The Unified Model of Personal Branding
This post was published simultaneously on http://blog.mediasauce.com. To view the discussion it generated there, feel free to jump over there after you finish reading the post.
Two Things You Need to Learn from this Post:
- Character is at your core, image & brand are what you project to others, and reputation is how others perceive you. While you can control the first two, you cannot control the third.
- The human mind is continually seeking to identify discrepancies between what others say they are and what they actually are. If the image you project is different than your character, the gap between the two will buckle and collapse under scrutiny.
The Unified Model of Personal Branding
A More Detailed Exploration:
The subject of personal branding fascinates me primarily because it evokes such strong reactions from people. It first caught my attention in late 2008 with Dan Schawble and others promoting personal branding and Geoff Livingston and others railing against it.
At first, I was geared up to tee off against personal branding. Heck, I even had one of our designers whip together an absurd personal brand for me to use with irony and sarcasm as my Twitter avatar and background. Why? Personal brands seem to be full of hubris and egotism while being devoid of teamwork (e.g. Terrell Owens). Who likes to be around people who just look out for themselves and who only care about what others think of them?
Surprisingly, as I discussed the concept with my MediaSauce colleagues and gave deeper thought, I began to appreciate how highly nuanced the concept is. As I moved on to other ideas and projects, my attention to the subject drifted. However, in the back of my mind I’ve kept thinking about personal branding.
Does Reputation Trump Branding?
Last week, when I read Chris Brogan’s tweet commenting on Geoff Livingston’s new blog post about personal branding, I clicked the link and read the post. Since Geoff has been one of the most vocal critics of personal branding, I was curious what he had to say that might be new.
While some might get distracted by his acknowledgment that he does have a personal brand or his claim that it “accelerated [his company’s] reputation for social media,” I found the discussion around brand and reputation most relevant.
In short, he encouraged people not to confuse personal branding with reputation and made the case that reputation matters more. In his opinion, those who are using social media to project their personal brands would be better served building their reputations for accomplishing things.
While I don’t disagree with this idea, I think it is an incomplete assessment because it fails to acknowledge a deeper truth: Character is more important than reputation, brands, and image.
But before I explain why, let’s consider branding and its relevance to broadcast and social media.
What is a Brand Anyway?
Despite what the man behind the curtain wants you to believe, brands are artificial constructs designed to evoke emotional reactions. They came about when people began to trade goods and services over longer distances with people they’d never met. Prior to that, people had plenty of opportunity to interact with the other person and form a judgment of their character and value to them.
To fill the void created by the absence of these personal interactions, the brand was born. Through consistent imagery, colors, tonality, etc., merchants could ensure goods and services would be remembered by those who were in the market for their products. H.J. Heinz’s pickle emblem and Coca-Cola’s signature bottle are examples of this.
Over the years, branding has developed into a complex science and created interesting niche professions and firms. The process and cost to develop the new Pepsi logo was an eye-opener for those unfamiliar with the inner workings of the branding sausage factory.
Social Media Fuels Personal Brands
Personal branding is a natural result of giving people who’ve been bombarded by branding with easy-to-use tools to project their presence across the Internet. Those uninitiated in the field are fusing their perception of branding with what people have done for years to maintain their personal images. That’s why you’re seeing the digital versions of wearing the same fresh cut flower in your lapel or always wearing the same color combination.
Why Personal Brands Matter
Now that everyone has a voice, joined the conversation, and [insert your favorite social media cliché here], it’s getting awfully crowded and noisy online. Projecting yourself online with consistency and clarity can help you stand out. While some might scoff at the notion of personal branding, it’s hard to argue against the goal of wanting to be associated with the value you think you bring to the world.
Let’s just acknowledge the elephant in the room: personal branding is here and will be around for the foreseeable future. Knowing that, we better understand how it relates to reputation and character.
An Introduction to the Unified Model of Personal Branding
With these underlying concepts explored, it’s time to introduce a unified model to help people be successful personal brand managers.
At Your Core: Character
The values and principles by which you act say a lot more about you than the image and reputation you try to maintain. Your character is substantive and drives your actions. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”
Projecting Yourself: Image and Branding
Even when we lived in small villages, image has played a role in our social lives. The way we dress, the things we own, where we live, who we hang out with, where we work, and how we carry ourselves project an image. That will never change.
As commerce grew over greater distances and people were able to buy goods and services from faraway place, a void was created between buyer & producer. To fill that void, the concept of branding was created to personify a product or service. While many definitions exist, let’s simply define branding as providing a consistent experience to evoke a desired emotional response. Personal branding is applying corporate branding on the individual level.
