Introduction

 

Personal Branding Is Dead

That headline might seem heretical—not to mention self-defeating—coming from me, a pioneer in the field of personal branding.

But it’s true.

At least, it’s true that the concept of personal branding as we once defined it has no more life in it. It’s no longer relevant. It’s nothing more than a relic.

RIP old personal branding.

We didn’t know it then, but analog personal branding was a mere prototype for the glorious, global, digital branding machine that today’s workforce is learning to operate.

But before we lay to rest the personal branding of yesterday, let’s take a trip down memory lane (at warp speed).

The idea of personal branding was not an instant hit. Take it from me. I was there at the beginning. Personal branding simmered for many years and was predicted to be little more than a passing fad. When Tom Peters coined the term back in 1997, few people knew what it meant, and even fewer were interested in building their brand.

The acceptance of personal branding was slow because the circumstances that require it hadn’t fully formed. Just eight years after Tom Peters’s prophetic article, “The Brand Called You,” was published, the magazine that featured it on its cover—Fast Company—decided that they had made a mistake. They declared personal branding dead before any life was ever breathed into it (Lidsky 2005). And it’s true, in 2005 professionals weren’t feeling stressed about their long-term career prospects and most people still worked alongside their colleagues in corporate towers or suburban office parks. The Internet was in its infancy. And the product that changed how we communicate, the iPhone, didn’t make its debut until 2007. It wasn’t until 2014 that the Internet was accessible in 80 percent of U.S. homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But rapid changes in the global marketplace, combined with multiple, serious downturns in the economy, led career-minded professionals to start taking notice of the potential for personal branding to serve as a career management strategy. From there, even if they didn’t know exactly what it is, executives realized that having a brand is an essential career asset that can help them reach their goals. And companies got in on the act, too. Most major corporations have adopted personal branding programs into their talent development initiatives. My company alone supports 20 percent of the Fortune 100 and dozens of global brands, associations, and institutions.

Ironically, now that personal branding has made it to the big league, there’s talk that the personal branding revolution is over. I hear about it all the time—from the press and career coaches to HR executives. It’s true that pseudo-branding has lost its cachet, but the new era of digital personal branding is not only thriving but vital to success.

Let me set the record straight by describing three reasons why naysayers have muddled the truth about the personal branding revolution, which I can assure you is alive and well.

1. Message overload. You’re inundated with messages all day long: ads, emails, app alerts, texts, tweets. It’s easy to think that personal branding is next to impossible now that the roar of the crowd is almost deafening. But silence is not the answer. Quite the opposite. Today’s tools for digital personal branding provide clever ways to differentiate yourself, presenting your valuable message to the right people at the right time. The same tools that caused Information Age overload can help you rise above the roar and get noticed when you use them effectively.

2. Misunderstanding. Many people confound personal branding with self-promotion, bragging, or manufactured pristine personas created by a self-centered generation. The term personal branding has become hijacked by those who associate it with mindless, endless online chatter and the grandiose desire to be visible, known, and popular. Equating personal branding with social media excess has distorted the true value of personal branding. Personal branding is not a TMZ story about the Kardashians. And it’s certainly not about visibility for the sake of being visible. In fact, personal branding is not about you. It’s about how you deliver value to others.

3. Myopia. Ironically, the third reason some people think personal branding is dead is related to the rise of virtual employees. Companies, once reluctant to let their people work from home for fear that they would goof off, are now becoming proponents of remote work. They are encouraging their employees to keep away from the office; in a 2015 Gallup study, the number of American workers who have telecommuted climbed to 37 percent. The cost savings to companies are just too big to ignore. But as work becomes more virtual, employees often have the erroneous belief that they’re free from having to brand themselves because their work will speak for itself. Without the distraction of face-to-face chats at the coffee station, the quality of the work takes center stage, right? Nothing could be further from the truth. We all know the old adage: out of sight, out of mind. Virtual employees have to work harder to be relevant and remain top-of-mind. They must use new ways to visibly demonstrate their value. Being virtual can mean being invisible, and digital personal branding is the solution.

