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Founders: Market Yourself, Not Just Your Business

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Contributed post.

Marketing yourself can be just as important as marketing your business. As the owner of your business, you are the face of your company. By making yourself a key part of your brand, you can build a human connection with your customers. After all, in most cases, consumers don’t put their trust in products–they put their trust in people.

11 techniques for personal brandingThere are many ways to market yourself. Here are 11 effective ways to use personal branding to boost your business.

Dress to impress

From the shape of your product to the look of your website, visuals are vital for making the right impression. Your personal appearance is an important part of your visual brand. One way in which you can win people over with your appearance is to dress the part.

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Author Interview: Wendy Marx, Thriving at 50+

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Ageism, like other forms of group discrimination, is despicable, ignorant, and illegal. Yet it’s commonplace among business leaders, especially in the tech sector. And it is, as Bill Maher has pointed out, “the last acceptable prejudice in America.”

Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, told the New York Times in an interview that he was “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” because, “in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated.”” Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted saying, “Young people are just smarter.”

Thriving at 50 Plus by Wendy MarxSubstitute a term like “white people” in place of Gen Y’ers or young people and just imagine what the backlash would have been. But because the bigotry was age based, it elicited barely a peep.

The average age of employees at Facebook, LinkedIn, and SpaceX is under 30. It’s under 35 at Tesla, Google, Amazon, Apple, Salesforce, Adobe, Intel, and Microsoft—among others.

Yet as Tricia Lucas, CEO of Lucas Select, has written, there are numerous benefits to hiring those over 50: they are flexible and dependable problem solvers, they make great mentors, they usually have large professional networks, and, most importantly, “they are ethical.”

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How to Showcase Your Social Media Skills and Land Your Dream Job

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Guest post.

Everyone has a different idea of their “dream job,” but regardless, getting it requires hard work. When looking to land your dream job today, you have to market yourself properly. This is not only about the relevant job skills you’l need, but also about standing out in a sea of applicants.

Social media job skills interviewWhen evaluating you as a job applicant for any role in marketing (particularly social media marketing) or public relations (PR), prospective employers will scrutinize your social media presence and activity. While this may seem scary, it also opens up a lot of possibilities.

Blurred Lines

Your social media profiles are no longer just for amusement and socializing. Taking the cue from the word, “profile,” these are indeed being looked at by employers to build a more in-depth and comprehensive view of their applicants.

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Enterprise Social Media and Personal Branding

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Personal branding is a hot topic for entrepreneurs and solo consultants, but does it matter to large enterprises? Oh yeah.

Consultants and small business owners get the concept of personal branding, because in one-person or very small companies, one person is the “corporate” brand. Having optimized profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as well as personal profile / reputation management sites like Google Profile, Plaxo, LookupPage, VisualCV, PeoplePond and BusinessCard2 is crucial to optimizing one’s business online presence.

Social media is an individual thing, even in big corporationsBut isn’t it different in large enterprises where there’s already a strong corporate brand associated with high quality, great value, outstanding service, prestige or some other positive attribute? Not at all. That brand image matters little in social media. If anything, personal branding for key public- and customer-facing individuals is even more important in big businesses than in small firms or one-person shops.

First, if you want to talk to the “CEO” of your local bakery or neighborhood bar, you can likely just walk in and often find him or her on the premises. You can’t do that with executives at GE, IBM, Ford, etc.

Second, “social” media is by definition a person-to-person (or person to many persons) activity. You can have a conversation with a person, or participate in a conversation in a group of people, but you can’t talk to a “company,” which is merely a soulless, bodiless legal entity.

Third, while you can certainly buy many types of products from companies (e.g. books from Amazon, coffee from Starbucks, electronics from Best Buy), there are many products and services that purchased from individuals, even though there may be large company behind them. If you refinance your home, you work with a mortgage banker—an individual—even though that person may work for a large bank. Insurance is typically provided by large companies, but sold by individual agents. Ditto for other financial services, legal services, cars, motorcycles, heavy machinery, exotic travel, some types of luxury goods… You purchase something supplied by a company, possibly a very large company, but you buy from an individual person.

In that sense, the individual’s personal brand becomes, to you, the corporate brand. Your experience with that individual, good or bad, influences, often strongly, your perception of the corporate brand.

So, big companies have an interest in making those individual interactions as positive as possible. It’s essential to hire good people, of course, but it goes beyond that. Often, a bad experience isn’t the result of a having a bad agent, broker, salesperson, customer service rep or consultant, but rather from a mismatch between the individual buyer and seller. The transaction is more likely to be positive if the connection is appropriate based on geography, area of expertise, hobbies or other factors, possibly even age (e.g. a couple nearing retirement may prefer not to work with a twenty-something financial planner).

How is this achieved? Through personal branding. It’s easy to investigate companies and product attributes online, without ever giving up your contact information. Why shouldn’t you to be able to “shop” for the individual you’ll eventually buy from or work with as well? You should, of course. And smart companies, big or small, who recognize that in a social media world, their people are their differentiation, will find ways to capitalize on personal branding.  Read more about this in Why Personal Branding Matters to Big Companies, my guest post on the Workface blog.

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