Your Face – Your Brand
How do the people in your life see you?
How would your co-workers, your neighbors, your friends, your family, describe you?
Would you be surprised if those descriptions were very different depending on the group that’s talking about you?
It’s an interesting exercise to go ask a few people to share three words that they feel describe you. Try it… you may be surprised.
I’d like to point out that how they describe you is another way of saying you’ve been ‘branded’ by them in that way.
Branding is POWERFUL! Think of the challenges many have in trying to get the members of the family they grew up in to see them in a new way. Our nuclear families tend to hold us locked in the branding we received in our youth.
Now we don’t typically call that BRANDING… yet isn’t that essentially what it is?
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a name, symbol, design or sign (or any combination thereof) intended to identify and differentiate the goods and services of one seller from another.
WAIT! I’m not suggesting you need to go create a logo for yourself!
I am suggesting you consider what comes to mind as you look at the logo’s on this page and realize how many of them you can spontaneously name even if their name isn’t included. (For a fun bit of challenge go take the quiz )
This is important because as you interact with people online, people will start to recognize your name and associate it with a variety of things. Why not give some thought to how YOU would like to be recognized?
There are a few things you can do to stand out in the ‘crowd’ and be recognizable. If you’ve been online for awhile and didn’t purposefully set out to ‘brand’ yourself you may discover that you’ve inadvertently done so anyway… and there is still time to do so in any case.
Here are a few suggestions:
*Create an original name and use it consistently everywhere!
Have some fun with this. Explore what you ‘declare’ yourself to BE… this creates the space for you to show up and be that!
For instance, I consistently use my name, Mary K… not very original, but I also consistently follow it with my tagline, Ambassador of Play!
If you spend some time you’ll discover many successful people that become familiar to you as their ‘name’ sticks in your mind…
like a few of my friends, The Barefoot Exective, Marcy from Maui (who choose her name when living in Maui was only a dream… today she lives in Maui!) or The Card Guy.
You are going to be dropping your name in a lot of places so you want it to be original enough that it isn’t already in use somewhere.
*What are you contributing?
Offering helpful information and quality content will quickly be connected to your name. Remember, what and how you share will become part of your ‘brand’.
Don’t be afraid to ask people questions when you don’t know something. And be gracious enough to express your appreciation to those who respond to you. All of these things combined will cause people to be attracted to you and look forward to seeing your name.
Branding can be fun… and it really moves you into relationship with people because they feel like they know you better each time they see your name. With recognition they start (hopefully) to trust you and find you approachable. As you ‘live up’ to your brand, they even start talking about you to their friends and before you know it your email box will be full of the BEST kind of messages and your phone will be ringing off the hook. (Not to mention the fun you’ll have when you finally get to meet in person all the friends you’ve made online)
Now that we’ve covered some of the WHO, we’ll talk about the what, where, why and when in another post. In the meantime… what’s YOUR brand?!?
Play well,
–Mary K
¸..· ´¨¨)) -:¦:-
¸.·´ .·´¨¨))
((¸¸.·´ ..·´ -:¦:-
-:¦:- ((¸¸.·´* Light
EXPECT MIRACLES!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=55ac1b9e-620d-46b1-b989-85bb3ecb913d)
Leave a Comment