Does your personal brand have what it takes to overcome one of these nightmares?
5 personal branding nightmares
Being Labeled A One Hit Wonder
People tend to starting using this label about someone who has had only one significant achievement long enough ago that they could have repeated it by now, yet haven’t. If that someone is you and you’re still growing your brand, being called a One Hit Wonder is a slap in the face that says your post-achievement branding efforts simply aren’t working. You haven’t engaged people beyond their past major impression of you.
The only way to remove this label from yourself is BY recovering from it, and the sooner you do, the more you’ll be able to avoid long-lasting effects.
But can you recover?
It depends on how your one significant achievement came about.
Try to understand what were the keys to your achievement. Are they repeatable or was the success based on a fluke? If the latter, take a step back and reexamine your entire personal branding strategy to get insight on why you aren’t having more success in general.
Being Libeled or Slandered
While libel is the written form of defamation, slander is spoken.
Can you recover?
Probably.
The stronger your personal brand was before the libel or slander, the more likely you’ll recover since many of your admirers will likely not have believed the charges made about you in the first place.
However, the impact of the defamation also depends a lot on the personal brand of the defamer – how well that person knows you, but more importantly, how well your admirers believe that person knows you.
You should also be very careful how you react (or not) to the defamation and look for a way to use it as a brand-building exercise, like anything else that happens to you.
Being Exposed When You’re Faking
Someone finally proves once and for all that you’re a phony.
Can you recover?
You probably wouldn’t want to, because why else would you have been so completely faking what you do in the first place?
If you do want to recover though, come clean and try building an authentic personal brand for a change. You might consider changing profession, industry or location to make a clean break with your past but you would build more credibility by accepting what you’ve done and instead explain to others why they shouldn’t make the same mistakes.
Leaving a Bad or Wrong Impression On An Influencer
Can you recover?
You may not need to.
This nightmare couldn’t happen if you were friends with the influencer in question because then they would likely have the right impression of you. So if this did happen, it’s because the influencer doesn’t know you.
In this case, as the expression goes, “the best defense is a good offense”. By continuing to build your brand, you increase the odds that:
- If the influencer ever acts on the impression in a way that comes to your attention, it will be clear to anyone who knows you that the influencer is mistaken.
- Your admirers might defend you, possibly before you are even aware that something was wrong.
If you do learn of the bad impression, you could also try contacting the influencer to set the record straight. Perhaps the influencer will follow suit and update whatever they said about you.
However, the defamation might come later (if at all), and you might not even hear about it although it can still impact you.
Missing Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunities
Can you recover?
Only once you’re able to recognize the opportunities passing you by, and why.
At that point, the best thing you can do is set yourself up to create more such opportunities, and then be ready to seize them as they come.
Author:
Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.
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Libel is written and only needs to be “untrue”. Slander must not just be untrue, it must cause loss of revenue or income. Things to keep in mind.
Just more reason to be yourself and watch what you do and say, things will come back to you when you least expect it.
I think anybody can recover from ALMOST any branding setback: Case in point: Barack Obama. Earlier in his career many thought him down for the count, but he regrouped, rebounded, and came back with a vengeance.
Its all a matter of persistence.
The key to avoiding these mishaps is substance. Creating a personal brand is great, but what’s the transparent value you provide to others that serves as your real foundation? That’s going to sustain you from all the critics and naysayers. However, no amount of word smithing or Web 2.0 veneer will compensate for a lack of substance.
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