What’s Your Personal Brand?

Last week I mentioned that I thought web professionals are notoriously bad at branding themselves. How would you rate your personal brand? If you are in the technology field personal branding is a necessity. This is doubly true if you are a start-up or thinking about starting a company because early on, the brand of a company and its founder will be one in the same. When I talk to people about this topic I usually get a lot of bogus reasons why they don’t pay attention to this part of their professional journey, but here are the most common ones:

• I’m not in sales or marketing, it’s not important for me
• My skills speak for themselves
• Yeah, Yeah. It’s who you know not what you know

I’m not in sales or marketing, it’s not important to me

It’s surprising how many people think that they don’t have to know how to sell. Nearly everything you do in life will have some sales component. Job interviews, convincing your peers or boss to adopt a certain technology, convincing that special someone to go out on a date with you. It’s all sales. How good are you at identifying the “benefits” you bring to the table and accentuating them?

My skills speak for themselves

Ha. I laugh in your general direction. If skills were all that mattered, the world would be a very different place. People don’t work with skills, investors don’t invest in skills. They work with and invest in people. If people don’t know you, then you probably won’t get the opportunity to demonstrate your skills.

It’s who you know, not what you know

I have known a lot of people during my lifetime, but how many of those people remember me? That’s what’s important. You have to have a distinguishable brand so that people can remember you.

How do you do it?

A successful personal brand is authentic. Thus, you need to know to build a brand. If you are creative, dynamic, outgoing, and whimsical, you will not succeed by communicating the attributes of predictable, steady, and focused. I have done this a couple of times in the past few years, once while prepping for MBA applications and again last year with Reach Communications. The Reach program was easy and comprehesive in its “probing”. Although there were a lot of questions and activities involved but I would boil the process down into 3 steps, 1) Develop a vision, 2) Develop a purpose 3) Know your principles and brand attributes, and then demonstrate these things. As an example I will include some of the things I uncovered about myself.

Vision

I have always been a technology enthusiast. I have always loved creating things and building things, working with other people and community oriented activities. That’s a lot. How could I explain this without being wordy and still make it actionable? Here is what I came up with.

Kelsey Ruger is incredibly passionate about creating a world where technology is transparent, easy to use and universally accessible to all people regardless of ability.

Short, sweet, actionable and easily understandable.

Purpose

This one was harder. Why are you here? What do you want to accomplish? My purpose:

To be a leader in every activity I undertake (social, business, community) bringing a bit of humanity to everything I do.

Principles

How do you define principles? Start by thinking about things that make you mad when they happen, or things that you are strongly passionate about. Your principles are there. You just have to dig them out. Here are my principles.

• Think. Try. Teach
• Challenge Your Sacred Cows
• Help People Do More By Doing Less
• Provide Great Experiences

It shouldn’t be forced

This is not an exercise in deciding what you want to be, it has to be authentic. You need to ask people who know you and combine their attributes with your own list to develop a true brand. You might be surprised at what people really think of you. During my exercise I got to ask 40 people (bosses, peers, friends, family and employees) how they would describe me. That is by far the scariest step, but a necessary one. You need to know what “the market” already thinks. Personally, I found out some interesting things like – if I were a cereal I would be Wheaties and if I were a car I would be a Volvo. Not sure why but it was a consistent answer across the board. Use the feedback you get from people to build/repair your brand. The positive will give you areas for continued growth and the negative will give you the areas for improvement. While I found out a lot during the branding process two things stood out: People think I an genuine, ethical and visionary. Those things meant a lot to me. Maybe you think you joke around too much, or that you’re a clown. Maybe you’re making an effort to be “more serious”. Before you do that stop and think – maybe those are brand attributes that people appreciate about you and you should actually be proud to demonstrate that part of your brand. It’s who you are.

So I would recommend that if you haven’t recently done this, that you take some time to figure out your brand. It could make a world of difference.