Building your Personal Brand
Think about one (well known) woman you truly admire. What adjectives came to mind? What makes her unique? What do other people admire about her? (Or perhaps dislike about her – not everyone has the same perspective after all.) All of these questions should help you define this person’s “personal brand”. Now, turn that same questioning towards yourself. How would others describe you, what makes you unique, what do people value in you? Doing this exercise is not always easy and it’s not always pretty but it can help you get at what characteristics define YOUR personal brand. It might even be worthwhile to check on how others perceive you by finding a trusted friend or coworker and asking. Or you can try this online tool: 360o Reach.
Now that you’ve thought about your personal brand today, spend some time and think about what you’d want it to be. As hard as the previous exercise might be, this one could be more of a challenge. Think about 3 keys areas that define your personal brand and how you might to refine or re-Define them:
· Competence - What are you good at or what do you WANT to be good at, what special knowledge or skills do you have or want to have
· Appearance - Clothes, posture, gestures, facial expression - Are you a purple clothes type of person or more of a muted colors girl? (No value judgment here although I definitely lean towards the purple).
· Communications, Written and Spoken - Tone of voice, use of vocabulary, sentence structure
As you do this assessment, be true to yourself, being genuine is really important here – we can’t all be Tiger Woods. Er… no wait – bad example– his personal brand is totally sunk. This process of re-defining yourself doesn’t happen in a single day but happens EVERY day. Every day you have the opportunity to “up your brand game”. Remember as you unearth your brand to observe others for feedback (check back in with that trusted friend) and continually monitor it.
Speaking of monitoring, have you “Googled” your name lately? Web 2.0 and social media are complete game changers when it comes to personal branding. Your reach and exposure now has the potential to go way beyond your co-workers, peers, and associates. Willaim Arruda from
Reach Communications has developed a “digital scale” to frame and measure what he calls “digital eminence”. He measures digital eminence on 2 scales: Volume and Relevance, resulting in 4 quadrants:
Dissed -- not much on the web about you and what’s there is not at all what you want;
Dabbling – some information available and it is relevant and generally reflects what you want it to;
Disastrous – lots of information out there about you but it’s either irrelevant or not what you want; and finally
Distinct – lots of good, relevant, positive information. You can check out where you are the graph
here.
I’d like to leave you with 2 parting thoughts. As you think about the Image, Attributes,Skills, and Approach that you want to define your personal brand remember first to figure out what will make you satisfied and fulfilled. Then go out and express your brand, mark everything you do with it.
- Kristen Cheyney, BAO Technical Delivery Lead for IBM Global Business Services