Create the Ultimate Personal Brand

No matter what the discipline, profession or the industry is, you need to know exactly who you are and why you are going out and presenting yourself as a candidate, corporation or a cause. Everything after that will be a natural extension of these core understandings. Because if you don’t know why you’re doing this and what value you hope to offer, it’s going to be very difficult to convince anyone else.

Start with a blank piece of paper and define yourself. For example, I’m also a musician, and when I look at all the lyrics that I’ve written over the last couple days, I can tell that one of the things I’m most fascinated with is the intersection between the individual and the community. That’s the central interest and fascination of my life. Knowing that I can look at the different opportunities around me.

Knowing that core truth about yourself, and knowing the message you want to express helps you to be knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and passionate which people pick up on a gut level. Because if you try to go out and present someone other than who you actually are, people can pick up on it.

Whether they realise it or not, it’s going to make a massive difference in whether you gain their trust. In the first five to 10 minutes of meeting anyone, you would have taken your measure of the person and in some ways made said, “This person is who they say that they are. They know what they’re talking about. Or, they don’t.”

What we think of as making a decision is just about rearranging the furniture of our minds around conclusions that we’ve already reached. Leaving a good impression on others comes from being authentic and honest with yourself first. The key to any personal brand is authenticity and sincerity.

As you grow, scale up, go into different markets, and mature, there should be a cohesive narrative arc to who you are. Even if you change and learn new things, it’s all based on that core honesty of knowing who you are and displaying your authentic self. On the other hand, if your foundations are built on some level of dishonesty, first and foremost to yourself, then everything you build up from there is going to inherit that fundamental structural flaw.

Throughout the process, you need to remember why you are creating that personal brand—why are you crossing the line between being a private individual and having a somewhat public-facing personality? Is it to get people to engage in a cause, raise awareness around an environmental issue, or increase the stock price? Once you answer that, then you at least know why you’re doing this. When things get tough, this answer will help you get through the difficulty.

Stay Honest

If you want to refine your brand to reach as many people as possible, you need to be aware that there’s a fine line where you can easily cross over and begin justifying fundamental changes to who you are and your original value proposition questions.

If the reason you arrive at this presentation, lecture, or product marketing, is because you are decisive, you have sharp elbows, and you’ve made some enemies, then that probably means that your key values are putting your main attributes to use. You’re relevant to this marketplace because you have sharp elbows, you’re decisive, and you’ve made some enemies.

Balance that. Don’t lose yourself in the pursuit of excellence.

For example, one of the reasons people gravitated toward Barack was because of his oratorical skills. You don’t want to get to the point where you’re changing his oratorical skills. Self-regulate so that you're not rude, but if you lose who you are, then you start to look like all the other people that you’re competing against.

Of course, honesty doesn’t ensure success. The marketplace might still reject your product. Nothing guarantees success, but what honesty does offer you is that if there is success, and you move forward, you can continually scale and build on that success consistently.

If you’re a bank, and someone in a conference room makes a suggestion that you should have a presence on Snapchat, then you should probably fire that person. Or perhaps you don’t need to fire them, but you need to understand that you’re up against a channel that 14 year-olds are using. Your product, on the other hand, is mainly used by 55 and 60 year-olds. The constant need to lunge at the latest thing that came out is ultimately unproductive. Take Vine for example. How many hours were spent in conference rooms around the world debating whether or not people should get on Vine? How many people did go on it, and to what end?

Some people think they have to be on Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Live, and every possible platform, when in fact what they should do is to find the cultural fit for their voice, their style, and their message.

Different Mediums

If you’re an interior designer, architect or a restaurant owner, then Instagram makes a lot of sense because it’s a visually-driven medium. If you’re a thinker, a think tank, or a writer, then Twitter makes a lot of sense because it provides people with portals to your content.

Facebook is a combination of the two, but I wouldn’t do heavy thought pieces on Facebook, but you could link to them and amplify your social media.

Find mediums or tools that are very comfortable for you, tools that are a natural fit for how you want to communicate. Sometimes that could be television or radio. Sometimes it could be a six-to-eight-minute YouTube video. Find out which medium helps you to express better. If your natural fit involves doing short YouTube videos, then don’t waste your time on long blog posts.

Once you find your medium, make sure that it corresponds to your target demographic. You want to make sure you’ve having resonance with the people you’re reaching out to.

“One of the mistakes that many people make is that they do seven or eight things poorly, rather than one or two things well.”

