Grow Your Network And Maximize Your Brand!
You can be an absolute genius but still toil in obscurity if no one knows about it. The job market is crowded, but more than that, it’s noisy. How do you make your signal bright, loud and clear?
Plenty of people struggle with how to create a resonant personal brand. In fact, many people aren’t even sure what that means!
A “personal brand” is a theme that other people can understand. It lets people grasp the basic concept of how you fit into their life in an easy and compelling way.
Think about McDonald’s for a minute. McDonald’s does a great job of letting you know exactly how they interact with your life. Inexpensive, easily accessible and tasty burgers at a moment’s notice. You don’t have to know all the details of how they do it, you don’t need to know their history, you don’t need to know their business model. Their pubic messaging rarely tells you anything like that. What it tells you, over and over again, is that central message.
That’s what YOU want to do!
Your personal brand isn’t your life story. It’s more like your thesis statement, and you want it be reinforced constantly. By doing that, you can give a wide audience a compelling reason to interact with you in the specific way you most desire.
Okay, enough theory – let’s get into the specifics of how to do exactly that!
Know What Your Personal Brand IS!
Before you can craft a compelling message, you have to know what you want to say. You have a hundred different tools for communicating with the world: countless social media and electronic communication platforms are at your fingertips. If you want to use them to broadcast, you have to pick - and stick to - your theme.
I once had a client that absolutely loved baseball. He would Tweet about baseball, he would post on Facebook about baseball, and he even posted on LinkedIn about the business decisions of his favorite franchise. He belonged to baseball-related internet forums and his profile picture on most platforms was him at a World Series game.
He didn’t work in the sports industry, though. He wanted a job in contract law. But his personal brand was strong – as “The Baseball Guy!” He’d inadvertently created a personal brand that was totally different from what he wanted.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about what you want on your social media. But you need to create a divide between the private stuff for you and your circle of family and friends and the public-facing stuff for your potential network. And whatever is public-facing has to follow the right theme!
If you want to be known as a stellar marketer, you don’t want your personal brand to become “argues about politics.” If you want to command respect as a research analyst, you don’t want your personal brand to become “shares cat pictures.” It’s important to realize that the only things people will know about you are what you share, and share accordingly!
Stand On The Shoulders of Giants
It’s a big misconception that in order to have a strong personal brand, you have to constantly create huge volumes of original content. Not so! You can let others know that you’re a part of a particular community by interacting with others in that community. Find the existing voices in a particular world and interact with them!
For instance, if you want to let the world know that you’re a champion Salesforce Developer, you need to find the people that are talking about that now, and share in that conversation.
You can ask questions, share great articles, attend events and talk about them, or put links to great information sources on your own profile. All those things connect you to the theme without requiring you to create a ton of content yourself. That content will come, but it can come naturally!
If you want to create a blog, YouTube channel, or newsletter for your theme, that’s outstanding – but it certainly doesn’t have to be step one, and many people won’t ever need to get to that point.
The most important thing is not to just “lurk.” You can read all day long, but that doesn’t signal anything. You have to share what you’re learning! Guide others to new knowledge and you’ll be everyone’s hero. Talk about events you attend (even online webinars!), write commentary on books or articles, or give shout-outs to really helpful people you’ve met. You can do a lot of brand-building by boosting others, and that’s always a good look.
The second benefit of this is that it’s critical to building your network! You can be posting great stuff every day, but if your LinkedIn connection count is 4 it won’t do much. You need to get into the larger conversations.
Commenting on big threads with lots of engagement is the way to do that. And if you do it consistently, plenty of people will be reaching out to you!
Repeat, Repeat, Repeat.
Consistency is key. The most concrete voices aren’t trying to say something brand new every day. They’re trying to keep their message clear. If we go back to the McDonald’s example, they’re not inventing a new food every day, or even a new way to talk about burgers and fries. Their central theme – delicious, inexpensive, quick food – is front and center and hammered home again and again.
For you, that can feel a little repetitive. But remember that these messages aren’t FOR you. They’re for your audience, and no one will see 100% of what you say. That’s why you have to repeat the same general message again and again. You never know when a key audience member will join, or which message will be seen by which person. If you want to make it clear that you are THE sales leader in the medical device space, then you have to say that over and over.
This is a skill, like any other. It may feel awkward at first, but the good news is that every message strengthens the brand. They don’t all have to be gold, as long as they’re all there.
If you want to see this in action, it’s easy to do. Search for someone in your industry on LinkedIn. Anyone – just enter your current (or desired) job title into the LinkedIn search bar and see who comes up. The easiest people to find will be doing this well, so you shouldn’t have to search for long. Then just scroll through their posting history. You’ll soon realize that they aren’t saying something new and innovative every day. Rather, they’re becoming huge proponents of one or two specific themes. They’re owning their niche and living it every day. Consistence like that is the key to brand-building.
Become A Hub
As you consistently put up your messaging day after day, you’ll naturally look more and more for great content to share or comment on. Soon you may even be creating new insights yourself (or maybe you started that way)! Do this deliberately, and you can start to become a central resource for a particular topic.
Remember my client, “The Baseball Guy?” If I had a baseball-related question, he was the first guy I’d reach out to. If I saw a job opening within a franchise, I’d pass it along to him – maybe it would fit him, but even if not, he’d probably know more people who wanted it than I would. Basically, all baseball-related information that came my way naturally wanted to make its way to him.
Now, he didn’t actually want that. But imagine if he’d put as much effort into talking about contract law as he had about baseball. If he’s shared interesting cases, talked about new legislation, commented on changes in the legal structure, etc. He would have attracted a different audience – the one he actually wanted! And soon all of that information would come to him, too.
The more information you give, the more information other people want to give to you. If you’re the president of the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Fan Club and you post about The Rock every day, you’d better believe that if some new piece of juicy gossip about him comes to light, twenty people will be sending you messages starting with “Hey, have you heard…?” It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, where being a hub of information keeps you a hub of information. Once you’re at that point, you’re in great shape!
Creating a personal brand and using it to grow your network starts with hiring yourself as a marketer. Pay attention to those skills and learn them, but don’t think you need to have them just to get started. All you need to get started is the willingness to shout. All the other details, from getting better at copywriting to learning how to combine various forms of media, will all come together in time. But it starts with just deciding to have something to say, and saying it.
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