Personal Branding is Not a Fad, and Why You Need to Read This Book

Tom Peters first wrote about The Brand Called You in a 1997 issue of Fast Company. Slowly but surely, in the 12 years since, Personal Branding has gone mainstream. Nearly everyone in the social media/web 2.0 world is aware that what we do, both online and off, defines our personal brands. College students get it too. At a University of Wisconsin panel last week, we polled the audience and more than 75% people had heard of personal branding.

Despite this, many college students and young professionals aren't exactly sure how to effectively build a brand. Lucky for them, my buddy Dan Schawbel's new book, "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand To Achieve Career Success" will teach you exactly how to do it. Anyone who wants to give themselves the best chance to succeed in this new, hyper-connected world, needs to check it out.

If you're still not convinced, here are a couple reasons why I know that personal branding is not a fad, and why you should buy Dan's book, or at least read his blog

Everyone's an entrepreneur
The average stay at a job for Generation Y is about 18 months. Job hopping is the norm these days, and even the recession isn't going to change this fact. So, if you're changing jobs every couple of years, you need to think of yourself like an entrepreneur. Reid Hoffman, the CEO of Linkedin says, "Every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. Because it used to be that you got a job at one company and you were there 20, 30, 40, years. That's been dead for decades. That's even dying in Japan. The salary man no longer even exists in Japan."

Entrepreneurs start companies, and the smart ones spend a lot of time branding those companies and branding themselves. If every individual is an entrepreneur then it makes sense that you start managing your personal brand too.

Google is Branding You Right Now
It's true. You have a personal brand and someone can find it on Google. If it takes hours of searching to find some information about you online, then you're probably doing a poor job of creating your personal brand. If the first thing someone finds is your Facebook page with pictures of you beer bonging in college, then you're doing a poor job of managing your personal brand. Regardless, Google is branding you as a party animal, or a music lover, or a blogger or completely out of touch. First impressions are important, and increasingly first impressions are happening on Google. You may as well make a good one.

Personal branding lets you learn about you
I have to admit, when I first heard the term personal branding, I thought it was kind of lame. But as I've progressed in my career and in my life, I see the importance of defining who I am to the world and more importantly, I see the importance in defining who I am to me. Entrepreneurs deal with this all the time. I often find myself in meeting asking the question, "What is Brazen Careerist? What are our values? What's our mission?" When you figure out those questions, you can accurately define your company's brand. Well, it seems pretty important to ask the same questions of an individual. What do you stand for? What are your goals? Where do you want to end up in life?

Creating a personal brand allows you to look at where you are right now, and think about where you want to be and then you get to project that self knowledge to the world. That's pretty powerful stuff.

So, what are you waiting for? Buy the book. Build your brand.

Why You Can't Afford to Ignore Your Audience

Brazen is officially one-year-old this month. We actually launched the site on March 1, 2008, so I'm a couple of weeks late with this announcement, but better late than never.

If you were with us the first day we launched you'll remember the photo on the front page was of a woman in a tank-top shirt showing her stomach and flashing a handful of $100 bills for everyone to see.

It was obnoxious, a little risqué, and quite frankly, a poor representation of our brand. We really figured this out about a month after we launched. Ryan Paugh and I were driving down the road in Madison and we saw a billboard. As we crept closer, we couldn't believe our eyes, the woman from the homepage was on the billboard, staring us in the face, flashing $100 bills and telling us to go to Ho-Chunk casino!

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Brazen Careerist and Ho-Chunk casino should not be using the same stock photos. And in this case, Ho-Chunk got it right. We made a branding mistake. But that's cool; we've made a ton of mistakes in the past 18 months. Luckily, we've learned from every mistake we've made, and I'd like to think we're a better company, and better community because of it.

Now we're taking a step back and trying to figure out what to do next at Brazen. We have a million ideas. In fact, our tiny development team could probably spend the next two years building the ideas we've already thrown around. But we want to make sure that the next thing we do really benefits the community.

So we're asking for feedback from Brazen Careerist members, readers or potential members who are just waiting for us to do something really cool before they join. If there was one feature or addition that you would like to see on Brazen Careerist, what would it be? Feel free to leave a suggestion below, or join the conversation on the official Team Brazen blog where I lay out a couple of our ideas.

The biggest lesson we've learned at Brazen and a lesson that can be applied to every company is that the audience is ALWAYS right. The people you are trying to reach ultimately decide what is appropriate for your brand and what isn't.

For example, if you're a recruiter trying to fill an entry level position, it doesn't matter how cool you think your company is, or how lucky you think someone would be if they get the job that you are trying to fill, you really have no idea what recruits will think until you ask.

In this case, I would ask your newest employees. Find out what attracted them to the company and what things you should highlight when you're branding your company as a great place to work. Then try a few things out and determine which are the most successful. After a few interviews, you can even ask the recruits directly what attracted them to the company.

Even if you don't get the response you're looking for, when you ask your audience exactly what they want and you listen to them, you won't have to guess about what may work and what may not.

A surefire way to be successful is to have an army of people who find your company, product or service useful AND truly believe in what you are doing. But for people to care about what you're doing, you first have to care about what they want.

From here on out, we'll be asking for as much input as possible from our community before starting a new project. I would highly recommend your company do the same.

(And don't forget to leave us some feedback here or on the Brazen blog!)

