Comments on: Personal Branding!

By: Hai Nguyen

Hai Nguyen — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:46:30 +0000

They are difficult questions indeed. Nowadays, social media brings an equal opportunity for everybody who wish to brand themselves and/or their products online. It is a challenge for anyone to blur the line between “advertising” and “branding” or as Annette said “personal” and “professional”. I recently joined some social networks and learnt quite a lots from the members. Mostly, people don’t pay attention to advertising information but interesting notes, valuable information, or interesting debates. I also don’t believe that people will read all comments/recommends on linkedin, Retaggr profile or other online profiles which I saw some people have many. People will “know” you base on how you communicate and contribute to the community that you joined. May be it isn’t right with some other networks but that is what I’ve experienced so far. Personal branding do need a strategy. It’s not only writing an attractive profile, having nice design and we can be standout. I think it is also a long process as well. Seth Godin is a great example. His daily notes have sometime over 1000 tweet and retweet directly from his blog. Imagine how many people reading his notes each day. The key is that he doesn’t write about himself, sometime he writes a short note about his new books. I think he is very successful in branding himself and his books using social media.

By: Annette

Annette — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:00:40 +0000

well, Seth Godin is a good example and you are already aware of him.
An interesting question is to think about just how personal you are in your quest to make your brand more personal. What are the limits? How much to you blur the line between personal and professional, particularly in a digital age when so much information about us is online. Any thoughts?

By: Hai Nguyen

Hai Nguyen — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:48:03 +0000

I agreed with you Karen in the point that “human interest” stories are good way to grab readers and headlines. That can happen in media with its typical shortlife products. But not very much in a corporate brand or a product brand actually. The later cases need a strategic and long-term “brand” built with many different contents.Those different contents will make this product/company brand different from the others. The success is not at grabbing customers for the first purchase but achieving their loyalty with brand/product. With personal branding, to me, no matter what/how you sell yourself to others, it must be real who you are. If you don’t have ‘human interest’ sense, you must look for other sale-points that you really have. That’s how I understand personal branding. And that makes different between this “personal brand” and other “personal brand”, otherwise we will have all same “brand” coz everybody tries to have “popular contents”.
It’s interesting point of “human interest” you’ve mentioned. I really want to study further about this concept, any link or book you think I can explore? Thanks Karen.

By: Karen Patel

Karen Patel — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:05:27 +0000

Interesting point Hai. Personal branding is certainly popular nowadays, and during my experience on the Insight Out course (as well as during the MA) personal branding has been mentioned numerous times. As mentioned in the post you linked to, the media want to know about the personal side of things. This is something I learnt early on during my journalism degree – ‘human interest’ stories are a good way to grab readers and headlines, and the same applies to business when you are trying to grab customers, funders, investors and so on. Personally I always find companies and brands that have that ‘personal touch’ the most appealing, and this is what I am trying to do with my own business (I’ve never liked being formal anyway!)