iFive

As a personal brand, you connect with your target audience in various ways.  You might be an online personal brand exclusively and never meet your audience.  Or, you may interact with them primarily through telephone calls.  But, for most of us, chances are, we interact with our clients, co-workers, and others up close and in-person at least some of the time.   Therefore, your audience gets to “experience” you.

Have you ever met someone that you had heard good things about only to discover that the experience of being with them did not live up to their advance billing ?  This is a case of the image not equaling the identity.  The image was made up of your expectations.  The identity you experienced was totally different.

To be a great personal brand you first operate from strengths, the real you, your true identity.  You develop those strengths.  You select a career and an organization that values them.   This postions you to make your greatest contributions and have the greatest satisfaction. 

But being positioned to succeed is not the same as succeeding.   Success requires that you also communicate with your audience better than your competition does.  You have to help your audience consistently see the best of the genuine you. 

I once had a senior client, the president of a company, whose CEO did not consider him strategic enough.  My client was very action oriented and highly people focused.  That was the personal brand he was conveying.  A great brand, but his boss wanted him to be more strategic.

 We fixed it.  We inserted the word “strategic” more frequently into his board presentations.  We made sure he always couched his recommended actions more carefully within the context of the corporate strategy.  In a very short time, he was viewed as strategic.  Ta-da! 

How could this possibly have worked?!  Wasn’t that just gaming the situation?  The reality is that my client was already a strategic thinker.  He just tended to jump into action without doing a good job of conveying his strategy.  His identity and image did not match because he was not managing his comunications. 

You cannot borrow a brand or sustain an image over time that is not the real you.  Our plan worked because my client was already a strategic thinker – he just needed to better at communicating that strength. 

Manage your personal brand to be sure your audiences are seeing the best of you, especially when it counts the most.