Personal Brand Assessment: What To Consider Before Creating Your Personal Brand

I stumbled upon a debate about personal branding started by Geoff Livingston of The Buzz Bin a few days ago with his blog post: I Don’t Care About Your Personal Brand. While I disagree with the overall message, he does bring up some interesting points.

(Mitch Joel at Twist Image responded with a post: Why You Need To Care More About Your Personal Brand. I encourage you to read both posts, the comments, and come to your own conclusion).

To touch upon a few of the key points:

“Personal branding is NOT for everyone.” Personal branding is for everyone who wants to live a happier and more successful life – if you have the drive to follow through with it. Half-assing it won’t achieve much, and might actually water down your brand if you aren’t consistent. A commitment to personal branding is required if you want to see results. Thus, personal branding is not for you if you’re unwilling to commit to it.

“Don’t use personal branding as a means of ‘self promotion.'” Don’t waste your personal brand on a fake image just to try and get your few moments of fame. This will only hurt you in the long run. Authenticity is the name of the game. As we said in a previous post: “Your personal brand emerges from your search for your identity. It powerfully and clearly states what you want based on your values, vision and strengths. It promotes yourself based on who you are, what you stand for, what makes you unique, what your purpose is, and what value you offer to your specific audience. It is a path to self-awareness, joy and self-esteem. It is NOT creating and marketing a made up image – that’s the exact opposite of personal branding. Personal branding is 100% authentically YOU.” So don’t spend time on personal branding until your efforts stem from your genuine source of career energy.

“Ask yourself: does your personal brand offer any VALUE?” You can join every social network and have as many friends as you want, but if you don’t add any value, you’re wasting your time. Make legitimate connections with everyone you meet, not just “Thanks for accepting my friend request.” Engage people in thoughtful discussion. Your personal brand defines why you’re the best solution to a certain audience’s problems, so what value to you provide them?  In short, don’t try to strengthen your personal brand without constantly creating content and value.

Consider these three points (the commitment required, the need to align your brand with your authentic self, and the value you provide) before starting your personal branding efforts.

Please feel free to leave comments here on how you feel about personal branding. For a breakdown of what personal branding is, see our post: Everything You Need to Start Building Your Personal Brand Right Now.

Author: Trace Cohen

6 Comments

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  2. 2
    Pete Kistler

    Hi Geoff!

    First, thanks for writing your blog post (http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/2008/11/06/i-dont-care-about-your-personal-brand/), which inspired our response.

    In your comment you imply that personal branding is self-centered, and you’re absolutely right.

    Why would I voluntarily work a job I hate? I’d be a fool not to align my working life with my sense of purpose and my passions – which is why I first got into personal branding.

    I’ve found people sometimes think that the very LAST step of personal branding, which is “self promotion,” is all personal branding is about. Actually, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Self promotion is useless – I would even say harmful – if it’s not based on a rock-solid foundation of self awareness. And self awareness is the first and BY FAR most important step in the personal branding process.

    Without self awareness, no self promotion could possibly be genuine. Perhaps you’ve encountered some folks who mistakenly proclaim they’re “building their personal brand,” when really they’re just shamelessly promoting themselves without understanding who they are. People like this violate the very first rule of personal branding: authenticity.

    Soul-searching, personal values identification, and asking yourself tough questions about your vision/purpose/direction in life can be difficult and even uncomfortable. It’s hard for many people to cope with the fact that where they’re headed is not where they actually want to go. Perhaps that’s why some people might skip past the first and most vital phase of personal branding. It can be painful.

    In the end Geoff, you’re 100% correct: personal branding is self-centered. It’s self-centered because its goal is to attract ideal opportunities (clients, job offers, etc.). But it’s also others-centered. Why is it others-centered? Because it makes it easier for those with a pressing need your services to find you and benefit from your expertise. In the end, everybody wins. Only by knowing yourself can you build a brand to attracts the people who need you most.

    Perhaps advocates of PB (like myself) have failed in our duty to make it clear that personal branding is useless without going through the genuine and difficult process of figuring out what drives you, who will benefit most from your expertise, and then making yourself known to those people as a credible solution to their problems.

    I hope that clears up any confusion, and best of luck! Feel free to reply and keep this dialog open.

    – Pete Kistler

  3. 3
    Geoff Livingston

    So Pete, you seem to think I am confused, but I am not. Question based responses are commonly known as the Socratic method.

    How does self-centered branding help a corporation? Why does employing self-centered brands positively help them affect change, stop contrived messaging and engage in real conversations?

    See the problem is a consultant’s model -PB- is being sold to companies, and it doesn’t work on a large scale. It works for the person.

    Like the person, companies have been to self centered, and not market centric. This is the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Any social media consultant needs to read this book, otherwise they will not understand the underpinnings of the social web. Companies need to stop BS, and start conversing in real dialogue, not employ rock stars who have nothing to do with larger products/solutions and market needs.

    I will also add that personally I feel that self-centeredness is the root of all problems in life, from an individual standpoint all the way to national identity. Therefore, while it may seem like a good justification, it fails because it leads to selfish acts as opposed to thoughtful, other-centric acts.

  5. 5
    michel Hogan

    Brand is brand is brand – corporate, personal, non profit, for profit, public, private. For me the discussion misses the point. Brand is what you believe and what your actions show. When done right (ie not opportunistically looking for gaps in a perceived market to exploit), it can provide a valuable framework for making decisions about what you do, why you do it and how you do it. But ONLY when it is based on an authentic foundation that works from the inside out.

    Is it self centered to have a personal “brand”? – depends on how you use it and why you are doing it. Do you genuinely want to have a better understanding of what your values are, what your promise is? Great. Creating a message for some marketing spin to gain attention. Not so great.

    I don’t think the idea of a personal brand for someone inside a corporation is inherently a bad one – however if the goal of the personal brand is to upstage the corporate for personal gain or was to work at odds with the purpose and values of the corporate then I would question why that person was still with the organization and what their motives really were.

    Again brand is the result of what we believe to be true (about ourselves or about a company) and what our actions show to be true. The bigger the gap between those two things the greater the likelyhood that you don’t have a brand and never will (no matter how much personal brand you try and buy).

    Full Disclosure – I am an advocate for authentic brands and do work with individuals on their personal brands using a process called “Brand Id”.

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