Personal branding has taken on a completely new life since the days when it was only being used by senior execs in large corporations. Today, college students are using it to stand out so they can land internships. Some universities have added branding courses to their curriculum. Even high school students are perfecting their LinkedIn profiles to help them secure a spot in the college of their choice.

In my own business, I can see how it has become a thread seamlessly woven into the fabric of career management. In 2018, my company signed on eight new corporate clients for personal branding programs (two of them rank in the top 10 places to work). My company’s personal branding certification programs (now delivered by Career Thought Leaders) had near-record attendance, and the number of Google alerts I received on the term personal branding increased 30 percent over the past year.

Personal Branding Is Dead. Long Live Personal Branding.

Let’s focus on where personal branding is today, where it’s headed, and what you need to be thinking about so you can remain relevant. Let’s be clear: Your personal brand is your most valuable career asset when you know how to uncover, express, and nurture it.

Personal Branding Reboot: Nine Key Trends

There are nine business and career trends that are influencing how you need to think about—and strategically manage—your brand. Understanding these trends is critical to your ability to amp up your success and happiness at work.

1. Nexting

Tenure is down.

The time we spend in companies is waning. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker has held 10 different jobs. Today’s youngest workers are more likely to have 15 or more jobs in their lifetimes. That’s at least 50 percent more jobs. According to a study by Nintex, 53 percent of employees don’t expect to stay at their companies beyond five years. And Deloitte’s 2018 Millennial Survey revealed that Gen Zers expect to stay with their current employer for fewer than two years (Previte 2019). At the same time, the life expectancy of companies is shrinking. The security you feel “working for the man” is probably false security. The new career mantra is “What’s next?”

Although successful branding is based in authenticity, an element of aspiration is essential to career success. You need to plan for (and be prepared for) what’s next. In the book Switchers: How Smart Professionals Change Careers and Seize Success, Dawn Graham points out the importance of ensuring your brand is aligned with the growing professional network you seek to influence.

“Today’s job market is shifting so quickly that career changes, hybrid roles, and budding industries are becoming the new normal,” she told me by email, “so it’s important that everyone understand how to rebrand for a career transition. Professionals often have a wealth of transferable skills and experiences that make them both qualified, as well as unique, for open positions, but my mantra is ‘match first, stand out second.’ Too often, job seekers fail to brand to their target audience, relaying impressive achievements that unfortunately aren’t relevant to the role. Those achievements will serve you well when you bring them up at the right time—for example, to demonstrate a competitive advantage over the other finalists when you’re on the verge of an offer.”

What’s more, retirement has been completely redefined. We’re living longer—giving us an opportunity to write a complete chapter 2 of our careers (or chapter 16 if we think there will be 15 distinct roles in our “official” career). The idea of retirement has all but disappeared. Navigating this major career milestone requires preparation—a longer-term mindset for your career planning.

2. Flextrapreneurship

Rigidity is gone when it comes to the entrepreneurial–intrapreneurial divide. There is an increasing fluidity between working for a company and working for your company. Countless online communities are being built to support this paradigm. Remote.com, for example, with more than 2 million members, brings together people who are working remotely for a company with entrepreneurs and solopreneuers.

Moreover, companies are seeking the entrepreneurial mindset when hiring talent. In her SlideShare “Five Ways to Get Your Team Thinking Like Entrepreneurs,” Sophia Ellis, head of content at the productivity app Hibox, writes, “The companies with the most entrepreneurial-thinking team members are going to be the ones that surpass all others despite how big they are, where they started, and how they started to provide just that. An entrepreneurial mindset is something that must be both hired in and fostered in companies of any size to guarantee success in the new business landscape.”

3. Digital First

You may not need to google yourself every day, but you do need to know what’s out there and proactively manage how you show up online. Like it or not, your Google results are quickly becoming your first impression. When people want to learn about you, they’ll open up a browser, enter your name, and see what comes up. I call it he-surfing or she-surfing, and it’s a phenomenon that’s here to stay. In his eye-opening book, Ctrl Alt Delete, digital media expert Mitch Joel speaks of a digital-first posture. He acknowledges that the web is often the first place we go when we want to learn about something—or someone. The implications of this phenomenon are huge when it comes to career success. Eighty percent of employers admit to googling potential employees before they hire them.