What Others Think: Reputation
As social creatures, we rely upon others to survive. What others think of us determines our ability to achieve what we want in social settings. Therefore, reputation matters greatly.
Interestingly, reputation is the only one of the three elements you cannot control – no matter how hard you try. That’s because reputation lies in the hearts and minds of others.
Humans seek discrepancies between what others say and do. From these micro-observations (many of which are subconscious), we make judgments of all kinds. And, when we share these observations and judgments with others they form into a highly dynamic cloud we call reputation.
Managing Brands and Reputations in the Interconnected Age
The simplest path to success is to project an image/brand that is directly aligned with your character. Trouble comes when you try to pretend to be something you’re not – that’s true for corporate brands and personal brands. If there is something different (or nothing) at the core, the image/brand you build around it will buckle and implode upon itself eventually.
With broadcast media, there are only so many channels and none of them are inherently two-way or allow for peer-to-peer interactions. In the broadcast era, branding was powerful since it was very easy to control the images you projected and the experiences everyday people had with your brand could only be shared with their limited, local networks.
As online and social media have spread, the playing field has shifted. The ability to share each of our observations and judgments with each other has grown exponentially. Not only does the little boy know when the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, he can quickly tweet about it and post photos and videos to his Facebook page and blog – spreading it almost instantaneously.
Greater Scrutiny Increases the Value of Character
Whether you are a corporate brand or a personal brand, this greater scrutiny increases the importance of aligning your image/brand with who you are at your core. Character matters now and will continue to matter more. That’s why you are seeing savvy corporations increasing their commitment to being good corporate citizens (e.g. Timberland, Starbucks, P&G, and Target).
So if you are building a corporate brand or your own personal brand, the best use of your resources is to clearly define who you are at the core and stay true to that. Those who invest in building an image/brand that is different than the core will find the perils of building a house on a foundation of sand.
What are Your Thoughts?
What do you think of personal brands? Does character really matter? Is there an element I’ve missed?
Find me on Twitter:
@scottyhendo
You certainly put a lot of thought into this Scott.
First, I agree with your points.
Perhaps we can sum the argument up with: walk the talk. If the online brand is the talk, it is how you act in the real world, what you accomplish and the tone in which you do it. Reputation builds over time with walking the talk authentically.
Also, it is so easy to talk, and hard to walk and walk in alignment with it.
Glad to have your thoughts on this, Carol. Your work helping corporations identify and live core principles is a great example of what I have laid out in this post. Companies and people who understand that character drives long-term success will be better off in the short- and long-term.
I have to concur with Carol on this one. I talk to my marketing students about their “brands” (in terms of how they conduct themselves in class and the quality of their work) but I guess that for many of them, what I really mean is how they develop their reputation – the walking the walk. But at the core, it really is about character. And I think more people need to give this more consideration … what do they really stand for? Not something that they think others want them to stand for.
The social networking tools do make it easier for people to portray false images. But at some point, some of this will all shake out and at the core, character and reputation are still crucial. The social networking tools are simply the channels.
One of the first to respond to this post was Geoff Livingston. He chose to write a blog post on his personal blog as his reply, Off Hours, since he wanted to explore spiritual implications. Of course, his thoughts are always welcome here and I invited him to join us here for the discussion.
I applaud Geoff for his willingness to share how his personal aversion to personal branding stems for personal character changes he’s striving to make. That’s a noble cause for each of us.
In his response post, he posed a question to me:
The start of my answer, Geoff, is found in my post:
- “Character is more important than reputation, brands, and image.”
- “So if you are building a corporate brand or your own personal brand, the best use of your resources is to clearly define who you are at the core and stay true to that.”
The rest of my answer is – when did I state someone had to work on their brand all the time? Each one of us is constantly projecting an image out to others – whether it be in person or online. The key is to make sure that image represents who you are really are and not something you’re pretending to be. Those who only focus on their image and no time on the substance of their character will learn the folly of ego and pride.
It seems, Geoff, that you have used a broad brush in your assessment of “personal branders” and I want to make sure you’re not lumping me into that category. I’m not advocating people need to do it. I’m acknowledging the fact that they are and need to understand basic principles if they are going to do it in an authentic way.
I certainly agree that the crowd determines your reputation, but there are ways to affect your rep. In other words, reputation is neither fully out of our control, nor is it totally enigmatic.
Let’s break down the components reputation:
Reputation = (Ability to Resonate + Ability to Deliver) * Reach
Ability to Resonate: Your brand can be excellent, but you have to be able to explain to people in a way that they understand and that ultimately makes them want to act.
Ability to Deliver: The message doesn’t mean much if you cannot do what you say you will do. You have to write checks you can cash. Seek to under promise and over deliver. Be up front about shortcomings. Handle problems with haste and thoroughness. Damage control falls under delivery.
