The Elements Of The Personal Brand & Why beBee Is A Great Place To Build Yours

One of the first things I did when I got settled in St Catharines was to sign up with Meetup, which is a networking directory site, and start looking for business groups to attend.
This is one of the best ways to make connections and get to know what the market down here in the Niagara region is like.
One of the first group get-togethers I attended was run by a lady named Charlene Norman. Like many of the business people I have met, she is also a refugee from The Big Smoke, (Toronto), where she was a business development specialist.
After she got to know me a bit, and found out that I was a beBee brand ambassador, she thought it would be a good thing for me to talk to the group about my experiences as an op/ed blogger and why have chosen to make beBee the source for my posting.
Hardly anyone I have talked to, even the two young guys who talked about SEO and digital marketing on social media in my group last week, knew about beBee. So I’m taking this presentation as an opportunity to inform them.

The Personal Brand Thing

Last week I wrote a post on branding, which I consider to be a flavour of the month term that has hung around for a long time because it’s basically a bucket that can hold a lot of water.
The reason I objected to it in this post was that the term has been so overused that it’s actually starting to go out of style.
Having said that, and knowing a fair bit about beBee, I believe the concept of ‘personal’ branding is completely valid. And the reason I believe this is because the going forward strategy of beBee is all about how a strong personal brand can be one of the more important keys to attracting and developing potential business relationships.

Many of the business relationships I developed since the turn of the century have been directly related to the personal brand I developed through my long format writing and through my emailing (until the draconian Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation made the process so complex that it was hardly worth doing.
It started with my first blog, (even before they were referred to as such), which I called The Couch Potato Chronicles. This blog, and it was a blog in the truest sense of the word, was basically a review column part entertainment, part sports, part politics, part marketing.
It was directly responsible for several of the long term relationships I developed with boutique agencies, designers and marketing consultants.
https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/how-to-lose-friends-piss-off-a-lot-of-people-on-social-media

What Was I Doing Right?

You hear a lot of people complain about how social media posting is doing nothing for their business. My marketing brain tells me that for many people this is probably true and that there are a number of reasons for that to be the case.
So for those people, and anyone else who is interested, I have summarized the things I have come to believe about the development, care and feeding of the personal brand.
A Personal Brand Starts With An Identity. This is a fundamental rule that is drilled into your head when you first get into advertising. When I started the Couch Potato Chronicles back in 1998, I designed a logo for it and made sure that it was attached to every post I wrote. along with my contact info.
A Personal Brand Has A Pre-Defined Target Audience:
Like any other marketing, you need to focus your efforts on reaching the kind of people you think will be most likely to be responsive and interested.
A Personal Brand Has A Common Sense Objective
You need to think long and hard about what this is and the content you create should support that.
This doesn’t mean it’s all about your business. Because people are looking for more than that. They want to learn about how you think and what you believe, because those elements are the ones that will build trust in you. And nothing happen without that element of trust.
A Personal Brand Has A Consistent Character
If you read my stuff regularly, you probably notice that there is a consistent feel to almost everything I do. A lot of people call this 'authenticity'. But advertising people call it brand character. Tomato Tamato.
I tend to be a lot more assertive and hard core than a lot of people in social media, but this character has been shaped by the responses I get to my posts.
Sometimes I piss people off. (Of course, these are people who have stumbled into me by mistake, or trolls of one kind or another). Sometimes I make them think a little deeper about things. Sometimes I give them insights they can use. Sometimes I attack stuff that needs to be attacked. But most of the time you know it’s me. And this is another fundamental rule: consistency builds recognition which helps build your personal brand.
A Personal Brand Is A Personal Commitment
If you are lucky enough to find a digital marketer who is honest and realistic, (and I know one or two), they will tell you that the development and ongoing maintenance of your personal brand is something akin to a religion.
This has less to do with the frequency of your posting than it does with the ongoing presence you need to maintain and the willingness you have to promote your posts at enough of a frequency to actually make your efforts worthwhile.

Why beBee?

In order to achieve Point #5, you need to be posting on a number of sites. But if you have any experience with posting on LinkedIn you have no doubt come to realize that their publisher, Pulse, is almost useless.
You will be much further ahead, (and I have proven this to myself a number of times) by using beBee’s publisher for your point of origin for longer format posts, and linking to LI, FaceBook, Twitter, and Google + than you will by posting in Pulse and hoping for the best.
The other advantage of posting directly on beBee is that you can link your posts directly to your email lists and promote them that way, all from one place with just a few clicks.
When you create your post on beBee, you can have it forwarded within the site itself to three different affinity based groups or ‘hives’, so you can put your posts in front of the people who are more likely to be interested in what you have to say.
And of course, your post will appear on the home page of every one of your followers as well.

The Intangible Advantage

I have been blogging from beBee for almost a year now and have come to realize that the people who belong to this site have a higher level of interest in reading commenting and sharing good posts and generally have a very positive attitude towards the site and the people who populate it.
Being in a good space with a good vibe can, for many of us, be very stimulating. And that makes the job of maintaining your personal brand that much easier.
Yeah, I’m a beBee brand ambassador and part of my role is to help promote beBee. But you know what…my severe allergy to bullshit prevents me from writing anything that is not, at least in my personal experience, true.
But the proof, as they say is in the pudding. This whole article is my advice to you. It will cost you nothing but time you are spending anyway if you should decide to take it.
And in the now immortal words of D Trump: “What the hell have you got to lose?”

Related Posts

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/why-every-linkedin-group-owner-should-consider-carrying-their-group-over-to-bebee
https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/my-goodbye-to-publishing-on-linkedin-my-hello-to-publishing-on-bebee

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 Copyright 2017 Jim Murray

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