Life is not easy. In today’s crappy economy, you
actually have work to look good for working, taking valuable drinking
time to counterfeit diplomas, or invent accomplishments, like winning
the Pulitzer for your late night Twittering.
These days, it’s just not enough to be a conniver and a kiss-up. These days, you also have to be a brand.
Or so I am told.
Branding – that’s the buzzword in employment
circles these days. Potential clients want to be able to pluck you out
of the great morass of generic event planners simply because they
instantly recognize in you something unique and memorable, like BMW, or
Coca-Cola, or Maddonna.
According to an article I read,” branding
professionals can teach you how to wrap your scared, feeble, inadequate
self in a bright and bold new label, complete with unforgettable name
and button-cute graphics."
Like, the author of “Me 2.0: Building a Powerful Brand to Achieve
Career Success,” who suggests that the key to building your brand is
finding your niche. You may think you have already found your niche –
it’s under your desk – but for Schawbel the secret for creating your
brand is to “discover your passion” and “put it together with your
experience.” But there are is already a Ron Jeremy and I am in events?
Color me confused??
For example, your passion for thrift could be put together with your
experience stealing other people’s lunches from the coffee room
refrigerator to create a kind of Robin Hood brand. You steal from
hungry and give to the rich, mainly yourself. Gee, I see a lot of
London city type firms typed up offer letters already.
Whether you brand yourself as proven and reliable, like Metamucil,
or calm in the face of stress, like Zanex, or wild and sexy, like
Desenex, establishing your brand is only the first step in the branding
process. That’s right, Mr. and Ms. Brand X, you also have to market
yourself and have someone to display you like a Trophy to the world.
That is why I am thinking of hiring a PR cowboy.
What is PR, you ask? The expertz will tell you that PR is an intense
and difficult job that can be rewarding and disappointing. It can be
exciting, and mind-numbingly boring. PR, more often than not, is
misunderstood by people outside of the industry. Increasingly, the
lines between PR, marketing and advertising are becoming more blurred,
taking the industry into a new direction. In short, once you get below
the surface, PR is not what it appears to be from the outside.
To be a PR person, I feel you need to posses a certain skill set
that can be broken down into two categories: human skills and
professional skills. Human skills include things such as patience and
congeniality, while professional skills include the ability to speak
publicly and write professionally. But I think the best way to sum up
anything is with a joke, so here goes:
A mathematician, an accountant and a public relations officer all applied for the same job with a large company.
The interviewer called in the mathematician first and asked, “What does two plus two equal?”
The mathematician replied, “Four.”
The interviewer asked, “Four, exactly?”
The mathematician looked at the interviewer incredulously and said, “Yes, of course: four, exactly.”
Then the interviewer called in the accountant and asked the same question, “What does two plus two equal?”
The accountant said, “On average, four – give or take 10 per cent; but on average, four.”
Then the interviewer called in the public relations officer and again posed the same question, “What does two plus two equal?”
The public relations officer got up, locked the door, closed the
shade, sat down next to the interviewer and whispered, “Well, what do
you want it to equal?”
Ok, so you now have a PR person, what can you do while she is doing
his/her thing to speed along the branding thing, you don’t want to be left
the only one not doing it, not like twitter, not this time!
The favored place to let your branding flag fly is the Internet. “It’s
about building a community,” says Veronica Fielding, the president of
Digital Brand Expressions. Makes sense. You certainly don’t want to
meet anyone face to face, which means the logical place to expose the
brand new Brand You is one of the popular anti-social networking sites,
like Facebook, or Linked-In. Start with your online profile. Instead of
putting down prosaic, expected information, like your blood type, or
the name of your favorite Jonas Brother, use graphics to make your
online persona to match your brand.
Let’s imagine that your brand identity is designed to show your
aggressive approach to business problems. You will want to upload
photos of bloody battle scenes of carnage and slaughter, the better to
demonstrate what you will do to the company’s competition, or any
co-worker who uses your pencil.
Important as it is to establish your brand’s unique and scary
presence, it is only the beginning of your online networking efforts.
“You want to find groups,” Fielding suggests, “alumni, former employees
of your last jobs, trade groups.” The idea here is to join the group
and then wait in hiding – a cyberspace stalker – for opportunities to
“establish yourself as someone insightful” by “chiming in with your
opinion.”
Unfortunately,if your opinions are like mine they may seem quite lame, which is
probably why you are looking for a PR person in the first place. But
don’t let that stop you from promoting Brand You in the mean time.
Demonstrate you are a team player by butting into online conversations
with supportive messages, like “you guys are pants.”
Demonstrate your abilities as a “people person” by adding a smiley-face
emotogram to every email, even the emails that include threats and
promises of retribution.
Now that’s the way to build a brand.
The experts also suggest that you promote your brand in the offline
world. Don’t go out in sweats and old T-shirts; you never know who you
might run into. In the same spirit, be sure to sleep in your best
Armani interview outfit. You never know when a fire will break out, and
you’ll find yourself on the sidewalk with a prospective client.
Another piece of good brand advice is from some author who's name I forget, who cautions that you shouldn’t hover over the free buffet at
a networking meeting, since she “would hate to have three meatballs in
my mouth and try to explain what I want to do.”
This wouldn’t be a problem for me, of course. As anyone who knows me
knows, having three meatballs in my mouth is what my brand is all about.
So what do I do, I plan to be my own PR person and align myself with those that can help me be all I can be …and just wait patiently for something to happen……till then all I can say is, "C’mon cowboy..giddy up..would you?
My Brand:
Lord of the ( undone) flies!
