by Mel Carson
Copyright 2015 Mel Carson
All Rights ReservedTable of Contents
Introduction
1- Establish Your Professional Purpose
2- Embrace and Expound Your Experience
3- Analyze Your Competitors as You Build Your Personal Brand
4- Get a New Headshot – Your New Image Starts with an Image
5- How to Craft Your Personal Branding Statement
6- Make Your Personal Brand Discoverable
7- How to Re-engineer Your Digital Presence
8- Take 5 and Practice Writing
9- How to Learn to Listen and Practice Empathy
10- Social By Design: Make Your Personal Brand Stand Out.
11-
12- INTRODUCTION
13- In July 2012, I was laid off from my role as Digital Marketing Evangelist at Microsoft.
14- As the company streamlined its operations, a group of us learned our roles were eliminated. Microsoft was very good about it, of course, and offered to help us find other jobs within the company and externally. I felt positive about landing somewhere fresh and new after seven years in that position.
15- When I got back to my desk to contemplate my future, I wrote a blog post about the news to let people know that I was fine and was open to job offers.
16- The post went viral.
17- Over the next couple of days, major news publications mentioned my story and linked to the post. Ten thousand people viewed it and the phone began ringing off the hook with companies wanting to interview me.
18- What struck me most were the comments of support from people I had never even met. It turns out I’d built quite a brand in the digital marketing industry in the course of those seven years. While I knew many of those who followed me and would connect and engage with them online and at conferences, there were many, many more people who had come in contact with my writing, videos and presentations but stayed silent until that point.
19- That’s when the penny dropped and my company, Delightful Communications was born out of my commitment to helping others consciously build their personal brand. Three years later, we’ve helped hundreds of people across the world make their wisdom and expertise discoverable, sharable and memorable. This eBook is a compilation of blog posts I have written over the last year and is intended to help thousands more gain an understanding of the fundamentals of personal branding, with actionable tips to get the professional ball rolling in the direction you want it to go!
20- In taking action on the ten steps in this eBook, you’ll begin establishing a personal brand that’s approachable, endearing AND enduring. The next seven thousand words have been designed to offer an introduction to the art of personal branding, rather than overwhelming with massive amounts of actions and to-do lists. These tips are meant to inspire, with simple activities to help you see immediate results as you embark on your quest to stand out in your industry.
21- If you have any questions AT ALL, feel free to reach out to me via my website, and connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
22-1- ESTABLISH YOUR PROFESSIONAL PURPOSE
Before you can tackle the creation of your perfect personal brand, it’s important to understand who you are, what makes you tick and why you do what it is you do.
Simon Sinek’s How Great Leaders Inspire Action TED Talk has been seen over 22 million times in large part because of his simple mantra: start with why. It’s a powerful but often overlooked first step towards success in any area of life.
Nearly all of us have to work to pay the bills, pay off university loans, save into our pension funds, shrink the mortgage, go out on occasion, take vacations and hopefully have a bit of fun while we’re not working.
If we know we have to work what might be a 40, 60, or even 80-hour week, there has to be more to what we’re doing than just earning money. What helps us get out of bed in the morning? What helps us be better at what we do? What is it that separates a job from a career? What helps us live, strive and survive?
We need more than a paycheck.
We need a professional purpose.
Without purpose, there can be no planning, and we limit the possibility of channeling our future in the direction we desire.
How I Discovered My Professional Purpose
My story started back in school, when I realized I had a talent for acting, singing and writing. School plays, music festivals and talent shows all saw me pouring my heart and soul into something I knew I was good at. Drama at university was an obvious next step; the bright lights of London theatre, TV, and film beckoned after three years of honing my craft. I then spent six years selling teddy bears at Harrods and failing miserably at getting real acting jobs. I decided, at the age of 29, that I needed a new career. The Internet was pretty new, so I did a course in HTML and managed to conjure up an editor role at the
search engine directory LookSmart. My job involved writing 55 website reviews every day – short, punchy descriptions of what users might find if they clicked on a link. Soon after, I was promoted to traffic manager helping our European sales people get display ads live across the LookSmart network.
LookSmart folded in 2003 and I spent some time at a digital agency. Soon, Microsoft came calling and I spent the next (and best) seven years of my career evolving into an evangelism role. This meant more writing, speaking, video creation and other ways to communicate to an audience looking to be informed and inspired.
