I started my personal-branding business, Reach, almost a decade ago—long before Facebook, blogs, and Twitter existed. In that Web 1.0 world, personal branding focused on real-world activities, such as public speaking and publishing books.
A lot has changed in the world of personal branding since then, but the core principles remain the same.
Thanks to the ubiquity of Web 2.0 tools, it's now easy to increase your visibility—but to what end?
As with all corporate-branding plans, your personal-branding activities need to be part of a well-conceived strategy, but one that will help you not only achieve your goals but also increase your professional fulfillment.
As I watch people build their personal brands on the World Wide Web, I see a lot of personal-branding disasters—efforts that diminish brand value rather than increase it.
Here are the nine personal-branding mistakes I saw continually repeated in 2009. Avoid them so you can build a powerful and compelling brand that increases your brand equity.
1. Being Fake vs. Being Real
Personal branding is not about fabricating a persona; it's about authenticity. You can't start building your brand until you understand who you are, what you want, and what makes you exceptional.
What are your superpowers? What do others think about you? Don't create an image. Be yourself—your best self. And keep in mind what Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said, "The most exhausting thing you can be is inauthentic."
2. Acting vs. Thinking
Thanks to the availability and ease of using social media, it has become extremely easy and attractive to increase your visibility.
But visibility is not the same as effective personal branding. If you don't have a clear plan, a message that you want to communicate consistently and an understanding of how you want to be perceived, you will create confusion rather than build a fan club.
Personal branding requires thinking before acting. What's your area of thought leadership? What's your position? How do you want to communicate your personality? What's your plan for linking all your communications activities? Answer those questions before putting finger to key!
3. Quantity vs. Quality
Some people tweet multiple times an hour—retweeting anything they see, reposting their own tweets—to make it seem like they have a lot to say. And I've seen similar misguided fervor on blogs.
People can see through that. It's better to make a few high-quality posts to your blog or tweets that add value to your brand community than to be associated with content that is vapid, regurgitated, or stale.
Create content when you have something thoughtful to say that is valuable to your brand community and reinforces what you want people to know about you. Quality trumps quantity.
4. Omnipresence vs. Focus
Branding is not about fame; it's about selective fame. The only people who need to know you are those decision makers and influencers who can help you reach your goals.
Trying to be everywhere with your message will exhaust you, without adding much value to your brand. Think about your target audience and then research the best places to express yourself.
The scattergun approach isn't very effective, and it isn't very fulfilling, either.
5. Burst vs. Steady
Social media is attractive. It's so attractive that some people jump onto the latest social-media tool with reckless abandon.
An executive once told me that he was a big fan of social media. When LinkedIn came along, he worked hard to connect with everyone he ever met. After time, he lost interest. Then Facebook gained prominence, and he began friending everyone in his LinkedIn contacts and updated his status hourly. He became tired of that as well and switched his attention to Twitter.
Such an approach will not only wear you out but also do little to build brand value. Choose which social-media tools you are going to use, and commit to using them regularly.
6. Being Virtual vs. Being Real
The ubiquity of social media has convinced some that personal branding is an exclusively Web-based activity.
Sure, social media has made it easier to express yourself to a much larger audience, but it doesn't replace real-world relationships and communications activities.
Those who are most effective in building their brands combine the real with the virtual. They continue to write and provide content for traditional media, speak publicly, attend professional-association events, volunteer for professional organizations, sit on boards, etc.
The trick is to connect the real and the virtual, expanding what you are doing locally by making it visible on the World Wide Web.
7. Do-It-Yourself vs. Using the Right Resources
If you think people who are making decisions about you are impressed by the photo your mother took of you at last year's family picnic or the poor-quality video you posted to YouTube, you are fooling yourself.
You need to invest in services and tools that will help you present your best self. The New York Times said it best in an article about video resumes: "A well-produced video can send the message that the applicant is both professional and on top of new technology, while something that looks like a home video can send the opposite message."
If it that's important to you, invest in the right resources—career coaches, resume writers, Web designers, video-production companies, etc.
Sure, those services come at a cost, but what's the cost of damaging your reputation with poor-quality copy, images, and video?
8. Taking vs. Giving
Personal branding is about giving value, insights, feedback, and recognition to your brand community.
I see so many people confusing social media with billboard advertising, blatantly promoting their services 24/7.
As social-media expert Chris Brogan says (I'm paraphrasing): Use the 12:1 ratio—make 12 posts about your brand community for every one that is about you. Just as people use TiVo to skip TV ads, people will start to tune you out if you come across as an immodest self-promoter.
9. Implementing vs. Measuring
Are you spending a lot of time implementing your personal-branding plan without asking yourself, How is this helping me reach my goals?
I spent 20 years in corporate marketing and branding, and one of the most important parts of any campaign we launched was metrics. You need some way to evaluate your progress and see whether your efforts are paying off.
Decide, up front, which metrics you will use, and establish a baseline; then, remember to measure progress along the way. Have you increased the volume and relevance of Google results? Are you growing your brand community with the right people?
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If you avoid those nine brand busters and focus on being your best self—online and offline—you'll be bolstering your brand with everything you do.