We live in a relationship economy, where influencing others is essential. If your initial impression is anemic or inauthentic, you’re squandering opportunities and will be left behind. We’ll talk more about the connection between virtual branding, your career success, and the three cognitive biases that come into play in chapter 4.

4. Brandscaping

It’s a noisy world. To be heard in this world requires steadfast clarity and focus. You’ll get lost in the clamor if your message isn’t clear, consistent, and constant (the three Cs of strong brands, which we’ll talk about later in the book). Brandscaping is all about trimming the extraneous stuff that distracts, detracts, or disorients so your image comes across pristine and potent.

You need to build your brand around something—not a hundred things. That’s way too complicated for people to figure out. It’s cacophonous. But when you are singing the same note all the time, you can be recognized and remembered. Just as Volvo is known for safety and Apple is synonymous with innovation, you must distill your brand into that nugget of value that you want people to hear from you, repeated often, like a refrain. In our overstimulated 24/7 world of nonstop communications, people just don’t have the time or inclination to try to figure you out. Unless you’re working for a startup or you’re a one-person show, being a jack-of-all-trades will work against you. Focus needs to be your mantra.

5. Treadmill Learning

You can’t stand still on a treadmill that’s in motion. If you don’t keep moving forward, you’ll fall off the back and be left behind. The same is true of learning in the new world of work. If you aren’t actively learning every day, you’ll quickly lose your relevance and gain the reputation of being a reluctant, reticent relic. In addition, your company is no longer responsible for telling you what to learn or how to grow professionally. But compared to Peter Drucker’s era, we have learned so much about how to learn. It’s never been so easy to expand your horizons using methods that suit your budget, your learning style, and your calendar.

Most of the responsibility—and opportunity—for learning has been switched to you. And that’s great news! According to Kelly Palmer in her book, The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed, “The one-size-fits-all mentality of corporate education is no longer relevant. Learning needs to be customized for each individual based on their skill and knowledge gaps, personal and professional goals, and specific interests.” That puts the onus on you to determine what to learn and how to obtain your learning. Palmer adds, “One of the main goals of personalized learning is ultimately to combine the best of what the ecosystem has to offer. It’s not an either/or proposition, but rather aims to unite the best features of learner motivation, technology, and online learning supported by teacher and peer expertise.”

With that in mind, I’ve created this book to give you personalized learning opportunities at every turn. (Yes, reading this book counts as a giant leap in your learning.)

6. Digital Advocacy

We’re witnessing one of the greatest contradictions in business history. On one hand, the 30-year, lifelong career with the same company is gone, and you’re expected to operate as more of a free agent even when you’re “working for the man.” Yet company loyalty is highly valued. How can that be? The answer is that “company loyalty” has taken a new form.

In the past, your career success was related to focusing on your role, function, and department. Today, success requires that you be a company brand ambassador and megaphone, even if you’re not going to stay with that company for more than a few years. Company communications used to be a solo act. The CEO, via the communications department, would decide what to say, whom the audience would be, and which medium would be used. Today, corporate messaging comes from a chorus. And nowhere is this more important than online.

Companies need this chorus of messaging because stakeholders crave transparency. It’s the collective voice that helps support the corporate mission, and your voice must be a part of that. This not only benefits the company, it also benefits you and your free-agent mindset. When you do commit to interacting with company-produced social content, you move yourself outside the normal hierarchy, learn what’s going on in other areas of the company, and expand your visibility with your own online community. Mark Burgess, president of Blue Focus Marketing and co-author of The Social Employee, puts it this way: “We live in an era of fake news and a decline in trust that extends to our institutions, politicians, and brands. In this new atmosphere, brands that are seen as self-serving and focused on profits at the expense of people and/or the environment are likely to fail. The new competitive advantage is trust, and engaged, empowered social employees are the fuel that powers purpose-driven brands.”

