The Anatomy of a Personal Branding Statement [Infographic]

Your personal branding statement communicates what you do and why you do it in the most vivid terms possible for those that want to learn more about you as a professional. It's a critical part of building your personal brand, and today we've created a special infographic to help you create your own personal branding statement.

The Anatomy of the PERFECT Personal Branding Statement.

 The Anatomy of the PERFECT Personal Branding Statement infographic is broken down into four main parts:

1. Your name, title and company
2. Your personal branding elevator pitch
3. Why do you do what you do? 
4. Who do you want to meet and why?

Your Name, Title and Company

You can't assume people know who you are, what you do or where you work. Tell them right away.

Your Personal Branding Elevator Pitch

Your personal branding elevator pitch describes what you do while incorporating your most valuable skills. Make sure you go back and learn how to create your elevator pitch if you haven't already done so. 

Why Do You Do What You Do?

This section is reserved for a passionate reason or reasons why you do what you do for a living. Be emotional. Be broad. If you can't think of something big that inspires you to go to work each day, you might be in the wrong job. 

Who Do You Want to Meet and Why? 

What type of folks do you want to meet to help you further you along your professional path? And towards what purpose do you want to build as you collaborate with the people around you?

Create Your Own Personal Branding Statement

This easy four-step format is a simple, yet effective way to paint a compelling picture of who you are as a professional.

Take a few minutes to create your own personal branding statement using this handy new infographic and blog post as a guide. Be sure to share what you come up with by way of a comment below.

A Personal Branding Case Study With Google Glass

I'm the Google Glass guy at work now. Everyone knows me as that one fella who walks around with that thing on his face -- everyone from the gang in accreditation to the entire admissions team to the President and the CEO of the college. What can Google Glass teach us about personal branding?

As a Glass Explorer and one of only about 10,000 people picked by Google to wear their new Glass wearable technology, I originally purchased them to get in on the ground level of a whole new app store. My goal was to wear them around as much as I could to better anticipate the future use cases of consumers for a completely new market. I didn't think of the affect Glass would have on my brand.

At first, there were quite a few people who told me I looked futuristic, silly, or even creepy. Those voices got to me during the early days of being a Glass Explorer to the point of considering not wearing them to work or in public anymore. But then something game-changing happened.

A Moment With My CEO That Changed Everything

One morning I was sitting in a public area updating with a colleague when our CEO sat down next to us, wanting to learn more about Glass. I gave him a demo and he marveled at how futuristic they were.

He went on to share that he told all his friends that he knew a guy at work who had Google Glass and that they were all very impressed that their pal had such a visionary working for him. I'd like to think my work speaks for itself, but I'm not too proud to get a Glass-related boost when I can get one. 

Great Brands Maximize the Experience

As with any great consumer brand, great personal brands should seek to maximize the experience of a few key personas, such as clients, customers, and CEOs. 

If having Glass makes me a visionary to one very important person, it can more than make up for the handful of those who are uncomfortable with the technology and associated societal implications of Glass. The same is true with strengths, personality traits, and many other aspects of your personal brand, too.

What aspects of your personal brand are most appealing to your key customers? Do you find that some of your strongest traits and characteristics are often subject to the attention of others but embraced by those you serve the most? 

[Study] 25-44-Year-Olds Most Likely to Invest in Personal Brands

35-44-year-olds and 25-34-year-olds were more likely to be familiar with personal branding, according to a recent Google Consumer Survey administered by Big Picture Web.  

The younger and older segments of the population were less likely to be familiar with the practice of treating one's career and professional life as it if were a brand.  

How Familiar Are You With Personal Branding?

18-24-year-olds were the most likely to be unfamiliar with personal branding, at just above 70 percent. 35-44-year-olds were the most likely to be at least somewhat familiar, while 24-34-year-olds were the most likely to be very familiar (6 percent). 

Based on the data, it appears is though personal branding is something that people start to become interested in as they develop a little career experience. It grows to peak importance once someone enters their peak earning years, but then starts to taper off.

