As Jeff Bezos says:
Branding is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
So let’s imagine you’ve left that room… what do you think is the collective representation of the individuals’ perception of you on a professional and personal level?
Should you care about it? Should you focus on your reputation?
I am sure that at this point in your life you have already defined your overall aspirations and truly know what you have to offer. If not, I will provide you some tips on how to use data mining tools to start developing your personal brand.
Your reputation is your most valuable asset, and it needs to be carefully crafted to ensure it properly and authentically represents you. Your brand identity is the representation of your reputation through the conveyance of attributes, values, purpose, strengths, and passions.
How to start?
Consider your BOD (Brand, Outcome, and Differentiator).
You must start by doing a Brand Audit to fully experience your brand and provide a custom plan of recommendations based on findings.
It is important to assess the current status of your online personality
By monitoring your online presence, you can identify any discrepancies between how you want to be perceived vis-à-vis people’s perception.
You should have a clear-cut idea about your USP, which would make a perfect sense for a customer to acquire your products or services and/or an employer to hire you.
A good way to define a unique self-image is by developing a “BOD” Analysis (Brand, Outcome, and Differentiator), which will enable you to answer the question:
How well-positioned is your personal brand in the digital space.
Here is a blueprint to help you get started:
1.Create a free account on BrandYouself.com
and analyze your online presence – Is your online personality congruent to your professional goals? Does your brand have an authentic and unique voice? Have you leveraged your personal experiences to create significant impact?
2. Upload and scan your resume on RezScore.com
– it is a free web application that reads, analyzes, grades and provides advice on your resume – instantly. If you’re applying for a new job and need to get your resume in shape, it could be a very helpful tool. Rezscore leverages the power of data science and build industry classifiers quickly revealing where you stand against other RezScore users – in-demand skills, salaries, tips for improvements etc. Again, does your resume effectively convey your experience, your skills, and aspirations?
3. Check your Social Selling Index (SSI)
on LinkedIn and measure the impact of your social selling efforts.
4. List your references, endorsements, and recommendations.
If you don not have any endorsements from your colleagues, I strongly suggest you reading my blog post on how to successfully get LinkedIn recommendations and fire up some emails – this is the era of social selling, and you don’t want to be perceived as a laggard! Remember, you are always on!
What to do next?
Once, you have gathered this information, you can mine all the data by performing sentiment and text analysis A.K.A opinion analysis – sentiment analysis identifies the positive, negative or neutral tones embedded in a piece of writing, in this case, your references.
By attaching sentiment scores to each opinion, you can uncover how people feel about your brand, products, and services, and why they feel that way hence better understand your market position.
Lexalytics provides an excel plugin that allows you to perform this analysis. If you’re heavy users of BI tools like Tableau or Qlik– then you will find that it’s super easy to import the results of the text analysis in Excel.
After the assessment, can you truly answer if your online personality is congruent with your professional goals?
If a fresh positioning needs to be done, hire a brand strategist who walks you through the process. A brand audit will enable you to discover, position and align process, skills, and offerings that tell you the gaps in your personal brand.
On the contrary, if you don’t have a digital footprint yet, why don’t you start by creating a website/blog using content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress or Joomla or build your own online community using Marzar.net – a social selling community platform that leverages your own professional brand and social network to gather insights and connections, discover new opportunities, and get business done.
I truly believe online communities are the natural evolution of social networking. The best part Marzar is free of charge.
Then you need to work on positioning to pull out YOUR story and articulate it in a way that is valuable for your target audience with real differentiation and ideal messaging.
The last step is aligning all your brand touch points and building brand ambassadors – each step builds a critically important foundation for all your growth initiatives.
Now, go back to that room and ask yourself again:
What do you think is the collective representation of the individuals’ perception of you on a professional and personal level?
Hoping this guideline assist you in showing the world your best true self in the online world. Remember, you need to be perceived as being always on, thus, make sure your digital outlets are kept that way as well. Think fast, be agile, be ready!
Don’t compromise your reputation. It’s a precious commodity – create a meaningful and lasting impression on everyone you meet without compromising your integrity.
How do you develop your personal brand? Have you discovered any other tools or methods? Let me know in the comments below!
For more business tips, check our entrepreneurship section and subscribe to our weekly newsletters.
