What is personal branding?
The way we present ourselves to the world professionally is our personal brand.
I remember growing up, how my room walls were covered with posters of my teen idols. Besides seeing and being profoundly in love with them, I always wondered how they got there.
In my teen years, I became an avid reader, I would read everything that would come my way, and this is when I really started studying not only fiction books but also biographies… even the ones of my teen idols.
I had a huge insight: promotion of personal brands was paramount to succeed.
¨Sophist¨ influencers
We know that the greeks technically invented everything, how ever they also invented influencers. The sophists were a group of men (sadly no women there) who would get togheter to talk, tell and explain many subjects like math, politics and sports.
How does this have anything to do? Keep reading.
At that time, they were the subject matter experts, something like the ¨math-fluencers¨of their time.
Let´s fast forward to the begining of the 20th Century, when people like Dale Carnegie, Paul Lazarsfeld y Elihu Katz decided dig out this theories. Paralely they gave birth to ideas like the opinion leader or political marketing. The most interesting thing, is that they all realized that people would also become ¨products¨.
This is where it´s all connected.
Personal Branding
Right now, personal branding is using a name or nickname binded to the qualities or strenghs of someone, combined with a very specific skillset based on expertise to push commercial actions.
It’s similar to talk about a commercial brand or a person who is working providing services: they are both here to sell. What establishes a real difference, it´s actually how one is sold vs. the other. This means that we must present both in a different way, to scale awareness and positioning.
Historically, corporations wanted to be huge with thousands of employes, however, now most enterprises want to spend less and even have changed their work structures to outsourcing and working from home.
The work model is changing, and this is fantastic for personal brands.
How do I do it?
As any other marketing product, personal branding needs to have the basics of brading: logo, website, social media, etc. This will generaty visibility industry-wise, but beyond this a true purpose (yeap, we got a piece on that).
The person who is behind the brand must have a service portfolio, be able to work with clients and in many cases be a one-(wo)man-show. They must be able to figure several steps along the way like a small company would : customer service, accounting, marketing, etc).
A persona brand it´s me, working for me, to promote me, selling y services and providing them to clients. It´s not easy work, actually some theories even point out that it can be harder to have a personal brand more than a comercial one.
So contrary to stopping the growth, this has actually been an important reason why today we see more and more freelancers and consultants popping up daily.
Do you want to be a personal brand?
In the next posts we will talk about the minimum viable product of a personal brand and the minimum requirements to be competitive.
*Sophists comes from the term ¨sophos¨ meaning wise, which mean that this group was a knowledge sharer. This means that a personal brand should be an opinion leader, a perso who can share something with us. This is why it´s important for professionals to be personal brands.