If You Suck, Your Personal Brand Does, Too
Personal branding is not shameless, endless self-promotion. It’s not direct messaging me with your faux request to “take this IQ test and see if you’re smarter than me.” It’s not directing me to your website with every post. It’s not seeing yourself as the epicenter of everything to do with your industry, category, talent, idea, or area of expertise. It’s not starting every conversation with “I…”
Maybe you shouldn’t be personal branding quite yet. Here’s a quick self-assessment to tell you if you need 
to keep your personal brand really personal right now.
- You don’t shower everyday.
- You’re been house-bound since Oprah’s announcement.
- You’ve been blocked for stalking or spamming.
The list could get pretty long, but you get the idea. You can’t be fundamentally anti-social, greedy, jealous, boring, self-centered, creepy or anything else that ensures you’ll be someone’s ex-husband (or ex-wife) someday (or again) and do yourself proud in personal branding. You have to lift the other end of the couch, not sit on it, while your roommate is moving out – unless he’s trying to take your couch.
Consider what’s real for you. Maybe you don’t have even a smidgeon of the mensch gene, that is, you’re a person with little or no empathy for others. You don’t connect with people in person. You don’t consider public service anything but a way organizations sucker people into doing free work for freeloaders. You’d 
like to compete in the Special Olympics because you’re not in any way challenged, so the odds are really good you’ll win.
Social media merely amplifies your personal brand
In that case, you just might quietly get into group therapy before letting us all know the real you. Seriously, you aren’t doing anyone any good – especially yourself and the company you represent – by using social media to broadcast just what a lout you are. Of course, if this cautionary post doesn’t apply to you, then print it out (wear gloves so it can’t be traced) and put it on the desk of someone who it applies to.
What brought all this on? A recent YouTube video on personal branding by Carlos Mandelbaum poked holes in my personal branding bubble.
Plus, perhaps like you, I have found too many of my friends do too little to report, yet they report way too often on Facebook. For example, a whole lot of people tell me when they’re turning in for the night or that they’re coloring a girlfriend’s hair before baking brownies in their hometown in Kansas (I live in LA, so no brownies for me; hence, I don’t want to know). A lot of the chatter reminds me of flying to Hong Kong from Los Angeles, lying next to a stranger (business class seats go all the way down). For 20 hours I knew everything about this woman, in real time and in the mini-series she relayed of her past.
Preparation is key
Before you make another social media move or affix your name badge at the next mixer, be ready with no 
less than 3 entries for these categories:
- Unusual facts or advanced tips that can help a person move forward in your area of interest.
- Experts in your field that you can learn from and connect with, along with a question you want to ask them.
- Reasons why you want to serve and lead your tribe.
You Speak, I Cry Inside. Personal Branding Never Sleeps.
It’s time to do a mind-sweep, because what you think is gushing out of your mouth and into your texts, tweets, posts, and email. That self-talk you’ve got going is killing your chances to connect with the opportunities that are all around you. Personal branding is a 24/7/365 effort – because if you do it right, your message is being carried even while you sleep or watch Tim have his first breakdown on Project Runway.
It’s not that you’re thinking bad thoughts. You’re just not thinking about growing your business, getting a job or landing a promotion – unless you’ve been sent an email to schedule an interview.
Opportunity doesn’t wait
Opportunity - How that’s been working for you?
But really, the best opportunities don’t say: “Hey, it’s me! Opportunity! Can you get your mind off working or texting or whatever else you are doing, and come take a look at this?”
If the best opportunities did that, they’d attract 5000 really qualified candidates and the endless stream of resumes you and all your competitors send, only to receive back an auto-responder acknowledging “your interest in our company.” How that’s been working for you?
If you’re not ready for every opportunity to get attention for the things you do well and demonstrate the qualities that define your personal brand, then you are not locked and loaded on success. But, your mind may be lagging behind real time.
Competent but not connected
I had a car wreck-like encounter on Saturday, when I introduced two healthcare practitioners who need each other in order to grow their businesses. I am a consultant to both. I know unquestionably they have the core competencies, resources and like-mindedness that will transform each of their lives.
These are both outstanding men in their fields, with strong personal and business brands. I happen to not only
How often do you have car wreck-like encounters?
consult for each of them on building those brands, I see them as a patient. They and some other folks are trying to avoid my having back surgery, and help me deal with searing pain that feels like a forest fire is burning, wildly out of control on my right leg. So, they know each other from me, and their visibility in the market. Plus in separate conversations with me, they’ve each expressed interest in how they might work together.
On Saturday, we get together to review the “nerves gone wild” leg and perhaps talk a bit of business. After we non-invasively poke my leg with a laser, the first doctor opens the business conversation, in a pretty direct manner. He asks us to walk through his space. He tells us he’s got a chance to take over more space next door. He asks how much space the other practitioner needs for equipment and patient care. And, so the opportunity to discuss how their practices might come together and share patients commences!
Uh, no. It does not. This simply isn’t the way my other client rolls. He’s still thinking about my leg. And, he doesn’t keep his architectural specs in his head. End of conversation.
They shake hands and talk about heat versus ice and agree ice is better.
I’m in pain (business pain, I can’t feel my leg because business dealings flood me with adrenalin, which translates to a state of consciousness where I, like a very evolved yogi, could have a stake in my leg or my head and not feel it). I cry inside for the lost opportunity, and the pain it will take to create a hole in their schedules for another meeting.
Here’s the lesson
The Lesson...
Sometimes you are standing right in front of the opportunity that will transform your life, but your mind is doing other work. You’re not trained to mind-sweep away everything that doesn’t matter right now, in order to focus on what does matter.
