marc miller - career pivotcareerpivot.com/wp...branding-for-baby-boomers.pdf · “why do i have to...

Personal Branding for

What It Is, How To Manage It,

Why It’s No Longer Optional!

By Marc Miller

Founder

and

Copyright © 2013 Marc Miller and Associates, LLC All Rights Reserved 6 November, 2013 http://www.CareerPivot.com 2

Personal Branding for Baby Boomers

What It Is, How to Manage It, and Why It’s No Longer Optional!

Table of Contents: 1. What Is A Personal Brand?

2. Three Key Elements of Your Brand Story

3. Your Brand Story: Who Should Write It?

4. Should Baby Boomers Care About Their Personal Brand?

5. Establishing Your Personal Brand and Credibility Through Blogging

6. Baby Boomer Personal Branding Using Social Media

7. Write A Book To Establish Your Personal Brand

8. Make It Happen


What Is A Personal Brand?

Personal Brand. Many Baby Boomers struggle with this term. I have to admit, I did not understand it for a long time. In the olden days, “personal brand” was your reputation.

When I graduated from an engineering school in the late 1970′s, I went to work for IBM as a computer programmer developing word processors (this was before the IBM PC existed!). A small number of us on the project were fresh out of college. We soon learned who was in charge, who knew what they were talking about, and who to avoid. All of these people had reputations, both good and bad. This was the beginning of understanding the concept of a personal brand.

You might think of this as a meritocracy.

You were known for your accomplishments as well as the way you treated other people. It was crucial that others noticed your good work. If you sat in the corner, did a good job, and kept your nose clean, you still might remain invisible to the organization. Only if you worked on a critical piece of the project would anyone outside of your immediate team know what you did. Your reputation was known mostly within your group, team or project. If you moved from project to project, your reputation often followed you.

Let’s fast forward to the 21st century.

With the rise of the Internet and Social Media came the rise of the concept of personal brand. I have worked on projects in the last dozen years with people from around the world. Your ability to promote your reputation—your personal brand—has expanded greatly.

Think about it. How many of your LinkedIn connections are from outside the city where you live? Outside the state where you live? Outside the country where you live?

Have you developed a personal brand from a blog, your social media engagement, or from a personal/professional website?

“If you sat in the corner, did a good job, and kept your nose clean, you still might remain

invisible to the organization.”


Many of you may be saying, “I do not have time for this!”

Many of you may also be thinking that this is self-promotion and bragging about yourself.

Growing up, many of us were taught that it is improper to promote ourselves. We were assured that only our hard work was necessary to be recognized and that any effort to attract attention to ourselves was immodest.

The world has changed. Your personal brand can reach people just about anywhere! Just like when I was working for IBM, if you sit in the corner and do a good job, your good work may never get noticed.

What if you do not want to create a personal brand? Whether you like it or not, you have one. What you need to do is manage it!

Before you can manage your personal brand, you must better understand your “brand story.” Don’t worry—there are only three key elements to consider.

Three Key Elements of Your Brand Story

Your brand story is exactly that, a story.

It should tell me who you are in a story format.

It should NOT be a diatribe of your accomplishments, but it should be a short story that tells your passions, your strengths and your goals. There are 3 key elements to a brand story.

A Strong Opening

We want to open the story with a compelling message to entice the reader to want to read on. I use, “I have had an eclectic career to say the least!”

Carol Ross, a career coach from Denver, starts her story with, “Everyone has a story, waiting to be told.”

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmiller/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/abiggervoice/


Tonya Clement has a bit of a more thoughtful opener, “Perhaps the most important lesson of my life is this: there is a big difference between being alive and truly living, and trading one for the other often means heeding destiny’s call.”

Be creative and authentic!

A Memorable Label

You will want to label yourself with a phrase that is memorable. For instance, I used to refer to myself as an articulate techno-weenie, but I now refer to myself

as a recovering engineer.

In the Carol’s, Tonya’s, and my brand story, we want you to remember our company names. In my case, that is Career Pivot.

Your story and label should enforce what you want people to remember about you. You need to come up with a catchy phrase that says who you are that is memorable and authentic. Marketing that sounds great but doesn’t really tell who you are is a bad idea. Find a group of your friends who can brainstorm on the topic and share what they think is a true expression of who you are and what you bring to the table. Come up with 20-30 phrases, and then you will want to test them out vocally. You have to be comfortable using the phrase!

This is not different from the slogans of brands like Nike, “Just Do It,” or Allstate, “You’re in Good Hands with Allstate,” or Capital One, “What’s in your Wallet,” or M&Ms, “It melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”

A Brand Theme

What do you want people to think and/or feel after they have read your story? There should be a common theme that accompanies your label.

