The 'Personal Brand' has never been so personal
We're seeing into the lives of our co-workers, bosses and even TV idols - and I love it.
Marketing professionals are always harping on about 'growing your Personal Brand’.
B.C. (Before COVID), growing your Personal Brand was all about consistently posting on Linkedin or sharing your industry opinions in talking heads videos. But in these ‘unprecedented times’, the Personal Brand has evolved.
Now we see inside our bosses/clients homes, we see photos and videos of our peers trying to work with small humans clinging onto them like limpets and we see colleagues supporting friends and family through illness.
The Personal Brand is no longer just a marketing phenomenon, it actually means something.
The pandemic has also given celebrities the chance to further perpetuate the notion that they are “just like you” - something YouTubers have been doing since 2009, by the way.
Whether you’re a one-(wo)man-band, a small business owner or active content creator, now is an awesome time to further develop your personal brand. It helps you get noticed in the sea of beige. A strong personal brand provokes a reaction; it sparks opportunity and even helps to generate leads.
However, it’s easy to get carried away. Not every communication has to be about the pandemic, but you can never, ever forget it - if you do, you risk crossing the line from tongue-in-cheek to insensitive or even parasitic - certainly not something you want to be associated with your Personal Brand.
What is a Personal Brand?
A Personal Brand is a fancy way of summarising how you portray yourself to the public. This is typically used in a professional sense, be it to grow your career or your business. In a non-professional sense, you could call it: making people like you.
How do you build a Personal Brand?
I speak mostly to freelancers and small business owners here, as that’s my wheelhouse, but anyone can build a Personal Brand.
I’m not going to give a full masterclass in this newsletter, instead, I’ll just leave you with some thinking points to help you decipher your personal brand:
Your Personal Brand should come easily, you can’t force it to be one way or another - it’s inherent in you.
You feel comfortable expressing your Personal Brand across all platforms, even if you do so in a different way for each audience (video, blog, quotes etc.)
Your Personal Brand is unique to you. It’s okay to seek inspiration from others but the final product is yours and only yours.
It’s intangible but can be expressed through a variety of means. Try mood boards, drawing, journaling or photography as a way of nailing your Personal Brand.
Workshops can be a great way to develop your Personal Brand, I’m currently taking part in an amazing challenge led by my friend and colleague Lauren Mcwilliams in her Facebook Group, which is helping me really dig deep into how I want to come across visually (always the hard part for me as I’m more of a words gal).
What are your thoughts on Personal Brand? Do you think it’s changing now that we’re all a little closer, despite being further apart? I do.
Another week has gone by and little has changed. We’re still in lockdown, working from home and consuming an excess about of baking goods.
I read two books this week: Louis Theroux’s memoir Gotta Get Theroux This and the first in the Villains Series by V.A. Schwab, Vicious.
I don’t read many biographies, so I don’t have a yardstick but Louis can do no wrong in my eyes - plenty of introspection and a unique insight into his own Imposter Syndrome, which seems unbelievable coming from one of the greatest documentary makers of our time. It just goes to show that it can affect us all.
The latter is a totally different concept. Vicious is the first a series about EOs: ExtraOrdinaries - people who have extraordinary powers and don’t always use them for good. I’m already halfway through the second instalment, so that’s a testament to this series. If you want to see what else I’m reading, feel free to add me as a friend on Goodreads - I’m always trying to grow my network :)
Moving onto the small screen, we orchestrated a ‘cinema date night’ from the comfort of our living room this week. We rented Rian Johnson’s who-dun-it Knives Out on Amazon Prime for £2.99 and it was awesome, kept us guessing all the way until the end. I’d highly recommend if you're running out of things to watch on Netflix.
And finally, I was very lucky to be invited to guest edit the Write 52 newsletter this week. Write 52 is an online writing community led by fellow freelance Ed Callow, where members aim to write something once a week Each week, the Write 52 musings are summarised in the newsletter, which is always a 5* read thanks to the vast talent of its contributors. You can read my edition here.
That’s all from me this week. Catch me on Twitter @ContentByTheSea