User:Haleymadi/Personal branding

Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.

The process of personal branding involves finding your uniqueness, building a reputation on the things you want to be known for, and then allowing yourself to be known for them. Ultimately, the goal is to create something that conveys a message and that can be monetized.

Whereas self-help practices focus on self-improvement, personal branding defines success as a form of self-packaging. The term is thought to have originated from an article written by Tom Peters in 1997. In Be Your Own Brand, first published in 1999, marketers David McNally and Karl Speak wrote: "Your brand is a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes the total experience of having a relationship with you."^[1]

Personal Branding

Individuals sometimes associate personal names or pseudonyms with their businesses. Notably, 45th President of the United States and real estate mogul Donald Trump uses his last name on properties and other enterprises (e.g. Trump Tower). Celebrities may also leverage their social status to support organizations for financial or social gain. For example, Kim Kardashian endorsesbrands and products through her media influence.^[2]

The relationship between brands and consumers is dynamic and must be constantly refined. This continuous process demonstrates the ambivalence of consumerism. Bop Design estimates that 80% of consumers are more likely to evaluate solutions from the brands they follow on a social network.

A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.

Personal brands may be deliberately modified to reinvent a public persona. This may be to recover from a public embarrassment, or to re-emerge from obscurity. The public perception of authenticity often determines the success of a rebranding.^[2]

History of Personal Branding

Personal branding, self-positioning, and all individual branding by whatever name, were first introduced in 1937 in the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. In Chapter 6 – Organized Planning, Planning the Sale of Services– Hill states, "It should be encouraging to know that practically all the great fortunes began in the form of compensation for personal services, or from the sale of IDEAS." The idea surfaced later in the 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout. More specifically in "Chapter 23. Positioning Yourself and Your Career - You can benefit by using positioning strategy to advance your own career. Key principle: Don't try to do everything yourself. Find a horse to ride". It was later popularized by Tom Peters.

Personal branding has gained significance due to the use of the Internet, as social media and online identities affect the physical world.^[3]

Employers are increasingly using social media tools to vet applicants before offering them

Personal Branding Steps[4]

Step 1: Perform an audit of your online footprint.

Step 2: Remove threats hurting your reputation in search results.

Step 3: Create and post assets highlighting your best qualities.

Step 4: Strengthen your credibility through reputation maintenance.

Step 5: Monitor the results and tweak your strategy based on successes.

Social Media

Social media can be "roughly defined as 'a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content'"^[5]. Social media extends beyond just Facebook and Twitter and into the professional world as well. There are general professional profiles like LinkedIn and company or industry-specific networks, such as Slack. Because of these professional networks, self-branding is useful in finding a job or improving one's professional standing. As an online open source, social media has become a place that is fulfilled with highly reliable and resourceful information to target user identities.^[6]

Personal branding focuses on "self-packaging," where 'success is not determined by individuals' internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are…branded"; it is more about self-promotion rather than true self-expression. The difference between the two is that self-promotion is deliberately intentional in all aspects because the individual is purposely shaping their image or persona, while self-expression can even be a byproduct of promotion.

Building a brand and an online presence through internal corporate networks allows for individuals to network with their colleagues, not only socially but professionally as well. This kind of interaction allows for employees to build up their personal brand relative to other employees, as well as spur innovation within the company because more people can learn from more people.

Some social media sites, like Twitter, can have a flattened, all-encompassing audience that can be composed of professional and personal contacts, which then can be seen as a more "'professional' environment with potential professional costs". Because of its explicitly public nature, Twitter becomes a double-sided platform that can be utilized in different ways depending on the amount of censorship a user decides on.

Aside from professional aspirations, personal branding can also be used on personal-level social networks to flare popularity. The online self is used as a marketing and promotional tool to brand an individual as a type of person; success on the virtual platforms then becomes "online social value [that could transform] to real rewards in the offline world."^[7] When one is branding themselves on social media they need to consider these three things: "crafting their physical footprint, creating their digital footprint, and communicating their message." A prominent example of a self-made self-branded social media icon is Tila Tequila, who rose to prominence in 2006 on the Myspace network, gaining more than 1.5 million friends, through expertly marketing her personal brand.

As social media has become a vehicle for self-branding, these moguls have begun to situate the maintenance of their online brand as a job, which brings about new ways to think about work and labor The logic of online sites and the presence of feedback means that one's online presence is viewed by others using the same rubric to judge brands: evaluation, ranking, and judgment. Thus, social media network sites serve as complex, technologically mediated venues for the branding of the self.

See also

• Creative disruption
• Impression management
• Online identity management
• Reputation capital
• Reputation management

References