In Tonya Clements’ story that I referenced above, it was all about how mountain climbing is inspirational and how she had climbed Mount Everest—Which led her to building programs to inspire people to reach their “peak performance.”

The theme, inspiration, could certainly urge one to contact her.

“What if you do not want to

create a PERSONAL BRAND?

Whether you like it or not,

you have one.”

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tonya-clement/3/88b/a02/

http://careerpivot.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tonya-clement/3/88b/a02/


My story is much simpler. It is about how a near fatal bicycle accident urged me to seek what I really wanted to do with my life: to help people make career decisions!

The story is about finding career direction and satisfaction.

Your Brand Story: Who Should Write It?

In developing your personal brand, have YOU tried to write your brand story? Your story needs to express who you are and not what you have done. It should convey what you stand for, your morals and values.

Wow that is hard!

I have taken several online programs to learn about the process of developing a brand story. What I discovered was that I was really lousy at creating and writing my own brand story. I’ve had a couple clients work this online process, too, but they did not do any better. In fact, most didn’t finish. Why is this?

I work with baby boomers that want to make a pivot in their career. I use the Birkman Assessment to better understand their personalities, work through what interests them, how they make decisions, how they fit into the workplace, how they behave, and more importantly, how they want to be treated. I have completed more than one hundred assessments and thorough feedback sessions. There has been one universal theme: We do not see ourselves the way other people see us!

The worst person to write your brand story is you!

Do marketing professionals sit quietly in a room by themselves and dream up brand ideas? No! They collaborate, they brain storm, and they bounce ideas off one another. When working on your brand and story, it is important to get outside help and feedback. I work with clients in a very systematic way to develop their brand story. Here are some of my conceptual focuses that you can use for this process:


http://birkman.com/

http://birkman.com/


Find Your Common Theme

Almost all of us have a common theme running throughout our lives. The problem is that many of us have difficultly seeing it. We are just too close!

Work with a good friend, relative, or even a career professional to assist you in developing your common theme. An outsider will see this much more clearly than you will. This may be a bit painful, but often, our greatest lessons and later victories can be tied to experiences that came out of dark times.

Label Yourself

Work with the same people who helped you develop a theme to create a label that defines you.

Have fun with this! Ask for feedback from friends. Ask them for words that describe you. Ask them if you were an animal, which animal would you be?

Write the Story

You should not do this final step. Find a close friend or relative who writes well to work on this with you. Use some kind of organized process for this. The final product should be put in the Summary section of your LinkedIn profile.

The Summary section of the LinkedIn profile is limited to 2,000 characters! This limits you to 4-6 paragraphs. The writing needs to be tight and targeted.

Again, the story should express who you are and not what you have done!

You can look at my LinkedIn profile to see an example. I did not write this, but my co-author of Repurpose Your Career – A Practical Guide for Baby Boomers, Susan Lahey, wrote it!

I am the worst person to write my own brand story. What about you?

“Marketing that sounds great BUT DOESN’T REALLY TELL WHO YOU ARE is a bad idea.”


http://www.amazon.com/dp/0988700506/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=myca4myli-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0988700506&adid=07NKFEAEA134FQ06SEW0&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fcareerpivot.com%2Fresources%2F


Should Baby Boomers Care About Their Personal Brand?

Each time I have shared links to posts about personal branding on a variety of LinkedIn groups, I have received comments like:

“Why do I have to post on social media? Face to face communication is more important. You cannot build real relationships using social media!”

First, that’s actually not true. I know many people who have met clients, customers, and collaborators on social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn. They begin by commenting on one another’s posts, having online discussions, and getting to know one another. Then, after a period of this kind of engagement, one or the other recommends they meet off-line. Frequently, the relationship they built online proves to be something fruitful for both of them.

I also have many clients who work on large, multi-national teams. They rarely meet face-to-face with their teammates. One of them has been running worldwide events for a large multi-national corporation from his “man-cave” for the last several years. His only interaction with his teammates was over the phone. And, like many people who get entrenched in a company, his business relationships were entirely with people who worked for the same corporation. It was an all-consuming culture.

He is now looking for employment. He knows his stuff. The problem is that no one knows he knows his stuff. Had he been interacting with other people who do similar things within other companies, his personal brand (reputation!) would already be well established. He would have connections outside of his own company. Now, he has to start promoting his skills.

He is a salesman and HE is the product!

Does this sound familiar? Had he been building relationships, reputation, answering questions for peers on social media, he would already have a personal brand as an expert in this field.

That’s why Baby boomers need to pay attention to personal brands!


We, baby boomers, were raised to be employees and were expected to go to work for father-like corporations that would take care of us. But those days are gone forever!

