Personal Branding Interview: Sarah Evans

Today, I spoke to Sarah Evans (PRSarahEvans), who is a public relations and new media consultant at Sevans Strategy, a guest writer for Mashable, a blogger, and more.  I spoke with Sarah because she’s been able to stand out amongst the million other PR people out there.  In this interview, we talk about her personal branding strategy, what some of her projects are and how they’ve helped get her name out there, the image she presents and more.

What do you think is the #1 thing that has built your brand name “prsarahevans”?

Consistency across networks and “living” the brand. If something doesn’t align with my brand (i.e. public relations and communications, improving relationships between journalists, bloggers and PR folks and improving non-profit communications) I don’t do it.

You helped create Mediaontwitter, which is very well-known in a few circles. What has this one idea done for your career/brand?

I’m not sure about this one. I love identifying a need for a tool or a relatively simple idea and making it come to life. I hope that MediaOnTwitter is one of many tools to come. As online communities evolve, needs will change and I hope to provide useful tools.

On your website, you display yourself as a cartoon. Did you have a branding strategy behind that?

The truthful answer is, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” I’m actually working with a company to revamp PRsarahevans.com to make it more consistent with Sevans Strategy. Modifying a brand is never an easy task and I want to do it right. I just went through the entire process when I launched my company.

If you were to leave “PR” for any reason, would it be hard because of how you’ve branded yourself?

Honestly, I don’t plan on leaving PR. I was a communications and public relations major in college and love this career path–it’s more than a job. You do bring up a good point though. If I chose to leave the industry, branding myself in the PR field would make it quite difficult. I don’t recommend branding yourself as part of an industry if you don’t eat, sleep and breathe it.

You created the first video review of Gary Vee’s new book. When he put the video on his site, what attention did that draw?

I had no idea I was the first review for Gary’s book. In fact, I was offline most of the day and didn’t realize until that evening he posted the video. Gary has a strong and loyal following, so I did get a lot of people reaching out to me via Twitter. Most wanted to know how I got the opportunity. It was truly a serendipitous moment.

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Sarah Evans is a public relations and new media consultant at Sevans Strategy, and has worked extensively in the non-for-profit, higher education and healthcare sectors, focusing on media relations, message management, coalition building, deployment strategies and organizational change. But it’s her personal mission – to engage and employ the use of emerging technologies in all communication – that connects her with a rapidly growing base of more than 30,000 people. A self-described “social media freak,” she initiated and moderates #journchat, the top-trending weekly live chat between PR professionals, journalists and bloggers on the microblogging platform, Twitter. She is a guest writer for Mashable, runs her own blog PRsarahevans.com and is a partner on namechk. She most recently worked with a local crisis center to raise more than $160,000 in three weeks with the help of social media.

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