​

I wouldn’t recommend using more than three mediums when you start. Avoid scattered good intentions. People think that by pushing out content out into the world in every possible way, at some point, it’s going to somehow hit the right demographic at the right time. In reality, these tools should be used more like surgical instruments. If you have 500 friends who just graduated from college, you can put $25 into a Facebook ad and ask them to create a lookalike audience, and you can go out and be very surgical about who you’re reaching out to.

Know Your Audience

When I talk about why I care deeply about American democracy, depending on the audience, I can tell that those parts of my experience really get through to people. I can tell a story about a specific family that I helped when I was starting out as an intern. I was working on their casework, and I can remember their names and the moment that we were sitting at their kitchen table, as they shared their difficulties.

This experience gets through to people which is great because it just involves being sincere and honest. Make observations about your audiences and write down what gets through to people. If you’re delivering a lecture and 25 percent of the people are on their phones, you’re wasting your time. Honestly, there are times when I know that I’m losing people, and I need to be aware of that and bring myself back in.

When you’re talking to people, take note of the things that pull them in, and make them get off their phones and pay attention. Jot down those messages and remember them for the future. Gather audience feedback and conduct customer and client surveys. Your findings will also help you refine how you do what you do—how you reach out to people and how you engage people in your political campaign. Just make sure you aren’t changing the fundamental essence of the product, the candidate or the cause that brought you to the marketplace, to begin with.

Be judicious about what your strengths and weaknesses are, and where your target demographic is living their lives online. What are they doing online? Where are they getting their news, doing their shopping, and consuming entertainment? Then, build a culturally appropriate way to reach out to them that’s still resting on that fundamental honesty about yourself, cause, or corporation. Don’t tell Facebook one thing and then Instagram another thing. Be consistent with your message.

Carrying Your Message

One of the most successful social media campaigns right now in the United States is UPS, the shipping provider. They started an Instagram page about dogs. That’s a great example of using something that’s already part of their daily life—their drivers are going around and seeing these dogs all the time. So, they asked their drivers to start taking pictures of and posting the dogs that they saw on the routes. They’ve collected millions of images.

Their sales have gone up since. People are going to UPS’ Instagram page to see if their dogs are there. They look for the feed from their drive or whoever does their route. That campaign is an example of creating something new out of something that was already part of these drivers’ days. They export it and go public-facing with it.

Just be smart and aware. Look for opportunities to tell your story in new and clever ways, and use someone else to tell your story. It’s not about the drivers—it’s the pets that are in the homes of the places where they’re bringing the packages. Those pets are telling the UPS story.

Incentivise Creativity

When it comes to developing the brand of your company, you want to be incentivising creativity.

I like to empower younger employees to perform above their position. Right now, I'm putting together a proposal for a large global bank that has two challenges. One of the challenges is about how they can either train or maintain millennials in employment, and the other challenge is how they can operationalise new creative ideas in any market relevant timeline. I see these two challenges as related. What you want to do is empower the most creative, outside-the-box, unconventional minds—no matter what age or background.

As organisations age, they become more sluggish, and it becomes more difficult for them to change and do new things. Simultaneously, many organisations are dealing with problems in attracting new talent and retaining talent. What these companies need to do is to look at how they can tap into the enthusiasm and creativity of some of those new minds. How can they put into place something that circumvents a process so that new, fresh, creative ideas are a reward—that there’s a place for them to be ventilated, looked at, discussed, and debated?

I’ve always been an idea guy, on a lot of the teams that I’ve worked on. I have no problem with throwing out ten ideas—seven of which get laughed at, three we end up chewing on to get rejected. But the idea that we end up implementing couldn’t have come from anywhere else, and it was because I worked in an atmosphere where people made that kind of exchange.

If there’s not some level of failure in any public-facing business, then they’re probably in the process of dying.

Every organisation should come up against some failure, especially in terms of marketing or reaching out to constituencies because if there’s no failure, that means you're not nimble and agile. Instead, you’ve created an insular culture, where the reward is placed on being safe and keeping your head down rather than having an idea that might fail.

1. Know Yourself and Your Strengths

Don’t focus on what you want to be your strengths to be in two years. Focus on the present. Ask yourself about your passions, the things you’re good at, and write them down. As you write out your strengths, you become more aware of yourself and what guides you.

2. Factor Strengths Into Your Brand

Use the strengths you’ve written down and funnel it into your marketing. Decide on the channels and mediums that will help to amplify your strengths.

3. Become a People Watcher

If you know your target audience, observe them and what turns them on and off. Speak to various audiences. Find out what they like and where they spend leisure time and online time. If you’re still figuring out your audience, become a better listener. By listening, you’ll have tools to draw on when it’s time to communicate about your brand.