Dan Schawbel’s new book Promote Yourself is counter to way many baby boomers were raised. Promote yourself? Many of us were taught that our work should speak for itself…or that we should let others speak for us. People who promoted themselves, unless they were really good at doing it subtly, were often seen as arrogant.

The world has changed.

You now need to look at yourself as a product—a well-defined product that can be promoted worldwide! This is defined by your personal brand. Can you afford to ignore developing and promoting your personal brand?

If you want to stay employed for the next twenty years (which many boomers will need to do), your personal brand cannot be ignored.

Establishing Your Personal Brand and Credibility Through Blogging

Do you have a portfolio of work that establishes your personal brand and credibility?

We live in an economy where your current job could disappear today and the competition for your next job will come from around the globe.

How does your next employer know that you “know your stuff?”

No matter the industry or profession, blogging is a very effective way for you to establish your credibility and, therefore, create a personal brand.

http://danschawbel.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250044553/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1250044553&linkCode=as2&tag=myca4myli-20


What should you blog about?

It is very important to decide how you want to be perceived.

• A technical expert?• The go to man or woman in marketing?• An artistic creative?

What is your personal brand? What is the image that you want to create? This will help you to decide the name and theme of your blog.

How often should I blog?

It matters less how often you blog than the need to be consistent. A good start would be once a week. I suggest you publish each entry on the same day of the week. This will help you get into a rhythm.

A great way to be a success from the very beginning is come up with the first 15-20 topics and titles that you will blog about before you even start. This will become an editorial calendar that you should follow.

Measuring success

Understanding how you measure success is very critical. For my own blog, Career Pivot, I measure success in three ways:

1. Did anyone read the post? There are lots of ways to measure this viaGoogle Analytics and other tools.

2. Do the readers comment on the posts? Commenting and responding tocomments is a key aspect of establishing your personal brand.

3. Do the readers social share the content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter orGoogle+? Social sharing is critical to spreading the word about your blog.

If you blog at a steady pace over time, you will build up a body of work that people in your industry will find either through social media or search or even word of mouth.

http://careerpivot.com/blog/


Jim Adcock and his blog

I want to tell you the story of Jim Adcock. I have known Jim for a number of years and we currently serve together on a board of directors for a local non-profit.

Jim is a SharePoint guy! In fact, he calls himself “The SharePoint Therapist” (http://sharepointtherapist.com).

He has been in the wrong place at the wrong time…multiple times! He has worked for a defense contractor that downsized. He was let go after a merger when his department was eliminated. Lots of bad timing, but never because of the quality of work he provided. I am sure this sounds familiar to many of you!

Jim started blogging in May of 2009 about SharePoint and related topics. He has been blogging almost weekly ever since. What is amazing is that Jim now gets to speak at regional SharePoint conferences, where he is known as “that guy with the SharePoint blog.” His blog is now found thousands of times each month and he has created a very successful personal brand. All you have to do is read his blog and you instantly realize that he “knows his stuff!”

His services are now in demand!

His blog has ALL of his contact information (LinkedIn, Twitter, his other blogs, his resume). More importantly, you discover who Jim is beyond just being a “SharePoint Therapist”.

This did not happen overnight! This took consistent and persistent effort to establish his personal brand and credibility!

http://dlairman.wordpress.com/


Baby Boomer Personal Branding Using Social Media

Are you a baby boomer? Are you using social media to develop and promote your personal brand? Am I speaking gibberish?

Step #1 Pick a Social Network

There are a lot of social networks to choose from. You cannot be on all of them. There is just not enough time in the day. So pick one!

• Facebook• Twitter• LinkedIn• Instagram• Pinterest• Google+• YouTube• etc

If you are looking to create a personal brand around your professional life, I recommend you begin with LinkedIn.

Step #2 Create a Profile

Get a good picture. Yes, you need a picture, and a headshot is best.

When you think of a brand, do you see a picture in your mind? Of course. Not having a picture raises questions. Sometimes, just throwing one up there raises questions, too. When someone looks at the picture you select, what does it tell them about you? You have to be recognizable from the picture. I have seen a few pictures where so many years were removed using Photoshop that I could not recognize them from the photo.

Some other important points: Enter only your last 10-15 years of work history. Do not enter the year you received any college degrees.


Step #3 Get Connected

Go through all of your e-mail contacts and connect with them. Search LinkedIn for colleagues from past jobs, college, and high school.

Take the time to reconnect on a personal level. That means you shouldn’t just send them the standard “I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn” message. Write something personal in your invitation.

Join groups that pertain to your career interests. There are a million of them. And visit them frequently. Comment positively and genuinely on other people’s posts.

Step #4 Engage

You are now virtually connected with people online. Read, share, and comment on what you find. The whole idea is to be social. Meet new people.

How you interact, what you share or even what you create will tell people a lot about your talents, skills and expertise.