7. Distance Branding

Proximity is down. More and more, people are working some or all of the time remotely. “Work Anywhere Anytime” is the new career chant. Companies are taking advantage of the communications tools that allow for virtual employees to engage and interact. Some companies track badge swipes at their offices, and if you don’t make the threshold of the minimum number of office visits each month, you no longer have the right to an office—or even a hot desk. Organizations know that when people work from home, they save the company expensive real-estate costs. They also understand that employees are demanding flexibility when it comes to work.

While this new “work anywhere” model is making companies more financially competitive and more attractive to the latest generation of workers, it comes with new challenges: Employees feel less connected to what’s going on. A 2018 report from WorkplaceTrends.com finds that for employees who depend on email to communicate with teammates, more than 40 percent said they feel lonely always or very often, are not engaged, and have a high need for social connection. The study also found that a third of employees globally work remotely always or very often, and two-thirds of them aren’t engaged. Only 5 percent of remote workers always or very often see themselves working at their company for their entire career, compared with 28 percent who never work remotely.

What does this mean for you? The hurdles for personal branding can be high. You’ll need to become more deliberate and focused on branding, which will require more effort to create familiarity, recognition, and connection with colleagues. You can’t achieve your goals if you don’t build relationships and influence decision makers. These needs are only going to become more pressing. Remote work is here to stay, and it’s poised to rocket even higher. Nick Marcario, co-founder and CEO of Remote.com, says, “It’s no secret work is changing as the workforce mobilizes. There is an abundance of research and statistics that illustrate how prominent the shift is and how much it’s expected to accelerate in the future.”

8. Digital Dexterity

The one skill that’s required across industries, functions, and levels is digital dexterity. Companies know that to maintain a competitive advantage, they need a workforce that is digitally enabled and enabling, because the most visible innovations emerge from technology—and from employees who know how to translate high tech into a high-impact experience for customers.

The world’s largest professional services firm, PwC, with more than a quarter million employees and partners, even created a new executive role—chief digital officer—to ensure all employees have the digital skills necessary to innovate internally and impress their clients externally. They tapped a senior partner, Joe Atkinson, to lead the initiative. He told me: “My role is to be ‘a constructive disrupter.’ My mission is to enhance digital fitness throughout the organization and put in place the learning and technology necessary to get the entire organization comfortable with the language and concepts that are driving digital innovation.”

That means whether you’re working in marketing, accounts payable, or legal, you need to bulk up your digital muscle, knowing which developments—from artificial intelligence and robotics to data analytics and new social media platforms—can become valuable assets for your team.

9. YOUcasting

I used to say that video is the future of personal branding. Well, the future has arrived! Video allows you to deliver a complete communication and connect more deeply and emotionally with those you seek to influence. Video is becoming a significant communications tool and will ultimately replace email and texting as a more powerful and valuable medium. YouTube is already the second-largest search engine after Google, according to Search Engine Journal (2018).

According to experiments done by psychologist Albert Mehrabian, words account for only 7 percent of whether a communicator is likable, and the rest is determined by tone of voice, intonation, and body language. See why video is such a powerful tool for personal branding? Virtually all the trends we have discussed so far are creating the opportunity for video to take over as our primary communications vehicle. Video skills are just as essential as, if not more than, writing or public speaking. Video conferences will replace teleconferences and vmail will become the new email. Professionals who get comfortable with this medium will remain relevant and compelling. Those who stick with the 26 letters of the alphabet will be left behind.

Live Between the Hyphens

You might feel a little daunted right now. How can you become a remote-but-visible, high-tech, high-touch, remote-yet-embedded, independent-but-loyal, video-producing, content-generating brand ambassador for yourself? The key word is you. Digital or not, successful branding is always rooted in authenticity, and effective messaging is rooted in simplicity. Even if you have never considered that you have a brand, your current LinkedIn profile is nearly blank, or you have relied on your organization to manage your career, I’ll share with you everything you need to know and do so you can take advantage of this new digital branding phenomenon. My approach will help you find your true self between those hyphens, unearthing the traits that help you thrive and then showcasing them using methods that are efficient and effective. What does it take to tap the power of personal branding in the digital age? Nothing less than a total mindset reset.

