Personal Brand Strategy

To successfully develop a personal brand on social media, you should develop a strategy for how you want to get there. This strategy is developed in stages and will enable you to build an execution plan.

The first thing you have to decide is what is a long-term goal of your personal brand. A few examples:

When professional acquaintances think of me, I want them to think of a Security Expert
When a question in CI/CD comes up, I want to be the obvious person to ask
When an associate wants to understand Marketing Strategy, they'll schedule a meeting with me

By defining this long-term goal of what you would like, you enable yourself to visualize, develop a plan to accomplish and actualize it. You might also want to define various stages or milestones along the way, so that you can more easily measure success.

When building an implementation plan, you have to realize that success doesn't happen overnight, but is a result of a continual presence over the course of a period of time.

It should include the following:

The platform(s) that I plan to use
The type of content I will be writing (new features, tips/tricks, use cases, stories, methodologies, ...)
The quantity of articles, posts/tweets, shares/retweets, comments/replies that you plan on doing
Other players in this space who you should be following and interacting with

Interaction is often more than a single comment on someone else's post. You don't want to take over someone else space, but you can open a conversation and have bidirectional conversation. You want to make sure that you don't leave comments on your posts/articles unanswered. If someone comments on something you wrote, try to engage with them. Tagging people is a great way to encourage engagement. You should tag people who are relevant to what you've written, asking what they think about it. Don't over-tag, though. If you tag people who aren't relevant to what you're writing, it annoys them.

Metrics are a good way to measure your progress. At the beginning, you probably won't get very many views/likes/comments. You have to keep plugging away until you are noticed. The more you engage with other people that more likely it is that they will engage back. If someone wrote content that has a connection to what you wrote, add a comment similar to, "that is very interesting, I recently wrote about a similar approach" and give the link to your article.

By taking the time to strategize and plan your personal brand, you will have a much greater chance of succeeding.

Comments

Reward vs Risk

When developing a strategy, there are 2 opposing concepts that must be balanced - Risk and Reward. There are two known philosophies to take into account when determining the methodologies: “The best offense is a good defense”. “The best defense is a good offense” Understanding these 2 philosophies and when each is appropriate, is a key factor in determining a plan of action. Generally speaking, risk and reward are proportionate - the greater risk a person is willing to take (potential loss), the higher the potential for reward. For example, there are different bets you can make at a roulette wheel. If you have $1000 to gamble and pick a specific number to bet it on, you have the opportunity to win $35,000, whereas if you pick red/black you only have the opportunity of winning $1,000. In both cases, the odds are that you are going to lose, but the risk is much greater when choosing a specific number. When choosing an objective, you have to understand what you want to accompli...

Stop apologizing and just do it

There’s a popular phrase, “presentation is everything”. If something is presented in the wrong way, it has a good chance of losing a good deal of appreciation. While most people understand this from a physical perspective - great food that is just piled on your plate is less appreciated than decent food that is carefully presented - this is also true when presenting something written or oral. When somebody starts off talking by saying, “this probably isn’t going to work, but...” or, “I’m sure there are better ways of doing this…”, expectations drop. Why should they waste their valuable time on something that even the person presenting it doesn’t think is any good. So why do people do this? Nobody likes being wrong. There is a lot of posturing and expressions whose sole purpose is to allow people to save face. People feel uncomfortable making a statement that they don’t feel confident that they can back up. It is easier to hide behind an excuse than to be proven w...

Strategy in your daily life

So how do we use strategy in our everyday life? It should be used whenever you want to achieve something to which there is no obvious answer. While the shortest path between two points is a straight line, it is often not practical or possible to follow it. There are factors and ramifications involved in the different methods and stages of getting from Point A to Point B. Strategy is understanding what is involved, weighing the pros and cons and consciously deciding the best method for you. As a very basic, practical example: You are standing on the corner of a busy street (A) and need to get to the bus stop on the corner diagonal from you. The bus that you need is going to turn left at the corner to get to the bus stop. You need to cross 2 streets to get to that bus stop. Do you first cross From A to B or from A to C? Most people don’t think about it - whichever light turns green first is the road they are going to cross. It is the same distance to the bus stop no matter which ...

Everyperson's strategy

Search This Blog