Return to Step #1 and Repeat

Once you have become comfortable with the selected social network, pick another.

For baby boomers who are looking to create a professional personal brand beyond LinkedIn, I recommend Google+. Google+ is about finding people with similar interests. If you are adventurous, you might try Twitter. It has taken quite awhile for me to get comfortable working with and interacting on Twitter. This might be a good time to invest in a lesson from a social media professional. Twitter does have video tutorials on how to use it, however.

So go for it! Are you ready to take the plunge?

“How you interact, what you

share or even what you create will tell people a

lot about your talents, skills and

expertise.”


Write a Book to Establish Your Personal Brand

Have you ever considered publishing a book? When you publish a book, it provides customers and others with a tangible example of your work, which can establish your personal brand.

I know what you are thinking!

Come on, write a book? Really? Who would publish a book I wrote?

You would!

I already suggested you write a blog to establish your personal brand. Now I am suggesting that the natural next step is to turn the blog into a paperback, or even easier, an e-book.

The first step is to decide how you are going to undertake this effort. There are a lot of books about how to write books. But I have to recommend one written by my good friend Gudjon Bergmann who has self-published twenty books. His latest book is The Author’s Blueprint: Successfully Write a Non-Fiction Book, Conquer Procrastination and Never Get Writer’s Block Again.

Gudjon’s book takes readers through the process of coming up with a title, chapter list and actually getting the book written. Gudjon says that, when writing your first book, you need to write A book and not THE book!

Just having a book published is a rite of passage. These days, fewer and fewer publishers buy books from new authors, but many often buy books that were originally self-published.

Publishing a book is a major accomplishment. And, it helps establish your personal brand by solidifying you as a subject matter expert. Your book is a huge statement of who you are and what you know.

I speak from experience.

http://www.communicatorblueprints.com/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A8NNJO8/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=myca4myli-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B00A8NNJO8&adid=149X68VDMCF7MGSMRFDW&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fcareerpivot.com%2Fresources%2F

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A8NNJO8/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=myca4myli-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B00A8NNJO8&adid=149X68VDMCF7MGSMRFDW&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fcareerpivot.com%2Fresources%2F


My first book, Repurpose Your Career – A Practical Guide for Baby Boomers, catapulted my business. But it’s not my last. There are more in the pipeline, including a second edition, slated for release in 2014.

Create a team

You could go through this process alone, but it is best to create a team:

• Co-author – Your partner in this endeavor could be a peer or someonewho is just going to help you write. Susan Lahey was my ghostwriter (whois not a ghost, by the way). Her name is on the cover of the book! If this isa technical topic find a peer who can share the load of writing the book.

• Editor/Proof reader – Depending on your writing skills you may want a full-blown editor. In my case, I hired several people to proof read the book. Infact, I sent out so many review copies to potential readers, we receivedlots of comments including suggested edits.

• Cover Designer – If you are just producing an e-book and have someartistic skills you could do this yourself. If this is going to be a paperback(much larger format and has both front and back cover), I highly suggestyou hire someone to create the book cover for you.

• Book Layout – This is not for you. Spend a little bit of money to format thebook. This is especially true if you want to include graphics in an e-book.There is an art and a science to book layout.

Leverage your blog

About 60-70% of my book Repurpose Your Career – A Practical Guide for Baby Boomers came from my blog. As you write blog posts, pay attention to which posts get comments, and are socially shared. Engage your readers who write comments for both what they write but why they are interested in the material.

Remember what Gudjon says: You need to write A book and not THE book!

When you have written enough material to create a 60-page book, you might consider publishing this as an e-book. You could then expand on this book and release a second edition as an e-book and a paperback. (Tip—Be sure to know current publishing requirements to get your book into bookstores!)

There are a lot of resources to assist you in self-publishing your book. The hard part is actually writing and finishing it!





Make It Happen

Anyone can read a blog, book, post, or white paper, but not everyone will take learned principles and DO THEM. To help your chances of taking the steps to clarify your personal brand, I’ve listed them again here for your convenience:

1. Think about your Personal Brand:

• A Strong Opening• A Memorable Label• A Brand Theme

2. Find someone to write your Brand Story.

3. Become educated about the importance of your Personal Brand.

4. Instigate a consistent blogging strategy.

5. Stop hiding from Social Media! Get out there!

6. Write A book, not THE book.

7. Be social, warm, and engaging!

Please let me know what you learned, or if you have any additional thoughts regarding Personal Branding for Baby Boomers! Find me on Twitter @CareerPivot or e-mail me at [email protected]

http://twitter.com/careerpivot

marc miller - career pivotcareerpivot.com/wp...branding-for-baby-boomers.pdf · “why do i have to...

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