The Secret to Building Your Perfect Personal Brand

Warren Myers CMP Recruitment Consultant likes this article by Ryan Erskine

Some people absolutely hate the idea of personal branding because they think it feels fake or forced. Sure, I’d hate that too. Who wouldn’t? But an effective personal brand should never feel forced by definition.
I’m going to let you in on an insider secret. Brand building is actually a misnomer. You don’t sit down and decide what you want your brand to be. In fact, that’s completely the wrong way to go about it. The secret to building the perfect personal brand is this.
You don’t actually “build” a great personal brand, you “extract” it.
It may not be an easy or comfortable process, but figuring out what makes you “you” is a necessary first step to making your brand realistic and relatable.
The people who skip this step and jump immediately to packaging themselves are the ones who end up with forced brands that they can’t relate to and ditch after a week.
It’s only once you’ve extracted your personal brand that you can package it for others in a compelling, memorable, and relatable way.
Extracting your personal brand.
The first step to extracting your brand is being 100 percent sold on who you are and what you’re looking to accomplish in the marketplace.
It’s like marketing a company’s brand. Would you ever sit down to market a business when you’re still unsure what the product is? Of course not. A company must first determine what benefit it offers and how it’s different from the competition. In other words, it has to determine its unique value proposition.
What’s your unique value proposition?
Most people haven’t thought about this much before. That’s good news for you because you’re about to put yourself 10 steps ahead of the competition.
Determining your unique value proposition.
This process is very much like defining your own personal business plan. You need to first answer three main questions:
Who’s your audience? Whose attention are you trying to get?
What problem or challenge do you solve for them?
How do you distinguish yourself from the competition?
Let’s say you’re a college graduate looking for your first full-time job in PR. Great, now it’s time to dive a little deeper.
The target audience is obvious, right?
At least in the short term, you’d want to reach the hiring departments at your favourite PR firms. But it’s also worth thinking about your audience in the longer term. Will you want to appeal to other PR professionals, editors at publications, or other people looking to break into PR?
Next, what problem or challenge do you solve for your audience? Well for starters, you’re going to solve the HR department’s challenge of finding their next awesome employee.
Taking it a step further, let’s say you want to be a PR thought leader and act as a guide for others looking to break into the space. In that case, you’ll want to provide them with all the information they need to break into the industry and succeed.
 
Lastly, what makes you unique? How do you stand out from the crowd?
Perhaps it’s your incredible depth of experience despite your young age. Or maybe you have a fresh perspective thanks to your academic background in a completely different field. Perhaps you’re so good at throwing parties and organizing events that PR firms can’t afford to pass you up.
Packaging it all up
Once you’ve answered these questions honestly, you can finally move onto packaging your personal brand. This is the exciting part. Your answers will help inform how you’ll reach your audience, delight them, and keep them coming back for more. You will figure out what kind of personal website makes the most sense and what your call to action should be. You’ll decide which social media profiles to use and what kind of content strategy you’ll use.
These packaging decisions will definitely feel forced or fake if you’ve built up a brand without much thought or deep questioning. It’s like building up a house of cards that’s bound to collapse at the slightest breeze.
But an effective personal brand is like a tree, with strong roots and branches that extend naturally from the trunk. And like a tree, your personal brand will grow and evolve over time as your goals change.
That’s the beauty of extracting your personal brand, rather than building it. By getting to the core of your passions and your unique value proposition, you invest in a brand that’s transparent, relatable, and sensible for the long haul.

That’s an investment in your future worth making.

Warren Myers CMP Recruitment Consultant likes this article by Justin Foster

Six Ways to Be Taken Seriously as a Young Leader
Building your leadership brand will make you a memorable and effective leader.

Young leaders (35 and under) possess self-confidence, drive, and creative thinking. Yet they often struggle with how to present themselves as leaders when working with leaders from older generations. Regardless of age, it’s important to cultivate what I call your Leadership Brand. It is a blend of self-worth, talent, value, and perception that is unique to each person, regardless of role or title.
Recognizing and building your Leadership Brand is a critical part of success in leadership. A strong brand will make you a memorable and effective leader.

1. Start with  a career strategy:
Young leaders are intuitively aware of their brands and reputations. What’s often missing is some systemic thinking. This means having a career strategy in place with a set of milestones and goals. It includes proactively and intentionally promoting ideas via content and speaking. Don’t wait to be discovered. Don’t wait to be asked to speak. Just go get in front of the right people on a consistent basis.
On a practical level, this means having something worthwhile to say and a platform to say it on that doesn’t suck. For example, having a complete LinkedIn profile, consistently writing on your area of expertise on a blogging platform, and speaking to business groups or internally in company meetings or training. In short, write and speak regularly and coherently.

