I hate to tell you this, I really do. The truth is that most people don’t give a hoot about your personal brand. They don’t care how great you are at what you do. They don’t care that you are the perfect solution to their problem.
They don’t care about how many impressive clients you’ve had or what wildly successful projects you’ve led. And unless they went to the same college as you, they don’t really care about that either.
Obviously, this is a problem if you’re trying to get your brand out there. You’re focused on telling the world about everything you can do and why you’re the best person to do it. You want people to come by your website and spend time learning all about you.
Shine the spotlight
After all, personal branding is all about shining the spotlight on yourself, right?
Sure. If you want people to avoid you. No one wants to hang-out with the braggart who is only interested in their own life!
If you want your personal branding to actually be effective, it shouldn’t be about you at all.
Instead, your personal branding should be all about someone else. Yes, I actually wrote that. And I’ll repeat it, just so you know it’s not a typo:
When you’re branding yourself, you need to stop writing about yourself and focus totally on your potential customer or employer.
Why in the world do you want to do this? Isn’t focusing on someone else the exact opposite of personal branding?
Not at all. In fact, it’s the only way to get your brand heard. People are really busy right now. They’re worrying about their own jobs and trying to get more done with less. They’re buried in work and barely have time to focus on what they need to get done.
Your potential employer or customer doesn’t have time to listen to you babble on about yourself in hopes they might hear something useful. Instead, they want to know what’s in this conversation for them. If you don’t make that clear right away, they’ll leave your website or tune out from your conversation. They’re too busy to do anything else.
So how do you know if you’re focused on yourself or your target market? Take a look at your website and blog. Do you speak in the first person a lot? Does your website say “I do this…” or “I’m great at that…”? Is it all an About page?
Or do you talk about the issues and problems facing your potential customer/employer and focus on solutions? Are your examples all about the steps you took, or are they about the results that happened because of your work?
What are they thinking about?
When you come up with your personal branding strategy, are you asking yourself:
- What is my potential customer/employer thinking about?
- What is their day like?
- What issues are they facing?
And the most important question of all: What can I do to make their life/work easier?”
If you’re doing that already, you’re on the right track. If you’re not, you might be turning off the very people you want to reach.
Once you’ve answered the questions above, you should focus your entire personal branding strategy around that final question. Everything you write should be focused on helping your potential customer/employer and showing them that you understand the problems they are facing and know how to solve them.
Your goal should be to leverage your personal brand so that when someone from your target market visits your site, they think “Wow, this person really understands me and can make my life easier.”
If you can do that, you’ve hooked them. Then, once they’re hooked, you can tell them all about you.
But, in order to get their attention, it needs to be about them first. That’s why a successful personal brand is one that’s all about someone else.
Author:
Katie Konrath writes about creativity, innovation and “ideas so fresh… they should be slapped!” at www.getFreshMinds.com.
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Great post, and so true. A good rule of thumb is to use the “YUMI” filter when writing about yourself or your products. The YUMI filter is the ratio of how much I talk about YOU vs how much I talk about ME. A good YUMI filter ratio is 3:1. Talk at least 3 times as much about your potential customer’s issues and concerns as you do about yourself.
Excellent work Katie.
You really bring good point to me as I am building my website. Building my personal branding should start from others.
Thanks,
Before I read the post, I figured the answer to “What your blog/brand should be all about” was actually going to be “Ensure your blog posts, media releases, etc. always include Handy Tips (preferably 5-8).”
You’re absolutely right: When building a personal brand, it’s important to stop focusing on what you want to say, and start focusing on what your stakeholders are interested in hearing.
At the same time, however, I do think that the people with the most successful personal brands are the ones who don’t ALWAYS cater to stakeholders. After all, a personal brand is typically built around being an ‘expert’ in something, and being an expert tends to involve educating non-experts in one way or another.
BTW: As I was writing this comment, I realized I was getting quite worked up about the relationship that original content (i.e. original ideas, analysis, etc.) has to personal brands, and whether a strong personal brand requires original content or can be built without it. I didn’t want to clog up your comments section, so I wrote a blog about it instead: http://digg.com/u155cV
Katie, you are very correct,people dont care how much you know but they are interested in how much you care.
Katie,
I read your comments with interest. From my standpoint as an executive recruiter as well as a resume writer (www.financeresumewriters.net) I have to somewhat disagree with your premise, at least to the extent that a resume is a form of personal branding.
When reading a resume, hiring managers do care about your brand (what I choose to call your Value Proposition as a candidate). They are very interested to know if you are the perfect – or almost perfect – solution to their problem. And they certainly are keenly interested in your successes.
I realize that a resume is only a sliver of what you may describe as personal branding, but in today’s environment, most people only have their resume to use as their branding tool. So, they need to get the message right the first time – and very quickly.
I do think that your advice can be readily adapted to a personal interview environment. In that situation, the constant use of “I” can be annoying and misinterpreted as being arrogant. The ability to translate one’s value proposition into a message of (as you say) “this person can make my life easier” helps the hiring manager connect the dots between a candidate’s value proposition and what the hiring manager needs.
But, in the final analysis it is what a candidate offers in knowledge, skills and ability (“KSA’s”) as evidenced by what that candidate has made, saved and achieved (MSA’s) that will generate the interview that nobody else is getting.
John -
Seth Godin offers an interesting viewpoint on resumes.
Excellent points, Katie. For me, it’s very important to re-evaluate my offline life as well. How helpful am I in my daily encounters with people – customers or otherwise? My offline attitude will then transpire more organically into my online writing. I can’t fake a giving image online if I’m selfish in ‘real’ life.
Your message hit home as I was just thinking about how I could incorporate clients or potential clients into a you tube interview segment on what works for them. I’m also thinking of collaborative cross marketing ideas with business associates in the same industry as mine. Your post was timely and helps me crystalize my strategy. Thank you!