What’s the buzz about your personal brand? When there’s a lull in conversation, do people fill it by talking about the wonders of your product, or do you feel like a kid with a lemonade stand on a busy corner, watching the cars speed by? During powerbroker conversations, does your name come up as a super-achiever, or are you the wallflower at the hottest cocktail party in town?
The effort you have put into creating career intensity is wasted if people don’t notice the career you have built. Whether you’re an Entrepreneur or an Intrepreneur, you need to create advocates – people who tell others about the positive aspects of your products and services and who encourage others to give you a try, or to use you again.
When you create awareness – through word of mouth – of the value you provide, you’re positioning your personal brand. This positive word of mouth becomes buzz, which you can then convert into advancement opportunities.
You don’t have millions of dollars to spend creating recognition for your personal brand and establishing the credibility and authority you need to compete with the dominant players in your market. Even if you did have the resources to deploy in expensive and time-consuming brand distribution channels, the best outcome you could generate would be to have large groups of your customers talk about you and the products and services you provide. This word of mouth would promote your brand and increase its recognition. This grassroots movement would be more effective than buying ad time during the Super Bowl.
Your own experience proves the point. Let’s say that you’re in the market for a new car, and you watch a commercial that airs during the Super Bowl. The commercial may catch your attention, and may even entertain you. Beyond that, it only demonstrates that the company has the financial resources to advertise in an expensive venue. You would need to gather additional information before purchasing the car. Instead, imagine that your friend brings up the reliability of her new car during a casual conversation. Most likely, you pay close attention and use what she says to inform your decision. More often than not, the opinions of your friends and family are more valuable to you than any information conveyed through an advertisement. More products are sold over the dinner table or on the golf course than are ever sold through ads in the New York Times and on television.
Surely, large companies must have an advantage over the sole proprietor when it comes to creating advocates, since they can deploy the significant resources at their disposal to effectively and quickly spread the word about their product. This is absolutely not the case. While the resources of a large corporation may allow it to increase its brand recognition, they do nothing to help the company stimulate additional positive word of mouth. In fact, most major corporations do not know how to harness the awesome power of consumer advocacy.
Likewise, the Intrepreneur can increase his personal brand recognition within his company, and generate and leverage positive word of mouth to help influence the perception people have of him. In fact, the people who are the most respected in many companies are often those who have the best reputations. This perception is created almost exclusively through word of mouth within their firms. In many professional service firms (law firms, accounting firms, and consultancies) performance criteria is only a partial determinant of career advancement. In those cases, partners or senior level managers are elected to their positions. If you are employed in one of these organizations, word of mouth has a huge impact on your future.
Once you have a message that is compelling, you need to find a way to get people to spread that message. Many people subscribe to the philosophy that providing a good product is enough to get people to talk about it. This simply is not true. In the case of your personal brand, simply doing a good job will not get you noticed. Perfect performance is not good enough to make your career aspirations a reality. You must activate the social networks and the expert networks that can generate buzz and help spread your message.
There is a systematized way to activate these networks and utilize them to serve your needs. In essence, you need to understand how the networks function – who talks, why they talk and how you can plug into this powerful force.
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