Can a Person Be a Brand?

Can a Person Be a Brand?

Jun 13, 2022 | Personal Brand

Anyone can be a brand, and that can happen without any letterhead to back this up. You do not need to be a celebrity either to be a brand or to feel like one. One person can market themselves and that will be key to defining an image.

But a key to this is also living up to the image that you are creating, which means that you need to be on top of your game all the time. That image becomes especially important to both your investors and your clients. When you think about yourself, you also need to make sure that you are a part of the image that you are always wanting to portray.

Can a Person Be a Brand?

If you are not employed yet either, you should know that what you are putting out there is also going to affect your career. The main reason of this is that you need to be aware that your posts and such are what you bring to the table. 

You will see that a potential employer will look at the content that you are sharing on places like social media, that content is often used to judge the potential success you will have in a role as well. 

“People relate to people, and if your brand feels like people, they’ll relate to you, too.”
Laura Busche

When you are defining your brand, you need to be clear about who and what you are. You need to ensure that you can always have your best foot forward. That means that you never want to broadcast any of your personal life or any issues you are going through to the world. Although it may seem impossible at times, you also do not want to look too perfect. 

You need to find a way to show you are relaxed and that you are always following your instincts. Being a go getter is the key to success here.

Pro Tip

Your personal brand should highlight your strengths, establish a reputation, build trust, and communicate the unique attributes that you bring to your current (or desired) industry.

When you think about it and consider things, every person is a brand. You may work for a large company, and you need to represent them in a way that is going to be favorable. 

In addition to that, it is important to make sure that you have content that reflects what you are doing in your business and in your endeavors on a regular basis. The way that you are presenting yourself tot the world as well as the way that you are working on your current state will be important for the way that people are thinking of you.

Understanding You as The Brand

When it comes to personal branding, it is critical for every profession as well as for your reputation. That means that you can really grab the attention of customers, clients, and employees by really marketing yourself as different. You need a personal brand statement; this gets the attention of anyone you want to do business with and make sure that people know who you are. 

When you have a famous brand statement, you will be able to communicate your expertise as well as also make other people want to learn more about you. When you are connecting with others, they will continue to know what is important about you.

Where Can You Use Your Personal Brand Statement?

You can use your statement as an addition on your social media platforms. You can also add it to your resume as it is a wonderful way to ensure that you are able to show your statement near your name.

If you have an online portfolio, this is also a wonderful place to make sure that you are always going to get the attention of your audience.

How You Can Craft a Great Personal Statement

When you are writing out your own personal statement, you need to ensure that you are working on these steps. 

  • 1. Be brief and direct: This will mean that you are going to want to get the attention of the audience and you are going to say what you need to quickly. When you are making a first impression, you have only a few seconds to make an impression.

    For that reason, you need to make sure that you can get the attention of your audience and do it quickly.
  • 2. Always Update Your Statement: You should have a statement that is always being consolidated and that is going to help you with the process of making your goals. You should revisit your personal statement every three to six months.

    That will make sure that you are always on point.

Pro Tip

Cultivated well, your personal brand will signal to employers whether or not you’ll be the right fit for an open role.
  • 3. Do Not Exaggerate: When it comes to making sure that you have a high-quality brand statement, you need to know that you are going to never be dishonest about your abilities. A large part of this means that you should always be very authentic.
  • 4. Show Your Strengths Always: You have values and abilities that you want to always work on showcasing. When you are genuine about your expertise, you are going to maintain your professionalism in a way that will make you authentic and will lead to others being impressed by your skill.

Protecting your personal brand is critical to ensuring that you can have success in all your endeavors. As much as your reputation is critical to your success, so is your brand. Just like you it should also be always evolving and ensuring that you have shown your experience as well as your areas of growth. 

One of the keys to your success as well as always in the fact that you never are bombastic about your skills. Always remaining approachable as well as open to your audience is a wonderful way to know that you will grow as a person and that your brand will grow.

Action Item

Write what you do well and what you feel passionate about.

Your brand statement is a statement of your truth, you are also a brand in and of yourself. Be prepared to stay on top of your image and your brand and the rest of your customers, clients, and followers will take care of themselves. A brand is something that must be protected and that will always be gold.

