Personal brand development...

Its been a while since I shared some thoughts on Personal Brand Development with Kris Krug down at the Bryght offices. I was particularly keen for his (and their) perspective on it as the Web 2.0 is such an interesting opportunity for personal brand development. (Shameless plug: I currently use Bryght to host my personal Web 2.0 site)

I should mention at this point that I am not an authority on Personal Brand development... as a matter of fact if you google or "technorati" me, you will find things that probably aren't that interesting...

... having said that, what I have always wanted to do was get behind all the members of our team at Sunaptic Solutions in order to promote their individual personal brands. The concept for me is simple:

"where an individual's personal brand succeeds, the organization succeeds with it"

My concept has always been to find something that you and the employee can take an active interest in building together that is of mutual personal value. The answer is almost resoundingly ... them.

Conventional wisdom might suggest that everyone in the company should all pull their weight to promote and build the corporate brand, but I think that is shortsighted. You could also argue that if you are ultimately successful, and their brand is successful (and by extension their "marketable value" increases) you will need to a) pay them more, b) deal with a bloated ego or even c) promote a destructive culture.

In my experience, when employees can see that their personal success is of real interest to you, you will instill in them confidence, loyalty and trust.

... am I a good practitioner? Maybe not... but I'm working on it, and I believe in the concept fully. The next step is to fully understand the vehicles at our disposal to make the concept of Personal Brand Development real and effective.

personalbranddevelopment | personalbrand | kriskrug | jamehealy | bryght | web2.0