Can You Really "Build" A Personal Brand?

This is the 26 edition of this co-authored post that Phil Friedman and I started way back in the day over in the Lumpy Kingdom Of The Mighty Microsoft Hamsters, and have carried over here to beBee. As writers we get a lot of joy and personal gratification from these discussions, and judging from the numbers we have been able to pull (which Phil will argue about till the cows come home), so do a great many others. So thanks for reading, and if any of this rings a bell with you let us know with a like, comment or share (preferably all three)

PHIL: I keep reading on social media about the need to build or create a personal brand and how to do it. Indeed, this particular topic often occupies center-stage in the publishing on beBee and LinkedIn.
However, in my admitted naivete, I’ve always thought of branding ― whether of a product, a company, or an individual ― as something which takes place over time and which arises, is nurtured, and grows organically.
It seems to me that an essential ingredient of a successful and durable brand is authenticity. In other words, when it comes to branding, you can’t fake it or you’ll never make it.
And I’m thinking that perhaps we all need to retrench when it comes to understanding the relationship between branding in a real-world sense and what transpires on social media. For on social media, it’s all too easy to publish some pile of bull chips and confuse the result with reality, while whatever marketing instinct I have tells me a brand cannot sustain itself, let alone flourish, without being at least mostly true.
Which means to me that, while you can affect the direction of a brand’s development and growth, and while you can carefully nurture the narrative that brings the brand to the market, branding is more like riding a horse ― a living creature with a mind of its own ― than driving a 4x4 off-road trail vehicle that simply goes where you tell it to go.
That said, when it comes to branding, I admit to being a waif compared to your position as a decathlon gold-medalist. And so I’m looking to you, Pops, to share your thoughts, experience, and wisdom on how a brand comes into existence and is sustained over time.

JIM: First of all, I humbly accept all praise. You have to take it whenever you get it.
Secondly, this whole notion of personal branding is something that has been on my mind as well, since just a few days ago I published one of my beBee promotional posts about what I believe you need to do when it comes to building a personal brand.
https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/the-elements-of-the-personal-brand-why-bebee-is-a-great-place-to-build-yours
And by the way, I don’t really believe that branding for companies is really any different than personal branding for individuals, in that they both need to follow the same strategic path to get to where they want to go, which is into the hearts and minds of whomever is at the other end of their messages.
But it’s one thing to define the steps necessary to build something and quite another to define what the hell that thing is in the first place.
To me, as an SME marketer and independent writer (to use your terminology), a personal brand is simply one very important thing. And that thing is your voice.
Your voice is dimensionalized in many ways. The most important being the tone and manner in which that voice makes itself heard. Embodied in that ‘tone and manner’ are all the characteristics that will help get your voice listened to, respected and yes even sometimes challenged.
These characteristics include your business and human intelligence, because you need to know what you’re taklking about: your honesty which means that you’re not trying to bullshit anyone: your clarity, which means you are trying to make everything understandable: and your personality, which is the thing that differentiates you from the pack.
This all adds up to what a lot of people call authenticity. I call it brand character. Or personal brand persona, if you want to use a more accurate term.
You and I and a few other people we know and love are professional communicators, so these elements, which have been learned long ago, appear in our communication almost naturally, i.e. we have found our voices.
And this is where the 80/20 Differential comes into play, because, for one reason or another the majority of people out there working to build their personal brand, are either not talented enough as writers (or not writers at all), or simply have not figured how to incorporate it into their brand building processes.
|n the 20% are the professionals and those I call the naturals. People like Kevin Paschuk, Gert Scholtz, Chas Wyatt, Donna-Luisa Eversley, and Mamen Delgado, to name but a few.
The whole idea of getting to understand your personal brand is not an easy one for a lot of people to get their heads around. Mainly because there’s a lot of bad advice out there being proffered by digital marketers, life coaches, personal branding specialists and con artists. The 4 Horsemen of the Social Media Apocalypse.
But this is no different from anything. 80% Bullshit (and growing) 20% Truth, reality and solid advice, (and shrinking).
The sad fact is that anyone who is really intent on building a strong personal brand has to realize they’re going to get a lot of shit on their shoes along the way. This stuff ain’t easy to make look easy.

PHIL: Well, I didn’t expect you to make it look easy. Nor did I ever think it could be easy. And by the way, if it appeared I was praising you, that must have been a typo.
That said, the qualities you cite as comprising authenticity in a brand cannot, to my mind, be manufactured. If I’m not “business and human intelligent”, I can’t just create that in myself by typing it on my LinkedIn, beBee, or Facebook profile.
I think this is especially true of persona which is, perhaps, the hardest ingredient to foster consciously, as you’ve either got it or you don’t. And it you try to fake it, you’re bound to misstep at some point.
I’m wondering if it isn’t like a Hollywood actor or actress having an identifiable persona that goes to hell the first time they appear without a script on, say, a late-night talk show.
I remember watching Michael Caine ― an actor whom I loved for many years ― on, I think, the Jay Leno show. And he was free-talking like a political Neanderthal. Ruined his films for me and taught me to turn off talk shows when anyone appeared who was on my roster of favorite actors and actresses.
When a persona is concocted and not real (natural or organic or however you might describe it), it falls apart as soon as the person affecting that persona goes off script, that is, speaks without a script crafted by others. Which is why I don’t think you can create a persona for yourself, or at least, you can’t successfully employ one.
And I haven’t been able to find any little purple persona pills, notwithstanding that some people might appear outwardly to be taking them. (Wow! That’s a mixed metaphor with an interesting image, isn’t it?)

