Great post from Wes Kao, co-founder of Maven, on how we should forget ‘personal branding’ and focus on building ‘personal credibility’ at work.
It resonated with a lot of people – comments are still rolling in.
I don’t like the word ‘personal brand’ or ‘thought leader’ – can we have a ‘personal brand’?? It feels icky and makes me think of hot iron branding, which is painful for animals.
But as Natalia Jaszczuk, Head of Learning at Learnlight, said, “if we have an issue with the word brand, maybe it’s time for another.
“I personally see brand as – ironically? – more straight talking. It’s how you are but also how you’re perceived. The package. There’s nothing wrong in wanting to focus on it, and certainly, it’s crucial to understand how your brand is perceived.”
The two go hand-in-hand. You can’t have a personal brand without credibility. But I don’t think you need to build credibility – if you’ve been working and learning your craft for years, you already have it.
But you need to invest in it, be intentional about it, communicate the change you’re making and be consistent – on whatever platform/medium you choose.
Personal branding is also on the rise – see this piece by Patrick Coffee in the Wall Street Journal on how more CMOs and marketers are investing in their personal brands – and turning to outside firms to further their career goals and help promote their companies.
“Marketers promoting themselves is hardly a new concept, but the trend is intensifying.”
We know personal LinkedIn posts generate far greater engagement than company pages, so it makes sense to do both.
Personal branding is also creating new markets for work – look at the fees these content agencies charge for their services.
I’ve been ghostwriting for a while. A book about a Russian escort in London (Belle de Jour days) and newsletters and social posts for COOs, CEOs, founders and DG’s. It’s usually a team effort. I provide a draft copy, and they flesh it out, add personal details and have the final sign-off.
Semantics again, but maybe we should stop aiming at ‘personal’ anything?
In the NUJ, it’s all about ‘collective bargaining', working together to improve pay & conditions for all. The union hashtag is #StrongerTogether. And we see that play out with our summer-winter of strikes – unions have power, and they say it like it is.
‘Personal development’ is a weird concept, too, as high-performance coach Brandon Burchard said in one of his Daily Fires. We should call it 'collective development' given we’re all learning from and influenced by each other.
At the end of the day, we all share the same goal: to build an audience and monetise.
How to shape your personal brand 🔥
Wes shares a few ideas in the post – be good to do a deep dive into those.
Dorie Clark, the author of Entrepreneurial You, has done loads of research on this topic for her work and says it comes down to three areas:
Content creation
Social proof
Networks
She has a Recognised Expert self-assessment toolkit you can download to work out what you need to focus on.
I also enjoyed this piece by Tom Peters: The Brand Called You (can’t believe he wrote this in 1997, still relevant).
What it takes to be the CEO of Me Inc. and how to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.
“The good news is that everyone has a chance to stand out, learn, improve, and build up their skills.”
What is it about your product or service that makes it different? Give yourself the 15-words-or-less contest challenge.
Think about your feature-benefit model: “Ask yourself: What do I do that adds remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value?”
What do you want to be known/famous for?
“No matter how beefy your set of skills or how tasty you’ve made that feature-benefit proposition, you still have to market the bejesus out of your brand – to customers, colleagues, and your virtual network of associates.”
There’s no limit to the creative ways to do this – moonlighting and taking on freelance projects introducing you to new people.
I've just discovered Phillip Van Nostrand’s book/podcast: How to live an epic freelance life. He earns a six-figure income as a photographer and talks about what he’s done to improve his quality of life and have more experiences - not always paid, he’s a fan of the skills swap.
Teaching, mentoring, writing a column for your local paper, signing up for talks – a crucial skill we can all learn (can’t believe speaking and listening skills aren’t taught in school.)
Make people feel something for the change you’re making, says David Hieatt, author of Do Purpose.
Share your story – here’s Marianne Lehnis on why she started The Green Techpreneur.
Details matter! Your post-sale comms are just as important as pre-sale – emails, phone calls, meeting etiquette, visual branding, how you dress and show up, support/technical content – it’s all part of brand you.
It also helps to have a great tagline. John Espirian’s is ‘The relentlessly helpful technical copywriter’ and he uses it everywhere.
Welcome to project world
One key to growing your power is to recognise the simple fact that we now live in a project world. Almost all work today is organised into bite-sized packets called projects.
A project-based world is ideal for growing your brand: projects exist around deliverables, they create measurables, and they leave you with braggables.If you’re not spending at least 70% of your time working on projects, creating projects, or organising your (apparently mundane) tasks into projects, you are sadly living in the past.
Today, you have to think, breathe, act, and work in projects.
Future you: Linearity is out, and your career is more like a checkerboard or a maze.
A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.
What you want is a steady diet of more interesting, challenging, provocative projects.
Yes, Tom!!
Sticking that on my LinkedIn profile 😁
📌 We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle.
Do you have an Ask/Offer on this topic? Email me the details, and I’ll share them next time.
Brand You Toolkit 🛠
Cal Newport – So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Phillip Van Nostrand – How to live an epic freelance life
Susan Cain – Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
Tom Peters – The Brand You 50 (Reinventing Work) – FREE on Google Books
Don’t be shy – automate testimonials
Julian Treasure – Learn How to Speak to Anyone
Speakerhub: Find your next public speaking gig
Fiona Chorlton-Voong – How to build an effective (and memorable) personal brand
Inside the 80/20 rule of content marketing
Jodie Cook – showing up online is no fun at all if you take yourself too seriously
📣 Have a great story to share? Contact nika@nikatalbot.io
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"1. Content creation
"2. Social proof
"3. Networks"
I guess (2) and (3) here are in some way associated with advertising/marketing. I think it's hard enough to get a product prepared, without worrying about social proof and networks. I went through a desperate period of being fobbed off in the 1990s by journals, on all three of these points. Eventually, I got some articles published in technical magazines and a few in Sunday tabloids, but if you are really innovative you are told you're skiing off piste, and if you go mainstream, an editor says they have loads of mainstream stuff already stacked up and camera ready for the next 2 years.
