personal branding

Personal branding is more than stoking your ego

It is easy to knock social media and building a prescence and profile on the web as little more than stoking the ego.  “I’ve got more Twitter followers than you”, “I’ve got more facebook friends, more subscribers to my blog, more linkedin contacts…”  But there is more to it than that.  The way you use social media should be about building you as a brand.

Take a look at David Armano’s excellent presentation on Brand U.0.  Celebrities have brand, and with that comes influence.  Similalry people like you or me who develop their brand start to have influence.  And that influence gets you places.  At ThoughtWorks we are recruiting for a new Information Architect role.  Rather than describing the role in terms of skills and competencies, the starting point has been ‘we need a person “like that”‘, pointing to to both particular people within ThoughtWorks, and also on the broader web, looking at LinkedIn profiles, blogs etc.  If you have a brand you have already made yourself stand out.  In these challenging times your profile is not about your ego, it is about your future.

It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’ve acheived

This is a good way to assess where you are going in life.  It’s not so much what you’ve done, it’s more about what you’ve achieved.  Great, so you’ve written a marketing plan, you are an expert in Java, .net and Ruby on Rails.  But what have you actually achieved?  What did that marketing plan result in delivering?  Who did you delight with the applications you built in Java, .net or Ruby on Rails?  What value have you personally contributed to the world?  What would your epitaph be?