JIM: No. No. No, but no, Phil. The way you describe a persona is as a totally manufactured thing. That’s not what I am talking about here.
Let me illustrate.
Phil Friedman, this guy I know from social media has one of the most clearly defined personas of anyone I have met yet. The reason for that is that Phil writes exactly what he feels. He doesn’t let political correctness or intellectual rectitude get in the way of making the points he wants to make. And because he is a skilled communicator and a masterful writer, he doesn’t have to worry about defending his point of view. And because he is essentially a real human being, he always listens carefully before responding and always gives people credit for the points they make. He is extremely assertive, but not because he is tripping on anyone. He just knows what he’s doing.
Now that’s a persona that you could not manufacture if you tried. And I defined that persona, not based on what you think you are, but on what I think you are.
If I thought for a minute that you were ‘creating’ a persona that was separate and distinct from your personality, my BS meter would have gone through the roof two years ago.
So I would argue that the actor analogy is incorrect. Michael Caine is not creating a persona, he is acting a character. His persona is that he is exactly as you described him. Which is a bit of a doof.
I know I’m getting a little hung up on one thing here. But it’s an important one.
There are only a handful of people I have encountered here on social media that I thought were manufacturing a persona. There was a woman on Facebook who was always talking about going on shopping expeditions to New York, when in actuality she was pretty much poor as a church mouse. Another one is someone we have both encountered here on beBee. These people, I believe were manufacturing personas for the sake of acceptance or cult building or whatever, but the simple fact is that most people saw though it and ended up backing off.
The moral here I guess if you’re not being yourself, you’re bound to slip up sooner or later and end up with egg on your face. So I agree with you there.
If you want to duke it out over my disagreements, bring it on amigo. We’ll show everybody just how civilized we can be.

PHIL: Well, to quote Jim Murray, “… humbly accept all praise. You have to take it whenever you get it.” I just hope the bill for the plug is not going to be too high.
But seriously, I think I understand what you’re saying, namely, that one’s persona is at the heart of one’s Personal Brand. And it is something that comes into being organically and cannot be manufactured.
I see the difference, then, between a persona and a brand in the general sense. And I can see how a personal brand has to encompass at least a persona, but often encompasses more, for instance, a logo or other visuals such a trademark items of apparel (like a hat).
Nevertheless, I think we agree that for a personal brand to be durable and effective, the persona it encompasses has to be believable and exude credibility. It’s not enough to say this is who I am, and you can trust this is who I am because I say this is who I am, and I know it… trust me, I do.

JIM: Alright…So where we net out here is that it is possible to build a personal brand, but like anything that gets built, it needs to have a strong foundation. The people to whom the brand is being exposed need to understand what they are seeing, so the brand needs to be clear, authentic, helpful and compelling enough to evoke whatever the desired response might be.
At this point, however, I would invoke the 80/20 rule which states that 80% or more of the denizens of social media actually have no idea what we are talking about.
There are two reasons for this. 1 They don’t really know how to think in terms of personal branding, because they just don’t have that skill set, or 2. They have been listening to some digital marketing dork who has been telling them that it’s a long slow building process and they have lost patience with it, because (see 1.)
In point of fact, I know relatively few people on beBee or LinkedIn who have developed a strong personal brand. But the ones who have like: Ian Mirlin, Kevin Pashuk, You, Don Kerr, Derek Walker, Shelley Brown, Paul Walters, John White, Renee Cormier, Graham Edwards, Donna Luisa Eversley, Milos Djukic even good old Brian McKenzie, are the people I like to read and interact with.
You know as well as I do that none of this is easy to do. But there’s a certain amount of social Darwinism involved here in that those who know how to survive and those who are almost fanatically determined to survive will survive. The rest….who knows? They come and they go.
The simple fact is that you and I are two guys who know how to survive in this jungle, have over the years outlined our methodologies in great detail. The trouble is that a lot of that insight is predicated on the fact that you are at the very least, a real writer or communicator of some kind, in order to really get the benefit out of it.
I feel bad for the people who aren’t. But my best advice to them is to stop beating a dead horse, take a step back and re-think your way forward vis a vis personal branding.

Post Script: OK, if any of this pissed you off or enlightened you in any way, we're happy. But we do need to reiterate that everything see is our honest opinion as communication professionals. We also want to underscore on important fact of life about personal branding and that is that it is a process that really does span your entire life. It needs to cared for and tweaked constantly, and the best way to deal with the responsibility of a personal brand is to accept that the management of it is not just a project but a part of your life and a professional.

If your business has reached the point where talking to an experienced  communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.
Download my free ebook Small Business Communication For The Real World here:
 https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/
All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page



All content & visual material Copyright  2017 Jim Murray & Phil Friedman

""""""""