The following is a guest article from friend and fellow blogger, Jake LaCaze. Jake writes about social media, communication, marketing, and human behavior – a little something for everyone! Check him out at JakeLaCaze.com.
Personal branding seems to be all the rave on the World Wide Web at the moment. People everywhere are spending a portion of their lives to spread the message all over Twitter and Facebook. These same people are dedicating blogs, writing books, and giving seminars about the concept. People are making a career out of spreading the gospel of this new buzz word. But that’s just it, that’s the thing — personal branding, at its root, is nothing new.
The foundation of personal branding has been around for the entirety of man’s existence. You may think that you heard of personal branding only a while ago, but chances are you heard it under a different title — protecting your reputation. To an individual, reputation is very important. Sometimes it’s all that a person has. It may take years to build a certain reputation. However, that’s only the beginning of the work. Then the individual has to protect his reputation and keep all his years of hard work from being tainted.
A person’s reputation is basically how he or she is perceived by others. Think of titles such as hard worker and good guy or gal. Once you’ve got people drinking the Kool-Aid, you want to keep them thirsty for more. But merely protecting your reputation isn’t enough. The qualities that come with a reputation — hard worker, good guy or gal — those are qualities that everyone is portraying nowadays. Promoting yourself through reputation alone is a cookie-cutter way of progressing your career. It’s no longer enough.
Personal branding is very much like building and protecting your reputation. In both instances, you’re developing and nurturing a certain image of yourself that you want others to see. Both strategies require you to conduct yourself in manners that make you desired and sought-after.
But there’s one big difference between personal branding and reputation management. And here’s why I think personal branding is incredibly relevant: personal branding requires you to take a more active approach.
With personal branding, you are not only defending your image. You are not sitting back, hoping that nothing happens that destroys your image before your very eyes. With a personal branding mentality, everything you do is in an attempt to create an image. You are trying to create an image that says that you are indispensable. To steal from Seth Godin, you become a linchpin through branding, not through defending your reputation.
Have you heard the phrase “the best defense is a good offense”? That is certainly true in today’s evolving labor market. When you market yourself as a hard worker, or Mr. Punctual, or Mr. Reliable — you’re saying the same things that everyone else is saying. You have the same reputation as the guy next to you.
But the person who comes in with a more active mindset and brands himself as an expert in his field — he’s the one everyone wants. This is the guy (or gal) that we all need to be. No one else is going to take charge of our careers and show us the way to prosperity. We have to grab our careers and our futures by the reins. We have to be active and take a few chances. It is our responsibility to find the unmet needs of employers (and consumers) and to meet those needs. That’s something you don’t do when you’re defending your reputation.
Things change, things evolve. Just as the labor market has evolved, so have the effective strategies for achieving prosperity and fulfillment. And sometimes a simple name change improves everything.
To prove the point, let’s play a bit of word association. Which of the following items do you respond more positively to:
- Secretary or executive assistant?
- Janitor or custodian?
- Cheap or frugal?
- Protecting your reputation or personal branding?
There are countless other things that we identify with multiple titles. But in our minds, they’re not exactly the same. There’s always a subtle difference between the two titles that makes one more pleasant and favorable. Yes, you can refer to personal branding as merely protecting your reputation. But I don’t really care what you call it as long as you take an active interest in yourself and your future.
Jake LaCaze is a social media and personal branding enthusiast. You can find him at jakelacaze.com or connect with him on Twitter: @jakelacaze.
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