It was during those years I discovered what truly made me tick. My desire to act and write had little to do with being famous or earning loads and loads of money. What I really enjoyed – what got me out of bed – was the love of communicating, inspiring and educating people and businesses to do their very best work.
I wanted people to have a great experience.
I wanted to help people.
I wanted others to be successful.
And so my professional purpose was born:
To inspire and educate people and their businesses to be successful by applying digital marketing strategies that focus on Social Media, Digital PR and Personal
Branding.
That’s it.
Past Signposts Define Your Future Path
During my time helping executives and professionals with their personal brands, I’ve talked to some who aspired to be architects, but now build successful businesses. I’ve met some who felt working with children was their calling, but they’ve turned out to be exceptional people managers or HR directors. And there are others who, while they were young, wanted to be engineers because they loved tinkering with things, but have now found successful careers as journalists, uncovering problems and making sense of the world for us through their detective work.
In order to establish your professional purpose, you need to look back at your early education and career and trace back the steps to where you are now.
Then consider these questions:
Why is it you do what you do?
Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
What thrills you about your current job role or career?
Why don’t you do something else?
What does a great day look like?
What is it you don’t enjoy about your job and why?
Answer those questions (and a few more of your own that you may uncover during the process) and you’ll be well on your way to identifying and articulating your professional purpose.
Knowing why you do what you do and being able to succinctly articulate it is as crucial for your internal wellbeing and growth, as it is an external badge. Start with why and when you figure it out, I promise you, the answer will be far more satisfying than any paycheck.EMBRACE AND EXPOUND YOUR EXPERIENCE
I have a story.
You have a story.
We ALL have a story.
Our personal brand is all about what kind of experience people have with us online and in-person, and that experience has a past. We need to embrace it.
During a personal branding workshop I delivered recently, we talked about our professional histories. What was our educational experience? How did we get into our niche? What were our professional passions? What did we find hard? Where did we want to be in three years’ time from a career perspective?
In just five minutes talking about themselves (not an easy or comfortable thing for many to do), the participants had started to cultivate a story about their career that had structure – a beginning, middle and desired end.
When it comes to articulating your experience, it’s important to set out your professional skills in a compelling way. Many people have an issue with writing down what, of all the experience they have in their career to date, is actually interesting or matters.
It all matters.
While embracing your experience and crafting a story you can succinctly articulate at a networking event or job interview is a goal, getting that information down in writing on your website or social platforms like LinkedIn is critical, as well.Share Your Unique Value Propositions
When you’re writing down your experience under present and past roles within your profile, include as much detail as you can. This means not just your job role, but expounding that experience with responsibilities, successes, awards, client names (if not confidential), and what value you brought to the role.
Detail, detail, detail.
It’s crucial to think about how people might be searching for you or your expertise. You don’t have to write an essay, but share enough for people reading your profile or looking for your skillset to have a much more robust understanding of your past than a thin, buzzword-riddled, two-sentence rush job.
As I was talking through each of the fields on LinkedIn during the workshop, I had to stop people furiously editing their profile in real-time. I suggested they take time away from the workplace and jot experience down in a Word document before committing it to be published.
These things take time!
Hiding your light underneath a bushel does you no favors. Share the highlights (and lowlights) from your past professional experience. Your target audience is looking for you, but you’re not providing them sufficient detail to figure out if you’re the right person to answer their need.
If you’re a procrastinator like me, take one job role at a time and write everything down you can remember. Then return to edit it down to salient points that help tell your story.
This isn’t something you can do in an hour or even a day.
You have a great story.
Start telling it more completely!3-ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS AS YOU BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND
One of the biggest gaps I see companies unable to fill is the real-time understanding of what their competition is up to.
During my years in digital marketing, I’ll be the first to admit to being so down in the weeds executing on the tactical plan that I didn’t have the wherewithal to notice what the competitive set was working on. Having learned that lesson, one of the first things we do now is conduct a competitive analysis to see who’s out there, what they are doing well and where the opportunities
are to differentiate and stand out. Competitive analysis is as important for you and your personal brand as it is for the company you work for.
Understanding what other people in your niche are doing, saying and how successful they are is crucial to personal branding success. Here are a few things you can do to figure out who they are, their impact, and what you can do to wrestle attention away from them onto you