About This Book

In Digital You, I’ll teach you how to master the new rules and tools for staying relevant, visible, and valuable in a world of work that is continually being reinvented. It’s time to stop worrying about career extinction and start crafting a brand of distinction. This is true regardless of who you are or where you are in your career. Whether you’re new to the work world, mid-career, or greatly experienced; whether you’re in career transition, just hired, a consultant looking to branch out, an entrepreneur trying to break in, or any combination thereof, this book is for you.

A few years ago, I was feeling untethered (read: lonely) and wanted to connect to a community—my community. That’s the challenge with being a public speaker and the entrepreneur of a completely virtual organization. Since most of my work is speaking, I decided to go to the annual National Speakers Association event in Philly (just a quick train ride from NYC) to connect with other speakers in person. My expectations were high. I thought I was going to fit right in with a community of like-minded professional speakers, but in fact it was quite the opposite. I found that the speakers were impressive, inspiring, and engaging, but what the conference lacked for me was authenticity, application, and action.

I realized that my brand differentiation as a speaker is that I don’t try to comply with the “standard rules of public speaking.” I don’t rehearse my presentations a thousand times until every movement, gesture, and inflection is memorized. I’m not an actor. I’ve never delivered the same keynote the same way twice. And the inspirational part of public speaking is just that for me—part of the experience. The other part—and my favorite part—is in the action. I don’t just want to fuel people up and have the fuel leak out of the tank over time. I want to compel them to combust that fuel—taking action so they can turn that fuel into focus, and then turn focus into future success.

I take the same approach in my role of author. I don’t want you to just learn some interesting things about digital branding. I did not set out to write a book about digital branding theory. I want you to apply what you learn, taking action and moving your career forward while amping up the joy factor at work.

To that end, this book is designed to be read—and acted upon—serially. It follows a logical order that will help you get to the top of your career the way you would ascend a staircase—one step at a time. Even if you feel you have a good understanding of your brand, don’t skip part 1. It will help you clarify and refine your thinking before you move into digital branding—making your social branding actions that much more potent. I’ve divided the book into four parts, reflecting the personal digital journey I’m asking you to take—and I’ll be along every step of the way.

In Part 1: Real You, I introduce personal branding and invite you to discover where your unique self fits. I help you to define yourself and uncover your brand in chapter 1, and better understand the perceptions others have of you and why those are important in chapter 2, so that you’re ready to define the authentic story you want to tell (chapter 3).

In Part 2: Virtual You, I invite you to think about your digital impression. In chapter 4, I help you to understand how the digital-first phenomenon can work for you. In chapter 5, I share how to translate the real you for a digital audience, and in chapter 6, I show how you can expand that digital brand you’ve created.

In Part 3: Visual You, I show you how you to build on and develop your brand to become a multimedia standout. In chapter 7, I help you see the power of pictures, both still and moving, to carry your digital message. Then, you’ll learn how to build your personal brand identity system in chapter 8. In chapter 9, I’ll share my favorite video tips to engage and connect, and explain why I’m video’s biggest fan and why you should be too.

In Part 4: Social You, I ask you to consider the heights you can reach through digital brand development, your network, and thought leadership. In chapter 10, I help you assess your current networks, both online and off, to build your social network and nurture relationships. In chapter 11, you’ll learn how to update, curate, and create content related to your expertise to express your thought leadership and promote others. Finally, in chapter 12, I show you how you can truly enlarge your role to your wider community, becoming a digital advocate.

To fulfill my role of CEO (chief encouragement officer) and action-inspiring branding consultant, I have filled the book with practical opportunities to absorb and apply the content:

MINDSET RESET

PONDER THIS

BRAND HACK

Do This, Not That

Remote Control

Fun Fact

Brandi Brainstorms

So follow along, taking action as you navigate the chapters, and as my CareerBlast.TV co-founder, Ora Shtull, and I always say, have a blast!