Branding is a journey. The topic has come up in a few conversations this week. Since July I’ve been working on my personal brand. Over the past months I’ve seen Jeremiah Owyang periodically mention how he branded the term ‘web strategist’. I didn’t feel a need to brand a term, but I needed to brand my name. As a librarian, I become known as the ‘library lady’. At the Hardee’s drive thru, I’d hear “Oh you work at the library!”. I knew this was the result of my photo appearing with my monthly newspaper column, so I had a sense of how it worked. