Personal Brand :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

In my post two days ago, about the speed of change and how my business specifically has changed in its shape and focus, I promised to share a recent experience of a friend’s comment which shocked me and made me think more about how well or otherwise I convey to others a sense and understanding of what I do, what I offer professionally.

I’ve weighed up whether to share this process of questioning and re-defining, lest existing and possible future clients wonder whether I actually know what it is I’m doing. I decided to take that risk, on the basis that my sharing how I’m working through the questions might help one or two people having similar challenges.

I’m actually pretty clear about what it is I “do”. I’m just wanting to be as sure as I can be that I am communicating that as well as I can.

Before sitting down to write this, I re-read my posts from only a few weeks ago, Just What is it You Do, Again? and Just How Valuable is Personal Branding? I was surprised to notice how my thinking has shifted even in that short space of time.

Partly that’s because I’ve been doing a couple of courses that have prompted me to look more closely at these questions.

But a significant trigger for some of the shift was an observation made by a friend of mine when we met for one of our infrequent but always interesting coffee chats. This was the event I referred to above. It was only a week after I’d written those two posts I’ve just mentioned and I actually felt I was getting a real handle on the business of answering the “what is it you do?” question.

Little did I know I was about to get a bit of a cold-shower wakeup message along with my caffeine hit.

In bringing my friend up to date on my doings, I thought I had explained fairly well how I was focused on what I saw as the twin or interrelated elements of my business, namely business coaching and social media strategizing. (Putting that in “title” or “label” terms, I am a business coach and a social media strategist.)

I recall I mentioned in the process of my update a few other specific items, which to me were more in the way of aspects of the coaching and strategizing roles, rather than add-ons or extraneous activities.

But I was in for a surprise.

Having listened to my little tour of my recent business activities and my sharing about some emerging possibilities, my friend said: “I don’t really know what you do. You jump around all over the place”. (That might not be exactly what he said, but if not it is close enough for the purpose of this story.)

I was taken aback, but it was cool. Real friends tell you the truth, even if it is uncomfortable.

So when I recovered I accepted that I had some more work to do on communicating clearly.

And because I tend to over-think some things – for the benefit of the NLP reader I’m more auditory-kinesthetic than visual – I sometimes find that I can break out of a loop of thinking by being deliberately visual. Doing a mindmap, doodling, drawing pictures (strictly stick figures).

This time I thought, how do I often communicate visually what I do? My business card.

So what would I have on my business card that gave people an idea of what I do?

In considering some design ideas – leaving aside such details as phone numbers – I found myself working through my own understanding of how I really want to present myself in a business context.

I got stuck on what label to use. I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with labels – “Director”, “President”, “Coach”, “Chief Wizard” etc – even though (because?) I’ve been using labels for the twenty years I’ve been in business. I’m not saying I’m ready to give up on labels, but at the moment I find them somewhat restrictive.

I love being a social media strategist. And I love being a coach. I see the two working seamlessly together and am not interested in giving up on either. So I’ve been using the double label “Business coach and social media strategist”, just as previously I used “Business coach and blogging evangelist”.

But maybe the time has come for some simplification.

I want to have the freedom to explain what I do more in terms of the needs of the person I’m speaking to now, or who is reading now what I’m posting, than to be constrained by a label and that person’s preconceptions about what a particular label means or doesn’t mean.

So, long story short, I worked through some texts for my next business card and produced the versions above:

from the double titled one top left
to the “kitchen sink” version – 3 labels – on the top right
to the relative simplicity of one label – “Social Media Strategist” – bottom left
to no label, just how to find me - my web+blog address – bottom right

I’m really warming to some version of the last-mentioned design – name plus Web address.

So how will people know what I do? It will emerge in the conversation.

Or it won’t.

But by not having a label there might less prospect of the conversation being skewed by pre-conceptions about what one or other label might mean.

I know I’ll still have to work out what to put in the field for “Title” when I register for events.

I welcome comments. If you feel you have a better solution I would love to hear it.

I’ve been wondering whether Personal Branding is a Good Thing for me to pursue, or not.

