What I understood about Personal Branding
The 4 steps I made to start working on my Personal Branding
Few months ago I started a course in Digital Communication. Every year the professor assigns a Project Work in small groups. As we were in the middle of a pandemic and working in groups were a bit more difficult than usual, the project this year was about Personal Branding.
I knew very little about the topic so I did what every person would do in this situation: I google it.
Apparently ‘Personal Branding’ is the topic of the moment. If you google it, you will find tons of articles, blogs and websites with useful advices. I was scared and tempted to shut down my laptop but I am a curious person and I wanted to understand so I started reading.
I spent a couple of weeks trying to find out what is this ‘Personal Branding’ everyone is talking about. At this point I have started having an idea so I felt ready to work on my project following the 4 steps we had been assigned with:
1- Fill in a Personal Canvas
A Personal Canvas is visual framework that helps you to reflect about yourself.
On the Internet you can find a lot of different types for different purposes but the ultimate aim is always to write down on a paper your values, your strengths and how to let others know them.
Writing these things down seems easy, but is not. Everyone has values. Everyone knows his/her strengths and weaknesses. But putting this into words is different.
I confess: I spent hours on the Internet looking for ready made Canvas to copy. After wasting a day or two I gave up and started to ask my closest friends to help me, but still this didn’t work very well so I was forced to do it by myself. I have to say, after a while I liked it.
2- Write a presentation using storytelling
After a deep reflexion about who I am and what I want, the second step was trying to writing a brief presentation as a story.
The idea was to write few lines we could use on our LinkedIn presentation. Not a summary of the résumé, a real story. That was hard too.
Again, at first, I tried to cheat looking for stories to copy on the Internet. But it didn’t work so I had again to think for real about my story.
After a while something came out and, I have to say, I was pretty satisfied. At the beginning I wrote something too personal but, at the end, I found a good balancing and I managed to describe myself as I think I am and I as would like people would see me.
3- Analyse your Social Networks
On the Internet there are some platforms to help you understand if your social reputation is good, neutral or bad.
I found much more useful to look my social networks ‘naked eye’. I checked my posts from the last year (we were supposed to check last 6 months but I do not post a lot).
I realised that I had never posted something to be ashamed of but also nothing to be proud of.
I had pictures of my holidays, friends, still life… so I started to think. The Internet, of course, will not need my deepest thoughts but, for sure, it doesn’t need my holidays pics either. I knew I could have done better.
4- Think about your possible content
At this point something it was clear: I could no more try to cheat copying randomly on the Internet. I went out (on the balcony, we were still in quarantine), sitting and thinking.
I do not believe to be particularly smart and interesting but I have read something, I studied, I had experiences and maybe I have something to say.
Writing my thoughts and share them with the world maybe can help someone else, or probably not. Maybe my writing will not help my reputation either but putting my ideas into words for sure helps me to understand better what I want. This is a good result anyhow.
So I have been thinking to open blog, I started to write something and translated some of the texts (sorry about my English) and finally I posted my first article on Medium (again, sorry about that).
At the end of this journey I get my own idea about what Personal Branding is and what is it for, here some random thoughts:
- Personal Branding is not for selling yourself as a product but to help others to understand who you are, what you like, what can you offer and why
- You do not have to show always your best side, you are a real person with limits. Show them is not a bad thing
- Using Facebook, LinkedIn etc. just to show off how good you are at composing astonishing dishes or where you went on holidays is a waste of potential
- Posting interesting content is hard, you have to think a lot (YOU have to think)
- You have to reflect about what you are, what you have done, what you would like to do. Not easy
- If you do not want to use Personal Branding on your social profiles you can use it just to reflect about yourself
- If you do not want to reflect about yourself, that is ok too