Personally, I find it a bit surprising there's not more wise 45-54-year-olds that are into personal branding. I would have thought their cohort looked more like the 34-45-year-olds than the 55-64-year-olds. 

The survey captures the responses of 1,001 U.S. Internet users between August 11-15, 2013. Google Consumer Surveys are available to anyone for a nominal fee per each response. 

Personal Branding on Twitter 101: How to Emphasize Your Strengths One Tweet at a Time

Successful brands evoke feelings from their consumers. The best brands pick specific positive and relevant feelings that can be associated with the products they represent and laser-focus their advertising to drive home messages reflective of those feelings.

Coca-Cola is about togetherness and good times. Band-Aid is about comfort and security during life's boo-boos. McDonald's is about getting a quarter-pounder with cheese anywhere in the world at most times throughout the day (although they may call it a Royale with cheese if they have the metric system).

If someone read through every tweet you've ever posted, what would you be about? If your answer might be unclear or unpleasant, consider this personal branding 101 strategy for Twitter. 

Getting in Touch with Your Strengths

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You evoke feelings from Twitter followers, good or bad. The first step of a strong Twitter personal brand is to figure out what feelings you want people to associate with you.

Enter data. The Clifton StrengthsFinder personality assessment uses a ~30-minute online questionnaire to plot you against thousands of other individuals and then provides you with your 5 top strengths among a list of 34. For example, mine are: 

1. Activator
2. Maximizer
3. Futuristic
4. Communication
5. Strategic
   

Personal Branding for Twitter

Next, simply reference your strengths when you tweet and think about how to emphasize them as you craft your update.  This small, yet powerful habit can help shape and reinforce a greater personal brand through Twitter.

Using my strengths as an example, Maximizers might want to share ideas about business process improvement or optimization while those with Futuristic might demonstrate this strength best by tweeting about new products like Google Glass. 

Using two or more strengths within a single tweet takes practice, but emphasizes even more your unique combination of attributes. Activator/Communication tweets might be about empowering staff using social media. Futuristic/Strategic/Maximizer tweets might predict the best demographic to target for market success when developing for Google Glass. 

Even personal/humorous tweets can be "on-brand" when they align what you're good at as a person. Using your strengths as a guide to what to tweet doesn't turn out to be all that confining. It's just more of an ongoing reminder of how to best position the types of things you want to share in a way that reinforces a consistent brand and evoke the desired emotions and feelings about your personal brand.

If you know your strengths, try out this exercise over the next few weeks to see if you can get into the habit, and if you do, come back and share whether you think it helped your personal brand take hold on Twitter. If you don't know your strengths, take the StrengthsFinder personality assessment at the end of every new copy of Tom Rath's StrengthsFinder 2.0.

Survey: Building a Personal Brand Remains a Mystery to Most Americans

How familiar are you with building a personal brand? If you said, "not at all," then you're like six out of ten Americans. According to our recent Google Consumer Survey of 3,014 U.S. Internet users, over two-thirds of the population had little-to-no idea what personal branding was, and only about one in ten had a better-than-average grasp of the process of applying brand and product marketing principles to one's own career development. 

U.S. Remains Blissfully Ignorant of Personal Branding

Most Americans don't know and could care less about personal branding. When asked what they'd like to learn about personal branding, very few survey respondents ventured any interest in the topic. A full forty-five percent said they wouldn't like to know anything about it. Some responses even contained a hint of contempt for building a personal brand, which can be seen by looking at a word cloud of a portion of the responses:

View fullsize

"Not a damn thing" and "how to avoid it" are among the most colorful responses. 

Should More People Care About Building a Personal Brand?

Unemployment remains high at 7.4%. Less than a third of Americans report being engaged and inspired by their careers. Shouldn't people care more about marketing themselves to either land jobs or build careers they love? What's the barrier to building a personal brand in the U.S.? What do you think would cause people to become more interested the topic?