As I continued the process I wrote about yesterday, of figuring out how to answer effectively the “What do you do?” question and – by extension – how that might be something people could be interested in paying me to do for and with them, my thoughts turned to the idea of personal branding. And positively at first. As in, Yes, that’s what I should be working on, my personal brand.

But as I thought a bit more, I wondered.

Part of my wondering was because I have a somewhat negative mental/emotional association with the “branding” word/concept, going back to childhood days on my father’s family’s farm – most likely an association shared by anyone who has grown up on or spent time on a farm with cattle and horses.

Back to what people in the city, specifically marketing and advertising, mean by “branding”.

I don’t recall when I first heard the term “personal branding” or such catchy expressions as “Brand You”, but I admit to quite liking the underlying concept, or at least liking what I understood about it. That may be partly because the concept has some very articulate and persuasive evangelists who post about the subject in an interesting way, such as William Arruda, Dan Schawbel and others on the Personal Branding Blog.

So what is “personal branding”? I imagine the experts define it in various ways. The BNET Business Dictionary says it is:

the public expression and projection of an individual’s identity, personality, values, skills, and abilities.

and adds, just so we get the point:

The idea of personal branding has evolved by applying the concept of a product brand or a corporate brand to an individual person.

In itself that doesn’t tell me a lot. Dan Schawbel and others believe that there is some confusion about what the term means and on a wiki set up for the purpose they offer the following as “The Real Definition of Personal Branding“:

Personal branding describes the process by which individuals and entrepreneurs differentiate themselves and stand out from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leveraging it across platforms with a consistent message and image to achieve a specific goal. In this way, individuals can enhance their recognition as experts in their field, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confidence.

That seemed reasonable enough. But I can’t say it got me excited.

I was still feeling uneasy about this idea of personal branding.

Then I came across (actually I looked for and came across) a contrarian view on the subject.

Not an easy process, by the way, if you are using Google as your search resource – seems there are a lot of true believers out there.

In business, I get nervous if everyone is agreeing (I won’t say “sub-prime”).

So the contrarian view.

In his post “Personal Branding” is a Misconception, Michael H. Goldhaber argues that

the idea of personal branding — common though it is — gets things backwards

Goldhaber’s blog is about “Attention, the Attention Economy, etc”

His argument on personal branding is, as I read it, framed within a context of blogging and can be summarized (although not necessarily done justice – I recommend you read the whole, very entertaining post for that: ok, it might not be entertaining for personal branding evangelists, but should be for others) as follows:

A brand is superficially a proper noun, such as the name of a place or a person – John Smith, Spain – but is linguistically an ordinary noun, differing from a common noun like “cow” or “strawberry” – “in that it is supposed to refer only to a line of pretty much identical products that all are associated with a particular company” – e.g. Heinz.
“…regular brands — far from being something that individuals need to emulate — are actually reminders of the singular persons or personalities who originated or stand behind the branded products or services” (examples, Microsoft and Bill Gates, Apple and Steve Jobs)
“Why Pablo Picasso is not a brand” (you need to read the whole argument – can’t do it justice with bullet points!)
I think his fourth point is about being yourself as a creative, entrepreneurial person, fully, at any given moment, which (this is how I read it) can’t be encapsulated in a “brand”.
Be spontaneous – personal branding is “a red herring”

James Chartrand,writing at Copyblogger, talks about “personal branding prison” and argues you should be branding your business, not yourself.

Start building value into your business so that potential customers think of your business name first and your name second. Get people interested in working with your business, not you.

That brought me back to a thought I’ve been having through this whole process, basically the idea I first understood from reading Michael Gerber’s E-Myth – that one of the key ideas (the main idea?) of being in business is to build your business up to the point where you are able to sell it. What to me is a no-brainer corollary is that a business which is branded with my name is going to be, on the face of things, harder to sell than a business with a more generic or less person-specific name.

That’s my real challenge with personal branding.

For me, the jury’s out.

Comments are very welcome.

Photo credit: photoflux via Flickr, Creative Commons licence