Your online identity is powerful. Your personal brand becomes the image you portray to your world of online follows. If you want to leverage it as a tool to advance your professional growth, you need to monitor and guard it closely.
I recently discussed the technical building blocks of establishing a personal brand. But once built and established, the work is far from done. What matters next is how you position your brand to your audience.
Here are four essential qualities you need to establish to elevate your personal brand and ensure its success.
Authenticity
In my opinion, the worst mistake you can make as a burgeoning brand is to insult your audience’s intelligence. People can spot a faker from a mile away, no matter how convincing you think you are. Be authentic. This is the first, and arguably most important, part of building a lasting personal brand that resonates with people.
It sounds easy enough, but people are often surprised by how hard it is to be honest, usually because they are still unsure of what their truth entails. Explore what the truth of your personal brand is by asking yourself three questions:
1. Who are you? Before you have an existential crisis, you don’t need to determine the meaning of life and your purpose on Earth. You just need to gain an understanding of who you are from a branding standpoint. When a company markets to you, what demographics are they hitting? Your age, occupation, location and interests are a great place to start pinpointing your identity. Make sure every aspect of your messaging is honest about who you are. For example, if you’re a single male with no children, don’t attempt to speak to what it’s like to be a mother of four. It’s dishonest and, even worse, condescending.
2. What do you like and dislike? Take stock of the things that you are truly passionate about and focus on them. Don’t be afraid to have an opinion about what you dislike. But always be respectful of the fact that people are entitled to their opinions and preferences, even if you disagree with them. Never talk down to someone for liking something you dislike.
3. What is off limits? Now that you’ve determined what you can explore in your personal brand, make note of what you don’t want to touch. For example, you can decide that you don’t want to discuss politics in your branding efforts. That doesn’t mean you can’t be political in your personal life, but you can choose to exclude that area of opinions from your public persona. You can draw the lines anywhere, whether it’s something as loaded as politics or as trivial as deciding not to post pictures of food.
Drive
Identify what gets you up in the morning. What drives you to change the world? Look at every person who has a successful personal brand and you can often immediately identify what drives them. For Elon Musk, it’s technological innovation; for Sheryl Sandberg, it's advancing women in the workforce; for Tim Cook, it’s design and engineering; and for Oprah Winfrey, it's self-betterment and social good.
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