Reach. People pay a premium to have marketers, PR people, agents, attorneys etc tell, promote, clarify, defend and (sometimes) alter their story. Take care to get your message in front of the right people. Be transparent (ack the t word) about failure and how you plan to fix a problem.
If you do all of these things, you should be able to predict your reputation. If you fail to do them, well… you should also be able to predict your reputation with a high degree of certainty.
Wow, long post. But I slogged through it.
Scotty, I enjoyed bending my mind around the concepts of brand vs. character vs. reputation vs. smoke and mirrors vs. curtains vs. advertising vs. marketing vs. reputation.
Through it all I was brought back to two things.
1 – to leave a comment I had to fill out some boxes and in those boxes I ended up putting what amounts to my online personal brand. But I’m so much more than the guy people know as the scooter-riding, anything-eating, copywriter savant and social-media mediocre star you all know and love. Or am I less?
I’m a whiny, exercise-averse, gambler who may have an addiction problem or two. I’m a Crohn’s Disease sufferer who declines to share this info with many people even though if I did so I’d probably increase disease knowledge and donations. I’m flat-footed, near-sighted and bereft of any dancing or singing skill.
These things are as carefully controlled as Tylenol’s past stumbles. But does hiding them speak volumes about who I am or about with whom I choose to share this info?
Maybe the tools we’re using to brand ourselves need to be examined as heavily as the branding subjects. If Twitter were as real as an actual conversation would people really overshare the way they do? Would people really shout out seven names on Friday morning and urge others to follow them? Would Ashton Kutcher have even heard what I said about him and subsequently start following me?
I don’t know about a lot of this because it’s all still evolving. Maybe a few days, weeks, months or years from now the concept of a personal brand will drop seven letters and revert to being a person.
Maybe it will go the other direction and Fan Pages for people will resemble the ones that only companies used to have. And we’ll need new eye-opening logos ala Pepsico.
It’s all a journey – even the one to be the best person you can be.
2 – YES, I said two things. The other is a quote I made up for a yearbook about 20 years ago. It’s copyright 1988 by Jeff Cutler. You can use it with attribution as long as you link to my site and give my brand proper credit.
“You need look no further than your own feelings for direction once you establish a set of principles to live by.”
Thanks for listening. Keep up the good work.
“Personal branding”….there’s a great word, huh, Scott. I’m glad you chose to use the old fashioned one, character. In a practical work it’s called credibility. In ancient times it was called ethos.
For me one’s credibility is built on character, competence and confidence. Character is all about whether you are trustworthy or not. Competence on whether you know what you are doing. And confidence on your ability to display good character and competence.
I remember teaching public speaking at Penn State and students having trouble grasping the “confidence” point most. Of course, these newbies to speaking demonstrated this point every time they spoke. They were sincere and truthful about the topics they chose and, of course, to ease their nerves, spoke on topics about which they knew a lot. Unfortunately, the style part of their delivery was lacking because of confidence.
The saving grace about confidence is that compared to character and competence people are willing to bear with you as you develop it. They are less forgiving on trust and knowledge.
New to the concept so forgive my stumbling but I enjoyed your post enough to comment.
I fear that those who stand opposed to personal branding do so with the lowest common denominator in mind. Those, like Mr. Livingston, who feel charity should remain silent or risk altruism for accolade. But, like personal reputation, the good will rise and the bad will fall based on the experiences they project. Whether that projection is silent is irrelevant because others are always watching and processing and spreading our image for us. Why should we not control that image to the best of our ability?
Again, a good brand will rise and a bad brand will fall. And should one’s personal brand fail, does that not send a message to the person that their brand needs reinvention? Is that not a positive thing? Like Mr. Livingston and his assertion that he is “not the man [he] used to be”, should a person be forever marred by past deeds? If anything I feel personal branding is one more avenue for self-reflection and creation by our ability to garner far-reaching feedback.
Sure, the trolls can hide behind pseudonym but they are not striving for authenticity. Those who take the time and effort to brand themselves are looking for strengthened footing to step forward in the world, not ways to undermine it. There will always be people with shaky morality, attention seeking hedonists, and destroyers but they will be relegated to the shadows as more people step to the forefront and lessen the internet’s anonymity with recognizable and trackable brands.
Reputation is undoubtedly built through action, but if we were all eBay users with our feedback numbers hovering over our heads would you not trust the person with the 93% pos rating with hundreds of sales all over the world to the person with a 99% rating from their grandma and one neighbor? I would and I would applaud his ability to uphold his character with thousands more discerning eyes watching him and not think that ability selfish, but rather heroic.