Me, the Company and Brand Consistency

Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success and he’s all about personal branding.

What struck me the most was the emphasis on managing your personal brand across the online (and offline) spectrum when managing your career and job search. The millennials aren’t the only kids learning to manage their personal brand.

We all like to Google ourselves. Don’t deny it. For those interested in managing their personal brand, it’s actually very important to do so, to know what we’re being found for (and then why). Google has even taken advantage of this and launched Google Profile.

And we like to Google our companies. We search for terms like “selling to HR” and are so happy to see when we come up number 1 (and 2, and 3, and…). That’s why we do the SEO work we do.

But what are you and your company being found for online?

Transparency is where it’s at these days with your personal and professional brand: they are practically synonymous these days. Transparency keeps you and your brand honest and your buyers are more sophisticated about honesty and integrity than you think, especially in this recession.

For smaller HR suppliers, the business owners and executive management are the brand. Wait, everybody is the brand. What your talent says and does and posts online is permanently fused to your brand.

My Godot, it’s a supercalifragilexistential brand management extravaganza for any sized company!

I’m not talking about crisis communications after the fact of some faux pas; I’m talking about proactive consistent brand messaging day to day.

Marketing drives this and these are the brand management activities you need to pay attention to and participate in:

• Your search-optimized website contains the marketing eyes to your company’s soul. Get it right and keep it flush with fresh content.
• Make sure your company has consistent brand messaging for all to evangelize. Take the time to figure this out and the time to modify from time to time.
• Create lots of content, content, content with consistent brand messaging in the forms of white papers, research reports, articles, webcasts, podcasts, etc. (which is part 2 of our 3-part marketing series coming out soon).
• Ensure consistent brand messaging in your media pitches, search-optimized press releases and direct marketing campaigns.
• Ensure consistent brand messaging when exhibiting and/or sponsoring and/or speaking at a trade show or a breakfast, lunch or dinner event.
• Ensure consistent brand messaging when you’re on a park bench or in an elevator.
• Ensure consistent brand messaging when blogging and commenting on blogs.
• Ensure consistent brand messaging when participating in social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning networks, and a gazillion others. That includes personal profiles and company profiles.
• Make sure everyone is allowed to be themselves in their online personal and professional lives, but also curb the rogues who may jeopardize your business (that’s where some form of guidelines and HR governance comes into play).

Brand management is more of an oxymoron than reality, but you and your team can guide and be part of the brand conversation that grows your business.

Be brand bold, be brand brash, be brand different – but for goodness sake, be brand consistent.

Post by Kevin Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn)

Labels: branding, marketing and PR activities, personal branding, transparency