Tag: personal branding

First and lasting impressions matter (review of Cindy McGovern’s Sell Yourself: How to Create, Live and Sell a Powerful Personal Brand)

Yovana Mendoza Ayres is either a cautionary tale in personal branding or another sign of the apocalypse.

Ayres was a social media influencer and raw vegan evangelist who called herself Rawvana. More than 1.3 million people followed Ayres on YouTube as she made vegan breakfast drinks and meals while wearing short-shorts and midriff-baring tank tops and reminding the world how she was living her best life.

But then Ayres committed the cardinal sin of walking into a restaurant and going off-brand. Someone posted a video of Rawvana eating fish. It was an entrée too far for Ayres’ faithful, and deeply invested, followers. They called her Fishvana and much, much worse.

Ayres posted a 33-minute video in her defense that only ramped up the backlash. So she quit social media for four months. She returned as Yovana, continuing to promote healthy living minus the veganism. While she’s rebuilt an audience in the hundreds of thousands, there are former fans who refuse to forgive, forget and move on with their lives.

It’s not only fish-eating social media influencers who go off-brand. Many us didn’t show up as our best selves in Zoom rooms during the pandemic. Bedhead, sweatshirts, never quite giving our full and undivided attention and routinely muting our mics and turning off cameras for extended periods of time became our pandemic brand.

“Your personal brand is how you behave, what you say and how you treat others,” says Cindy McGovern, author of Sell Yourself: How to Create, Live and Sell a Powerful Personal Brand. “It’s not only what you say about yourself, it’s what others think and say about you, based on how you behave and what you do.”

According to McGovern, we need to do three things with our personal brands.

We first need to put in the time and effort to create thoughtful, deliberate brands that are true to who we are and want to become. “The first step seems easier than it is, but because you are a complex, multifaceted person, your brand must also be complex and multifaceted. Like all things in life, your personal brand will be more successful – and so will you – if you spend time planning it. You can’t wing it. You have to intentionally create your brand or it might not stick.”

We then need to live our brand every day, without exception. “It’s hard work to live up to your brand every time you interact with someone, post something on social media or shoot off a quick text after having a couple cocktails or getting some unfortunate news.” Pay particular attention to what you’re saying on social media, especially if you’re forever yelling at clouds, picking fights, virtue signalling and trying to score likes at someone else’s expense. Think carefully if snarky, sanctimonious and bullying is really how you want to brand yourself.

Finally, we need to sell our brand whenever we’re presented with opportunities in our professional and personal lives. “It’s short-sighted to create a brand – even a great one – if you’re not going to sell it. That would be like plunking down a year’s salary on your dream car, but never driving it. Everyone talks about how important it is to ‘sell yourself’ but too many overlook the truly important world in that cliché – sell.”

It’s never too late to build or revisit our personal brands. This is especially true if you joined the Great Resignation or the quiet quit movement. To land your dream job, you’ll need to know how to create, live and sell the best, and 100 per cent authentic, version of yourself. You’ll likely need a new brand for a new career.

Personal branding can also help those of us who’ve passed our career peaks and have an unobstructed view of retirement on the near horizon. This is where branding turns into legacy. “All of us have a personal brand that we live and sell every day by the way we behave and treat others. And that is what will become our legacy. You get to choose.”

McGovern shows us how to make good choices whether we’re starting out, starting over or winding down.

This review first ran in the Sept. 10th edition of the Hamilton Spectator.

Jay Robb serves as communications manager for McMaster University’s Faculty of Science, lives in Hamilton and has reviewed business books for the Hamilton Spectator since 1999.

Build your personal brand around 4 key elements that tell your story (review of Cynthia Johnson’s Platform)

platformThis review first ran in the Feb. 23 edition of The Hamilton Spectator

Platform: The Art and Science of Personal Branding

By Cynthia Johnson

Lorna Jones Books

$29.99

You have a solution to our problem and an answer to our prayers.

You’ve gone where we’re going and already done what we dream of doing.

We’re hungry to hear what you have to say and you’re willing to share your lessons learned.

Thanks to social media, it’s never been easier for you to  offer up your experience and expertise, insights and ideas. Yet finding you among the billions of users online is the challenge.

This is why you need to build and then manage your a personal brand.

“You can change the world with your voice if you have a platform to stand on and people who will listen,” says Cynthia Johnson, author of Platform and a branding agency co-founder with more than three million followers on social media channels.

“There is so much noise coming from so many people and places that we are exhausting the public attention span for experts and important causes. We need to hear from people who understand topics completely and thoroughly.”

A strong personal brand cuts through the noise and draws our attention.

Brand building is technical, creative, spiritual and scientific, says Johnson. “And it is much easier than you think.”

Our personal brands are built on four elements: personal proof, social proof, recognition and association. “Each piece is part of a puzzle, and they all work together to tell a story: your story.”

Personal proof includes your education, experience, credentials and achievements.

“Social proof is the proof that other people need in order to believe that we are qualified to do something,” says Johnson. Examples include our social media followers, referrals and references.

“Association is the part of the branding puzzle that determines nearly all of your successes,” says Johnson. “People decide whether you are credible based on your expertise and your network. You are whom you hang out with.”

And finally, you build your brand by being recognized as among the best at what you do. Awards and accolades elevate you in our hearts and minds.

Building your personal brand requires growing your networks on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Johnson has four suggestions.

Always include an email address on your social media profiles and tell us exactly what you’re interested in and looking for. “You can follow and connect with people all day long, but unless they know how and why to reach out to you, the ball will remain in your court.”

Aim for quality over quantity when posting content to social media. Post too much content that’s of low or no value cand we’ll legitimately wonder where you find the time to do the job and develop the experience that you’re attempting to build your personal brand around.

Avoid the rookie mistake of overusing or misusing hashtags. Don’t use hashtags to grow your followers by highlighting key words, says Johnson. “The main purpose of the hashtag on all social media channels is to create live public groups around topics or interests.”

And, just like in the real world, treat everyone on social media as if they matter because they genuinely do. “Don’t be the person who ignores the little guy, because in a connected digital world, you never know how people will grow from one day to the next. So go ahead and connect with people; it doesn’t hurt, and you never know how much it could eventually help.”

Personal branding is for everyone, says Johnson and it’s not an optional exercise if you want to be seen and heard. “You have it even when you don’t. Everyone in the digital age needs to be aware of their personal brand. It is no longer a choice whether to have one; the choice is whether you manage yours.”

Jay Robb serves as communications manager for McMaster University’s Faculty of Science, lives in Hamilton and has reviewed business books for the Hamilton Spectator since 1999.