Source : THE AGE NEWS
By Tony Frost
What is your personal brand? It is not what you think it is. It is how other people assess it and you.
Imagine you are a fly on the wall, listening to a group of people who know you well and are speaking about you from a personal and a professional perspective. What do they say about how you present yourself, your character, your strengths and weaknesses, your special traits and attributes?
Whether you like it or not, how people perceive you in the workplace is essential for career development.Credit:
What is your reputation, and how are you differentiated you from your peers? The summary of their responses is your personal brand.
Our modern, online world provides plenty of opportunities to add or subtract from your personal brand in the workplace. Here are five tips to help you strategically build a strong personal brand in the digital age.
1. Identify your purpose
Start by asking yourself what exactly you are hoping to achieve by building your personal brand. Who are you trying to impress and why? Are you trying to build your profile within your organisation, industry or the world at large?
Are you trying to get a promotion or a new job? Are you aiming to win new business for yourself or your organisation? Are you seeking to position yourself as an expert, go-to person in a specialised field? Once you are clear on your purpose, you can plan.
2. Have a plan
Curating a personal brand should be done in a thoughtful, methodical manner. The place to start is by getting a handle on what your personal brand is right now. Ask any mentors and other people you know well and trust questions like these: How would you describe my personal brand right now?
What adjectives best sum up my personal brand in your mind? What could I start doing, continue doing or stop doing, to help me build a strong and credible personal brand?
If the people you approach are stumped by the term “personal brand”, replace it with “reputation”. Once you have assessed your current brand, you are in a better place to plan how to enhance it.
3. Start offline
Most discussion on personal branding focuses on how you present yourself to the wider world. However, your personal brand starts with how you wish to be perceived in your own organisation and with people you come into actual contact within your job.
That is, in the offline real world. Doing first-rate work, meeting agreed deadlines, building relationships, communicating well, and being a pleasant and cheerful human being will go a very long way towards building your personal brand. Not only do such activities not take any extra time, but you get paid to do them as part of your job.
4. Choose online platforms carefully
The usefulness of an online presence will depend on your profession, job, organisation and circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all. The two usual places for professionals to build an online presence are their own organisation’s website and LinkedIn.
You always have a personal brand – whether it be good, bad or indifferent.
Only when those two are working well is it worth exploring the multitude of other online platforms and maybe setting up your own website. Take your lead from senior professionals in your organisation and in organisations similar to yours who appear to be digitally savvy. And look at what your peers and competitors are doing.
Producing quality posts can take time but be careful not to overinvest. In deciding how often to post, again, be guided by others in your sector.
Sometimes you will see exhortations such as, “Make a commitment to post every single day for at least one year”. If you think that is a great use of your time, knock yourself out. Frankly, I would rather commit to visiting the dentist every single day for a year.
5. Get feedback
As the saying goes, breakfast is the feedback of champions. Seek out feedback occasionally from your colleagues and clients on what they value about your online efforts.
If they are honest, they will probably tell you that simply reposting your organisation’s material, will be of little interest to anyone, apart perhaps from the business development people in your organisation who like to keep statistics on these things.
Come up with original material that is interesting and relevant to your colleagues, contacts, clients and competitors. This need not be lengthy. You should present as insightful and original. Perhaps comment briefly and incisively on some current development of interest in your sector.
You always have a personal brand – whether it be good, bad or indifferent. With a bit of planning you can uncover the status of your personal brand and set about enhancing it in a strategic, thoughtful manner. In the digital age you will want to boost your personal brand with an online presence. However, start in the offline, real world.
If you do shoddy work, miss deadlines, and fail to build relationships and communicate well, then no amount of LinkedIn or other social media posts will be of much use.
Tony Frost, author of The Professional: A Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success is a speaker, executive coach, trainer and author.