The issue of how much effort to put into presentation of a product reminds me of computer coding at uni 20 years ago, in some course modules for programming in various languages (which I've done all my life, and had studied a decade before after switching from physics to fortran programming at college), and also marketing.
The head of IT had a PhD in "maths" (applied maths computer programming) and she gave points for compact, convoluted presentation of maths formulae. This was precisely what a lifetime's experience had told me to avoid! I always set out equations as simply as possible in as many anecdoted lines of code as needed to prevent coding errors and bugs. The result was grade B's, for what I knew about!
The problem is that an academically flashy, complex code presentation (in a backbox program that no customer using the program will ever see anyway!) is a waste of time and effort, and liable to introduce hard-to-detect (or correct) bugs. A more sensible, clearly laid out simple presentation wins by brownie points from academia, but works best in reality.
Marketing was something I knew nothing about, but was desperate to learn, so I just did it the was I was told, and got A's. Listing the four P's, product, place, price, etc, and jargon like the marketing mix, backed up with the then-fashionable concept that businesses exist to serve customers needs (rather than to create new needs, or whatever is now the fashion in marketing academia) really helps not a bit.
I did a study of the marketing of a very popular invention, the telephone. When you really dig into it, the phone was an expensive, complete failure for its main marketing point (long distance communication, because speech was badly distorted over long lines).
So wasn't invented by Bell but really by amateur mathematician Heaviside decades later, who found that you have to add loading coils to the cables to increase the inductance, which amplifies the higher frequencies that are attenuated by the capacitance, to end frequency dependent distortion and allow you to understand what is being said by someone 50 miles or more away.
However, Bell invented the intercom or the "handset" and takes the credit. In the early days, for long distances, you would use the handset to phone the local operator, who would write down your message and get it wired by Morse code as a telegram over long distances (dots and dashes don't suffer the frequency dependent distortion that speech did, before Heaviside's loading coils were added to telegraph poles), and the local operator at the other end would then phone the person and read out the telegram to them.
This is now edited out from human history, in the name of simplification.
But it's fascinating that the greatest mathematical physicist at the time of Bell's intercom, James Clerk Maxwell (who produced the equations for electromagnetism), didn't see or solve the technical problem in his review of it: "When at last this little instrument appeared, consisting, as it does, of parts, everyone of which is familiar to us, and capable of being put together by an amateur, the disappointment arising from its humble appearance was only partially relieved on finding that it was really able to talk."
So there was a huge amount of exaggeration in attributing long-distance telephones to Bell, or their theory to Maxwell. Bell managed to fool a lot of people, and even after Heaviside had discovered the way to make the long-distance telephone work properly long after Bell, powerful people in officialdom like Preece were still being officially funded by the government to work on crackpot ideas like shielded cables to try to reduce frequency dependent distortion (shielding has no effect).
I think this typical example shows just the tip of an iceberg of disaster awaiting anyone who sets sail on the sea of progress. In a way, it was vital that Bell was a successful conman, because he managed to kick-start something that would eventually be developed into something very useful, once all the really difficult technical problems were sorted out by others. But it was just a child's gimmick to begin with, yet one that won over alleged experts. (In the same way, clean nuclear fusion power has been hyped for funding since the 1950s, without ever delivering a single Joule of power into the grid.)
What lessons do you take from any of the many examples of this sort for trying to make any worthwhile product today which differs usefully from the existing alternatives? Even supposedly hard science is heavily corrupted by the greasy fingerprints of con tricks.
Bell was able to make a fortune because of local phone lines. It was overhyped from the beginning like as a long distance product but for decades could be used for local calls only. My conclusion was that sometimes you just have to accept that you are planting a seedling, and not selling mature trees. If you try to get the product that people really want, it's just never going to happen. If Bell had sold the telephone as a short distance intercom with a maximum range of a few miles before distortion occurs, investors might have been put off.
So there must be a bit of fiction or wishful thinking - which may or may not turn out to be accurate - thrown into the marketing effort to get radical innovations started. A bit depressing if you want honesty. I found the same kind of problem with nuclear weapons hype. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shelters which survived, even close to ground zero. People weren't in them because the air raid sirens weren't sounded before the bombs dropped.
There's a lot more to this about the survival of people modern concrete buildings versus outdoors in these cities, and at later higher-yield tests, which is covered up by the disarmers who promise that if you don't have nuclear deterrence, you won't have war. From Ukraine's experience of nuclear disarmament to appease Russia, this seems as hollow as the promise in 1918 that Germany's disarmament then would make ww2 logically impossible, rather than inevitable.
There are highly funded pseudo academic and quasi governmental committees of people employed to defend these beliefs against the facts, so you're really declaring war on those people if you state the facts that are deliberately made to be taboo or unfashionable. The latter is worse. You can break a taboo and get some support from from fellow free thinkers. But be unfashionable and you're boring and have to support! So there is a need to sex-up everthing to make it appear fashionable, even if it is actually innovative. ;-)
I love the personal branding stuff, and the 15 word exercise. I've always felt that the word "personal brand" feels odd to apply to people.
I'm trying to flesh out what my "personal brand" is at the moment so I'll check out some of the reading you recommended.
Thanks Nika!