Harvard Business Publishing: the Return of Personal Branding

I’m not a regular reader of the Harvard Business Review and its siblings, though I suppose I ought to be because I enjoy them when I do. So I just recently ran across Gill Corkindale’s two–part Letter from London post on personal branding. Corkindale feels, as I do, that visibility and influence are two critical aspects of managing your personal brand. Among her 11 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand:

• Make yourself visible. Build your profile internally and externally. Ways to do this include networking, signing up for high-profile projects, showcasing your skills in presentations or workshops, writing for internal or external publications, volunteering for committees or panel discussions at a conference.
• Build and manage your marketing network. Your friends, colleagues, clients, and customers are an important marketing vehicle for your brand. What is said about you will determine the value of your brand.
• Learn to influence. Use your personal power, your role and your network. But use them sensitively and intelligently, or else you will not be regarded as a credible or trustworthy leader.

I’m not surprised to see how important networking figures in her list, as you use your interactions with your colleagues clients, and friends both as a channel to “market yourself” and as an invaluable source of feedback and perspective. Note also that volunteering, sharing your expertise, and helping others also figure prominently in all aspects of building a personal brand. As I said in an earlier post, one of the amazing things about expertise is that the more you share it the more of an expert you become.

Some of the comments to Gill Corkindale’s posts are well worth reading. Bruce Temkin of Customer Experience Matters points out that:

In the “old days,” only a handful of people were known outside of their immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. So there was no reason to worry about your “brand” when just about everyone who might care about it knew who you were already. But along came the ability to search the Internet — for anybody. Who hasn’t put their own name into Google to see what shows up? Now there are vast numbers of people who might find out something about you. And since you can’t actually meet all of those people, you need to think about what they see and read about you. You need to think about your brand.

It is true that everything global is now local, as it’s just as easy (or difficult) to chat with someone on the other side of the world as it is with someone across town, and search puts everything (that’s online) at your fingertips.  Temkin, of course, is talking about the sort of visibility you have when someone already knows your name.  I think it’s equally important to work on getting found and being visible when someone doesn’t know it’s you they’re looking for!