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How to Boost Your Personal Brand with Social Media

How to Boost Your Personal Brand with Social Media

May 30, 2022 | Personal Brand

When it comes to creating content and sharing it online, you are creating content that reflects your personality and your professional skills. Even if you are only using social media on an occasional bias, what you are creating is sharing a narrative. 

You need to see that how you are conducting yourself online is as important as you are offline. When it comes to building your brand, you need to have a noticeably clear plan. The content you are creating will also help you to build valuable connections and to find new ways to ensure that the brand you are creating is working for you. 

Branding
  • 1. Update All of Your Social Media Accounts. A big part of success is to ensure that you have a noticeably clear plan for the accounts that you are using. You want to also delete all the ones that you are not using, which means that you want to ensure that all the information out there is going to be complete as well as accurate.

    When you do this, it will help you to grow your traffic as well as to share more information with the networks, this will highlight you and your work. If you have any content as well that is out there that has a questionable tone, you will also see that it can have a negative effect on your brand and your image. You want to take the time and remove it as quickly as possible.
  • 2. Have a Clear Area of Expertise? You need to decide what it is that you are going to do and know that you are focusing on a specific area. You need to think about the kinds of content that have been successful with your audiences in the past and decide how you are going to increase that brand.

    The more unique and engaging the content that you share is, the more you are going to see that your followers are going to think of you as a definitive e brand in that area.
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett
  • 3. Posting is Easy with the Right Apps. There are so many things that can make posting hard for you. You have forgotten a password, you are dealing with a crazy day job, whatever the issue is, there are many apps out there that can make your life a lot easier.

    A few of them are Sprout, Buffer, and Hootsuite which allow you to connect to all your platforms and from there make and schedule different content. That means that you do not need to worry about having to log into many websites and you will see that there are many solutions that can be set up quickly and easily.

Action Item

Find the right groups. Facebook and LinkedIn both offer great opportunities to join groups focused on specific topics or industries.
  • 4. Share Content on a Regular Basis. When it comes to social media, in the early days it was all about how often you were posting. If you posted a lot, you were going to get a lot of engagement. Now though if you are posting too much you are going to alienate your audience.

    What that means is that you want to post 3-4 times a week for individuals. That means that it is important to have one or two networks that you are focusing on to ensure that you are reaching that sweet spot of 3-4 times a week.

    You also do not want to focus on six or more networks all at the same time. There are going to be some days when you do not post, when you are not that is also fine. You need to know the social media metrics you are working on, look at all the data that is out there and then decide what it is that you want to focus on.

    That also means that you need to look at sites and see what is trending on social media. You want to use the tags and the aggregator sites to see what hashtags trending are.
  • 5. Import All Your Contacts. There are tons of people that you already know on all the social media networks you are using. You may know tons of people as well with which you have not connected. Take the time to import your contacts in Outlook, Gmail, and across all the other networks for any connections you are missing.
  • 6. Keep All Your Social Posts Positive and Engaging to Your Audience. One thing that is especially important, is that you want to have a famous brand. But it also must reflect you. That means that you need to show what you are doing on a regular basis and that you want the impression to be positive. You should think of your online interactions as an online work resume.

    The reason for this is that people need to see your professional outlook and your attitude. A large part of that also means that you will want to also do all that you can to ensure that you have a famous brand. You need to be ready to talk about all your achievements and be ready to share some information about your personal life.

    That means that you should not be afraid to share things about travel and your hobbies.
Branding

If you are concerned about not being able to voice your opinions as clearly as you want. You may want to have a personal and a private account so that you are going to be able to ensure that you have personal pages for friends and family and professional pages for the right people and opportunities as they present themselves. 

Building your brand through social media is something that will be a journey and something that is especially important for you to be successful in your online branding. 

Remember to create content that is meaningful to you and to your audience and you will continually grow your online presence as well as those who want to follow your content and your growth as a professional. Keep it light and fun and you will have an audience come to you!

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Please send an email to support@mitchcarson.com for inquiries.Click Here
Does Speaking at TEDx Improve Your Personal Brand?

Does Speaking at TEDx Improve Your Personal Brand?

Jun 8, 2021 | Personal Brand

For those who are looking to raise their profile in the community, the plan should be to build your personal brand. What was once reserved for celebrities and CEOs of corporations is now a vital part for anyone trying to expand their reach and profile within their community. That is why one popular method is to build you personal brand speaking at TEDx.