Employer Branding: It's All About the Story

Take a look at the newest Best Places to Work list by Fortune and you will see an interesting pattern. More often than not, the same companies show up on the list every year, and its not a coincidence. Sure, these companies are probably pretty good places to work, but more importantly, they recognize the value in employer branding.

Brand recognition is not employer branding. Brand recognition is easy – it's advertising. Authorize a huge budget; hire a creative advertising firm, make a funny Superbowl ad and people all across the country will recognize your company logo. That's great if you just want people to buy what you're selling.

Employer branding is much different and equally important. It gets the right people in the door to create and improve what you're selling. But, employer branding is all about the story you tell – its marketing.

A funny Superbowl ad is not going to make me think "Wow, that looks like a great place to work." In fact, I'll probably forget about the ad by the time the game comes back on. On the other hand, a well crafted story that I read on my favorite blog or on the Best Places to Work list will make me consider rewriting my resume and passing it on to your company.

Google has a story. Googlers get to work at the coolest company on the planet. They sit on brightly colored bean bag chairs and they get on-site dry cleaning and free lunches. Oh yeah, they work hard too, that's cool.

Zappos has a story. Zappos employees get fee lunch, concierge service, and 100% health insurance premium coverage. If you start with Zappos and decide after training that you don't want to work there, they will GIVE you $2,000.00 to go home. Zappos does not want dead weight, and neither do their employees.

During the Q&A session of my Gen-Y speech at State Farm last week, a gentleman asked if strictly branding to Gen Y would alienate other generations. It was a great question. And the answer is yes; strictly trying to appeal to people in their twenties will alienate older employees. But that's the beauty of marketing, you don't need just one story. As long as every story you craft is true, you can and should have multiple messages for multiple audiences.

For example, State Farm's story for Gen Y could be that becoming an agent gives you a great taste for entrepreneurship without all the risk. Learn how to run your own business with the guidance of people who have been there and done that.

For Gen X the story could be that starting an agency gives you the freedom to spend time with your spouse and kids while earning plenty of money to support your family. And you become an important part of your community.

And for Baby Boomers the story could be that working at State Farm is a great way to finish your career on your terms. You can call the shots and make your hours. And if they're interested, you can get your kids involved in the business.

Each of these messages is completely different and from what I learned at the conference, completely true. Different audiences want to hear different stories. And if you actually are a great company like State Farm is, crafting a story is easy. Take a good look at how your business operates, ask your current employees in every area and at every age level why they like the company. I guarantee the answers will give you the perfect story for every demographic.

Pepsi Recognizes Gen Y Optimism, But Fails to Follow Through

Pepsi just launched a new marketing campaign based on results from a research project called the "Pepsi Optimism Project (POP)." POP concluded that despite the tough economy, 94% of Millennials are optimistic about the future.

The marketing campaign started with a facelift to the Pepsi logo that turns it into a more uplifting look, giving the consumer the sense that it's a smile. Next they launched a series of advertisements with bright, flashy colors, a catchy song and the welcoming words "Yo," "Hello," "Aloha," etc., giving the ad a sort-of Apple 2008 meets 90's boy band "pop" feel.

At first thought, it seems a little strange that Pepsi would decide to play to Gen Y's supposed optimism when we're smack dab in the middle of the worst economy since the great depression. But in reality, it's really smart. In the past few years, Gen Y has had its fair share of negative labels, but one thing you always hear is that we are eternally optimistic. We're optimistic because until now, we've never faced a tough economy, we grew up with free-spending baby boomer parents, and if we couldn't afford something, our credit cards always could (Yes, I'm generalizing here).

So even though we are facing some challenging times, deep down, we still believe that everything is going to turn out just fine. Pepsi figured this out with some in depth analysis. And for that, I say, "good job!"

But here's the thing. The commercials won't work.

The commercials won't work because even though Pepsi did its research and concluded that Gen Y is optimistic by nature, they forgot to dig a little deeper. If they had, they would have found an optimistic group of 20-somethings that happens to be very realistic as well.

The realist in me does not want to see bright colors and sing along commercials proclaiming optimism for the future. The realist in me wants to see that Pepsi is doing something to help people out during these tough times. I want to see Pepsi cares about their consumers and that Pepsi is going to stand next to us optimistic Millennials and fight the good fight to get through the tough times.

Yes, Gen Y is optimistic, but we're not naïve enough to think we can close our eyes and ignore what's happening and expect some higher power to fix things. We want to do the fixing, and we want the brands we choose to associate with to help us out.

There are some companies who seem to "get it." Hyundai's new commercial talks about their newest program that will buy you car back if you lose your income in the next year. That's pretty cool. Hyundai is essentially saying, "We recognize the crisis and we want to make money. But we have a heart." The company is doing something to help, and they are sharing that information in their ads.

IBM's new smarter planet ads all center on the people who are doing the actual work to make a difference in one way or another. They give the viewer a reason to believe that IBM is more than just a huge brand name, and that the people who work for them are optimistic about the future BECAUSE they are doing something to make it better, which validates the optimism.

So, Pepsi, if you're strictly trying to appeal to the Gen Y tweens and teens who haven't experienced life away from home, this campaign may have a chance. But if you want to reach the coveted twenty-something demographic, it's probably time to rethink things. I would ask one simple question, "How is the Pepsi brand giving Gen Y a reason to be optimistic?" If you can answer that question, you've got your new ad. If you can't, than it's safe to assume that advertising is the least of your concerns.