2. Figure out what your driving principals are:
As with any brand (personal or corporate) you must organize first around what you believe, and then organize around a set of talents or an area of expertise. Knowing what you believe is the result of introspection and self-awareness. A simple exercise is to write down five principles or values that you are willing to risk everything for. If you don’t have values that you are willing to commit to, then you don’t have a foundation to build your brand on.
Secondly, you need to embrace your awesomeness. This is looking at internal things like "natural" gifts (things that seem easy for you to do) or learned skills, along with leadership traits like building deep relationships. Once you have these, they will become a never-ending spring of content to draw from and brand yourself around.

3. Master social as a branding tool:
The purpose of social media as it relates to brands is to build a following and create valuable influence. If your mission is just to get "likes" or "followers," then you’re missing the point.
If your mission is just to get "likes" or "followers," then you’re missing the point.
Conversely, labouring away in anonymity just means that you suck at branding yourself. In the chasm between these two areas is an intentional approach to building and nurturing a following.
The first test is: "Are you interesting?" If the person’s feed is full of platitudes and over-promotion, that’s not interesting. The second is: "Do you add value?" This means being an original thinker, with your own ideas—or at least a fresh take on trends, other people’s ideas, etc. The third one is simple. "Would we be friends in real life?" If not, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t connect with someone on social media. But it likely means that the relationship wouldn’t form in real life.

4. Develop personal branding in real life:
Branding is the amplification of who you are in real life, so here are some non-digital ways to be a better leader—and a better human being:
Dress for the occasion:
Having a sense of style that represents your brand is key. For young leaders, this is somewhere between trying too hard and not trying enough. The goal is to find a style that is reflective of your true self—one that makes a statement and projects professionalism.
Learn public speaking skills:
The ability to inspire an audience with your ideas and insights is a timeless skill. I highly recommend Dale Dixon’s book Sweating Bullets as well as joining a group like Toastmasters. Most of all look for and/or create opportunities to speak.
Expand your self-worth:
When you are creating a leadership brand, you are presenting to the world the best version of yourself. So you must invest in your self-worth by staying or getting healthy and fit, spending time with people who give you energy, traveling, learning, reading, and so on.
Two-way mentoring:
For the first time in history, as many as five different age groups are in the workforce. And we can all learn from each other. Rather than traditional one-way mentoring, seek out older leaders who can learn from you. While they are a tremendous resource for experience, wisdom and guidance, you are also a mentor of value related to new ideas, technology, etc.

5. Get out of the office:
So you need to get out of the office. Go to mixers and networking events. Join non-work related groups around a hobby or activity. Go to conferences. The best young leaders I know do these things with or without their company’s endorsement. They know the investment in any of these areas will lead to broadened borders, new relationships and more opportunities.
 
6. Showing up is not enough:
If you are competing against or working in an environment with lots of gen-xers or boomers, your age alone isn’t enough of a different. You must still break perceptions. However, you need to learn to amplify without being overly aggressive or perceived as disrespectful. Millennials bring a sense of equality to age and meritocracy. While noble in its intention, age and rank are still valued by everyone above the age of 35.


In short, "When in Rome" is a good initial strategy in order to build respect and credibility. That said when you get a chance to speak, speak your mind boldly. When you get a chance to lead, lead with confidence. And if you don’t get a chance to lead or speak, go create your own opportunities.
If you have your own convictions, your own ideas, and you believe in your talent, the world is waiting to hear from you.

Warren Myers and the  CMP Credit Temp Team recommend this FREE Webinar with the details below and if you are in the Credit Space or have a staff member or associate who could be interested, it will be time well spent to watch this Webinar.
 
Join Creditor Watch for a 30 min free webinar ‘Managing customer credit risk & reducing bad debts’ on Thursday, 9th June at 12.30pm (AEST / Sydney time).

The webinar will discuss how credit management tools can help you improve your accounts receivable process, better manage your debtors and assist your debt collection techniques.
This live and interactive webinar will also discuss:

• Setting up credit management processes
• What to look for in a credit report
• Utilising technology to keep an eye on debtors
• Debt collection techniques

They will also have a Q&A session at the end to help answer any questions you might have.

REGISTER NOW

If you have any trouble getting on the seminar call CMP and we can put you onto the presenters.
 
Enjoy,
 
Warren Myers
CMP Recruitment & Credit Services
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