Personal Branding – All Thought Leaders Need It

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Whether you’re a one person shop or a Fortune 100 executive with your sights set on becoming a thought leader in your industry, you need to take personal branding very seriously. According to this great post on Web Worker Daily.

Maybe you don’t care. Not caring is certainly an option. But if you’re a professional, and I’m assuming you are if you’re reading this, you should probably care.

This goes for all ‘knowledge workers’. You need to care for and about your personal brand and manage it on a weekly (at least) basis.

These days, with more and more big companies putting on a human face, and more and more people parlaying their personalities into companies (think Gary Vaynerchuk), the line between business branding and personal branding is becoming blurred. For these reasons, it’s especially important for people who run a one-man-show or a little shop, which many of us do, to consider the issue of personal branding seriously. Personal Branding is Important, Like It or Not

So, what are you doing today to manage your personal brand?  Here’s are a few things I recommend.
1. Keep a set of Google Alerts on your name, company and your discipline. You need to know what’s going on and what’s being said
2. Monitor the rest of the ‘thought leaders’ or personal brands in your space. If you’re the accounting manager at a local manufacturer, you need to be keeping an eye on the others as well. When that new corporate controller position comes up at a firm across town, you’re going to want to have all the advantages in your favor.
3. Write your own ‘personal marketing plan.’ Really, know where you want to be and what you want to be known for and work toward that as an ongoing exercise.

As Jack Welch famously said:

“Control your own destiny or someone else will.”