Photo Credits: pshutterbug
Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel asked his Twitter followers for their definition of Personal Branding. Here is my take, in 140 characters or less:
The art of articulating and communicating your skills, personality and values so that others seek you to help them solve a problem.
While these are very few words, each of them is there for a reason, so let’s dissect the phrase and understand what each word means in the context of personal branding:
- Personal Branding is an art: it takes practice, creativity and patience to do it right. There is really no checklist or sure recipe for success, and building your brand is a long term, ongoing process.
- Personal Branding involves your skills, personality and values: while skills are important, it’s not only what you know that counts. After all, business requires you to interact with people, so personality is also important. However, there’s a third, crucial element: your values. Without being true to your values you will never achieve a strong personal brand. You need passion, and for that you have to do something you believe in.
- You must be able to articulate and communicate what your brand is all about: you may have a potentially strong brand, but if you’re not able to define it and share it in a simple way that resonates with your audience, your brand will never reach its true potential.
- A strong personal brand makes others seek you instead of you seeking them. A sound personal branding strategy will help you build your reputation and your network so that interesting opportunities come to you.
- For a personal branding strategy to be successful, you must be able to solve a problem. You must provide real value and exceed your customers’ expectations.
So there you have it, my take on what personal branding means in a few simple words.
What is your definition of personal branding?
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Martin Buckland // Nov 13, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I specialize in helping senior executives and those who aspire to be business leaders manage their careers!
2 Dan Schawbel // Nov 14, 2008 at 11:45 am
Mario, thanks for the shout out and for joining in on my little poll/game.
@Martin - really bad decision to promote yourself in your comment without adding value to Mario’s blog post. It makes you look really bad!
Mario, personal branding is more of a process and the personal brand is the individual who has to constantly sell itself and be judged based on what is observable.
Great job,
Dan
3 Ryan Stephens // Nov 15, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Mario,
I really like your definition. The only thing that I would potentially challenge is that a personal brand needs to be able to solve a business problem. I would argue that athletes, rockstars, and even regular everyday people can build their personal brands that do not necessarily facilitate the end-goal of solving a business problem.
There’s a homeless guy in Austin named Leslie who cross-dresses, wears thongs, rides his bike around the town and receives tons of write-in votes for Mayor every year. He has a very distinct personal brand, and while he does impact the community, I don’t know that he’s helping solve all that many business problems.
In any event, this was a solid post that demonstrated a great grasp of personal branding, and for the most part I really liked both definition itself and the breakdown.
Thanks for sharing!
4 Mario Sanchez Carrion // Nov 15, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Ryan:
Good observation. I was thinking more in the context of a solopreneur or independent professional, who are in the business of “solving a problem” for their customers.
At the same time, it is also true that from the point of view of the customer, let’s say, a dentist’s patient, a root canal is not a business problem. To make the definition all-encompassing I have removed the word “business” from my definition.
Thank you for adding value to this post with that excellent reply.
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