And, sometimes you are frittering away your time rather than twittering thoughts that will get you the kind of attention that transforms your life.
Consider why you should mind-sweep at a moment’s notice. You are always just six degrees of separation – or less – from exactly what you want. That’s why personal branding is a 24/7/365 responsibility to yourself and everyone who relies on you. It’s why we introduced the concept of networking and engage in it.
Explaining how to see opportunity is not like explaining how your microwave works or why Donald Trump is suddenly selling vitamins in a MLM video. The opportunity to open your mouth or tap on the keys and leverage your personal brand is so pervasive and so often overlooked, I could cry. And, I’m tough. I don’t cry when my leg goes afire.
Here’s what to do:
- Always have your goals in mind.
- Identify and memorize what you would say if the great deal-maker in the sky presented you with the one person who can make your goals your reality.
- Take advantage of every interaction, on-ground or online, to move you closer toward what you really want. Sure, they may be tiny, incremental steps – but it’s better than your great ideas, strengths and plans being stuck in your head, and losing the opportunity to advocate for yourself.
Now, do the mind-sweep. What do you have to say for yourself? I’d like to hear it – along with 10,000+ other readers – in your comments below.
Nance Rosen is the author of Speak Up! & Succeed. She speaks to business audiences around the world and is a resource for press, including print, broadcast and online journalists and bloggers covering social media and careers.
Do-It-Together Club for Entrepreneurs
Nance Rosen’s October 27, 2009 keynote to the United Chambers of Commerce on Personal Branding: How to Build Your Reputation & Gain Visibility for Your Organization. Nance spoke on increasing company value, developing new relationships to increase revenue, and the new
Do-It-Together Club for Entrepreneurs.
Personal Branding: How to Build Your Reputation & Gain Visibility for Your Organization from PegasusMediaWorld on Vimeo.
It’s Not Who You Are, It’s What You Mean
If you’re trying to sell yourself on your stats: as a bundle of skills and experience, you’re going to lose out to competitors who know what they mean and are promoting that to employers and prospects.
The goal of your personal brand effort has got to answer this one question: what do you mean to your
It's not who you are, it's what you mean.
target group (or what will you mean when you get it together? As Phyllis Korkki writes in the New York Times, communicating that you are “hard-working, flexible, cooperative and witty,” will allow recruiters and clients to see what you would mean to the organization, not just what you can do.
Romancing your brand.
Personal brand strategists could learn a lot from the literature on romance. Men fall in love with women who make them “feel” a certain way. These women can be encouraging, admiring, demanding, angry and anywhere along the dotted line from angel to devil. The one thing that the loved have in common is not perfect hair and great bodies. These women mean something to the men they connect with. Someone to save, someone to adore, someone to fight out the demons of the past, someone to rely on when times are tough, someone they would take a bullet for: this is what generates commitment.
I live in Los Angeles, the capital of beautiful, toned, and educated women who are alone every Saturday night. They start out like this at 22 and continue until they’re 50, when they decide that having cats means they are no longer alone. Their “best years” are dotted by “hanging out” with a man now and then. Their regular dates are other womenwho are equally lovely and absolutely hopeless about finding a long-lasting, loving connection.
Last Friday night, I went out with my fiancé to meet these women and the men who would chill with them, but not settledown with them. It was 9:30 PM at an uber cool saloon, Pink Taco in Century City. We were there for a going-away party for Adam, an athletic, sweet, handsome and single physical therapist. Every other man at the party was almost a clone: hunky, nice, funny and hard-working.
The women there had all chilled with these men. Yet it looked like a middle school dance, except the guys didn’t look awkward at all. They were laughing and talking, mostly making fun of each other in that guy-bonding way. The women were talking to each other about work and not dating. I know these women because we chat each other up at the gym and at get-togethers like this one. They have really interesting jobs or are wrestling with challenges like finding a job, they have great family relationships and they all look like models. They just haven’t hunkered down on the one thing that matters in creating a relationship: what do I mean to someone else?
What do you mean to someone else?
What doe you mean to someone else?
Vibrant personal brands and big brands present a promise of what consumers will enjoy and why it’s worth it to commit to owning this one thing – to the exclusion of owning something else. With so much competition, it’s not enough for the contents of the can or the resume to be jam packed with good things.
What Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman calls “deep metaphors,” and I call “ideal qualities of life” are what you want to communicate with your personal brand. Zaltman’s research on Coke shows that the brand has successfully embedded the promise of “connection” to the soda. Connection to others and even more importantly, connection to the self are what consumers are buying: not the syrup and bubbly water in the cool red can. What Coke means is people holding hands and singing the same song or the pause the refreshes, which a radio spot successfully broadcasts just by the sound of ice clinking and soda effervescing in a glass. Ahhh.
You connect your brand
Whether you’re seeking a job or going after clients (or trying to get a promotion or project approved), start off by
You connect your brand
communicating the quality you deliver that elevates an organization’s standard of living. Of course, if you have a big book of business and you’re in sales, then it’s pretty clear: revenue means power. But, if you are in another occupation consider what you could mean.
Get your achievements organized so they all lead to a recruiter or prospect to say: “Wow, this individual would be a force of ______________ in my company.”
Need some hints? Below are just some of personal brand values you may be:
Vitality
Creativity
Resourcefulness
Courage
Humor
Empowerment
Security
Legacy
Persistence
Author: Nance Rosen is the author of Speak Up! & Succeed. She frequently speaks to business audiences around the world and is a resource for press, including print, broadcast and online journalists and bloggers covering social media and careers.
