COM0014-PMu Assignment #1 Graded Discussion #2 Personal Branding

To prepare for this discussion topic research took me into familiar and new territory.

Familiar territory was the brand called you inspired by Tom Peters and the lessons and books reviewed for COM0011. New territory is the vast amount of tips and advice available to perform personal branding or person building.

Q1. Has the concept of Personal Branding lost its way?

A1.No. The concept of Personal  Branding has not lost its way but the implementation of how to establish personal branding has.

Looking at 100 Personal Branding Techniques at  http://chrisbrogan.com/100-personal-branding-tactics-using-social-media/ it is clear that following specific steps to implement and plan using a process will ensure that your  authenticity and true passion are instilled and transferred from you to your on-line persona and will be sensed by your audience.

The following steps satisfy the Honeycomb Framework of Social Media defined by Kietzmann, Hermkerns, McCarthy and Silvestre in 2011 and described at http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media as Identity, Conversations, Sharing,  Presence, Relationships, Reputation and Groups. The key steps are:

Start Listening-listen to others such as thought leaders, podcasts, audience sentiment and comment frequently – and thoughtfully – about what you are hearing and give your point of view.
Establish Home Base-this is your “home” where your on-line persona (Personal Brand) lives and interacts from. Make it comfortable and easy for visitors to participate with you and engage in conversations.
Passports-identify, create and use accounts on other sites such as Instagram for photos, YouTube for videos and LinkedIn for professional connections.
Outposts-cultivate your presence on outposts such as forums and other social media sites such as Facebook where your audience is and connect your home base to your outposts to increase your presence and influence -and your persona.
Content-develop a schedule for creating and posting content. Define your time commitment to generate content such as daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly based on your time allocation. Make your content useful and usable to others to drive traffic and influence Likes and increase Links to your home base and outposts.
Conversation-comment on other posts and contribute to their conversation with authenticate, articulate responses and questions. Use those listening skills and remain humble and respectful.
Community-be human, apologise if you make a mistake (sincerely) and thank people for their contribution…you are part of a community.
Face to Face-have that 15-30 seconds elevator pitch or introduction ready for F2F encounters, including business cards, firm handshake and making eye contact with real people.
Promotion-start by promoting others and their content, home base and outposts.

With this breadth of topics and depth of tangible content to develop and implement a personal brand the future is bright for creating an authentic on-line identity.

Q2. Has Personal Branding become too close to bad corporate branding?

A2. Yes. If Personal Branding does not utilize and follow the honeycomb framework and key steps described above to successfully establish an authentic on-line persona or identity it will become too close to bad corporate branding.

Q3. What do you think?

A3. Overall I think identity management on social media using personal branding to create an on-line persona will continue. Successful sites will have authentic and meaningful personae and unsuccessful sites will die on the vine or re-brand to succeed.

This will follow the Technoself trend described in http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoself and continue to evolve along with social media and on-line identity and presence.