Personal Brand Makeover. Is it for you?

by | Mar 1, 2015 | Personal Branding

Now Reading | What It’s Like to get a Personal Brand Makeover by Personal Brand Consultants

http://m.fastcompany.com/…/i-got-a-personal-brand-makeover-…

This was a great little article in Fast Company by Chris Gayomali that I discovered this weekend. Here are some of his remarks as he approached the exercise with good humor:

Leland’s analysis starts before she reads a single tweet, with my avatar. “Your Twitter is a freaking cat holding his hand up!” she said. “You’re part teenager, part accomplished journalist.”

Leland asked that I not reveal the specifics regarding her process. But I can relay a few of the the tips and tricks that she and my other coach, Mel Carson, a former evangelist at Microsoft and the founder of Delightful Communications, a boutique marketing, PR, and branding firm, offered me over the course of my digital retooling.

Leland recommended I start with a simple assessment, which consisted of two basic questions: What was my current brand? And what did I want it to be?

Once those two poles were plotted, the brand-mapping process from Point A to Point B could begin.

For me, Point A was the idiot savant/teenage journalist thing. Point B was to present myself as a real business journalist, someone who can write about muddy issues in (I hope!) an entertaining way.

Typically Leland, who is based in San Francisco, spends a whole day with CEOs remapping their personal brand. But since I was a charity case, we broke it up into three separate phone sessions, each about an hour. After diagnosing my social media accounts and asking me a series of questions about where I wanted my career to go, we arrived at something she calls the anchor statement.

An anchor statement can best be understood as a distillation of what you want your career to be about. It’s the thesis from which the rest of your brand originates. It can’t be disingenuous, either. Your anchor statement has to communicate what Ideal You wants to be seen as.

“When you meet someone at a cocktail party, you have to have something that people understand,” Leland explained to me. “You may have specialties. Your main thing you’re focused on is a brand in and of itself.” During the exercise, Leland and I arrived at an anchor statement. Here’s what she recommended I say about myself whenever I meet someone at a party:

I’m a user-friendly business journalist with Fast Company, but I write about it in an accessible and entertaining way.

This is… not something I would normally use on my own! At first, the marketing-speak sounded very foreign to my untrained ears, but I understood its value, providing wind in the sails for my otherwise rudderless personal brand. I had to ask: Why the user-friendly part? I would have settled for easy-to-understand. Or approachable. “You want to be able to take the conversation deeper,” she said. You want to “engage people in a conversation with who you are and what you do.”

The most valuable lesson I learned, though, is that being authentic and putting your best foot forward are not mutually exclusive. Not being an idiot also helps. On the right platform, it’s okay to highlight your accomplishments from time to time. It sharpens you into focus.