But before you take the first step, it is important to understand what is a personal brand and how TEDx fits into improving your personal profile. 

Does Speaking at TEDx Improve Your Personal Brand?

Building a Personal Brand

A personal brand is how the public perceives your persona. You should look at it in the light of when people see you, what do you want them to think? When you think of celebrities and business owners, there personal brand is the perception of being popular, informed on their subject, and a source of authority at least in their specialty.

You can do the same by becoming an authority in your particular field. A personal brand does not mean trying to be all things to all people, but rather a source of reliable information usually on a single topic. This may sound limiting at first, but it may be the most valuable thing you can create for yourself in terms of how the public perceives you. 

“Your brand is your public identity, what you’re trusted for. And for your brand to endure, it has to be tested, redefined, managed, and expanded as markets evolve. Brands either learn or disappear.”
Lisa Gansky

How to Create a Personal Brand

The first thing to keep in mind is that building your personal brand is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no overnight successes when it comes to creating authority in your field. Instead, you must take the long approach and build up your brand over time.

Create a Plan: The concept of creating a plan is simple enough. Where do you want to be in a year, three years, and five years? Now, write down what you will have to do to get there. Creating a personal brand takes time, so use that time wisely by planning out what needs to be done. This may mean creating your own website, expanding your responsibilities at work, or building relationships with others. But it all starts when you create a plan for success. 

Keep It Real: The brand you create should be you. It should not be some idealized version of you or worse, a persona that is fake. People can see right through fakery, so you will need to keep things real in your public interactions.

Take Advantage of Opportunities: This is tricky because becoming an authority on a subject does not necessarily mean that you will be perceived as a leader. You may be seen as the “information person” that leaders rely on to find out more about a subject. To shape your personal brand, you will need to take advantage of opportunities that let you go into different areas.

Look at where you want to be in a few years and use the opportunities in your workplace and community to get there.

Go Public: Building a website, posting blogs or videos is an excellent way to reach outward. But arguably the most important is to speak at public events. This is because people seeing you in person is the best way to establish your personal brand. You can build up to that point by going online and improving yourself within the business that you work, but few things beat public speaking to establish your personal brand with others.

That is where speaking at events such as TEDx comes into play. This represents a substantial opportunity to push your personal brand to new heights.

Pro Tip

Don’t give everything away – just enough to intrigue the viewer.

What is TEDx?

Speaking at TEDx

You may have heard of TED, a live speaking event that is broadcast around the world in participating theaters. TEDx is a similar format, but it takes place in your community. This is a live event where a series of speakers just like yourself present valuable information. 

TEDx is fully planned and coordinated within your community and therefore will have some unique aspects that are not shared with any other community. The format itself is similar to the larger TED events. This is a program consisting of a series of speakers, performances, and demonstrations that are focused to teach and inspire. 

The goal is to create additional conversation on the ideas that are covered in the TEDx event. For building your personal brand, a TEDx event is the perfect format. Keep in mind that there is no selling or raising money. 

In fact, the purpose of TEDx is to provide a platform for non-professional speakers to reach an audience. The diverse number of topics means that it is the perfect place to build your personal brand even if you have little to no experience speaking in public.

Build Your Personal Brand Speaking at TEDx

The first step is knowing what area you want to talk about at your local TEDx event. The topic should be one that has value to your audience, even if the subject matter is seemingly limited. You should think about shaping your demonstration along the lines of providing value to your listeners.

Once you know what you want to say, the next step is getting on your local TEDx event. This means finding out when the next TEDx is scheduled, turning in the application, and following all the guidelines of your community TEDx event. There are no guarantees that you will be allowed to speak, but if the topic is relevant, you do stand a good chance.

Remember to build your personal brand at TEDx means connecting with the audience. You will want to practice your speech or demonstration and hone it towards providing value. There is no selling, not fundraising, only information that people will think about and discuss.

To build your personal brand is an ever-changing process. Speaking at TEDx is one way to reach a larger portion of your community in one session. While you can build your personal brand speaking at TEDx, it should be one part of a larger plan to expand your profile and build authority in your community.

Action Item

Post your videos onto a content-sharing platform that might be interested in the talk, like a subreddit on Reddit.com.

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Please send an email to support@mitchcarson.com for inquiries.Click Here