Personal branding: When you are your brand

Rosae Martin Peña / May 2019 / Personal Branding

Have a clear vision of where you want to go, authentic personality, unique style of clothing and communication, share achievements with everyone and through all channels available, faithful to ideals, global vision while detecting small details. These words perfectly shape what defines a brand. In other words: personal branding is not so much what you think about yourself or your business, but how others perceive it.

If one wants to explore the origin of the concept of Personal Branding, we must go back to that summer of 1997, when Tom Peters, as a visionary, wrote this article for the magazine Fast Company, titled The Brand Called You. Peters has gone down in history for having changed the course of what was hitherto understood by personal development, with this quote: “big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the era of the individual, you have to be your own brand. Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me Inc.”.

Thus, and for a little more than two decades, large companies began a new journey, which consisted of investing in their own personal brand, detecting what made them different from the rest. To find out if this technique has worked, it’s worth asking the following question: Who are Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla, Apple, Netflix? If you know the answer, it is that the statement of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who defined the personal brand as what people say about you when you’re not in the room, works like it was supposed to.

 

The AIDA method to promote Personal Branding in social networks

For those who are directly related to marketing, the acronym AIDA surely rings a bell. Attention, interest, desire and action, terms that were developed in 1986 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, but which nevertheless remain tremendously up-to-date. So, how do we put these four marketing elements into action with today’s theme: empowering personal brand through social networks?

1. ATTENTION: in order to attract attention, one must awaken curiosity, serve as a hook. The image that is transferred to social networks has to be what what identifies us for who we are, that authentically reflects what we want to transmit. Some strategies for acquiring more and more of a self-image may be to share content, follow people of our interest, comment posts.

2. INTEREST: after attracting attention, the interest consolidation phase begins. That is to say, if a user spends a long time in our profile, on our website or if a user leaves us a comment, this can be considered a “quality visit”. But in order to arouse real interest it’s necessary to listen and participate actively in social networks, to be proactive. In addition, it’s extremely important to regularly provide quality content on the networks about the topic with which we want to position ourselves, and have a solid profile, which reflects our personality. As Mark Zuckerberg has dared to say on a number of occasions: the personal brand is to show how authentic you are, including your foolishness.

3. DESIRE: this aspect can be seen from various points of view. On the one hand, it refers specifically to the interest that users show when they want to establish a relationship or a contact with us. On the other hand, it has to do directly with the desire to make ourselves known and to consolidate our own identity on the internet. Having reached this point, the most appropriate techniques are communication formats that establish a more direct and personalized relationship with users, such as the use of videos, webinars and webcasts. The interaction made possible by these formats brings the next level of action much closer.

4. ACTION: At this point, the last one, mutual contact is established in which the two parties start to communicate, that is to say, those who follow us and those who can be useful to us in our network of contacts.

Before starting a Personal Branding strategy on social networks it’s advisable to consider the type of results you will get on the Internet when entering your data. Remember the golden rule: don’t say anything in the virtual world that you wouldn’t link to your photo or your personal signature.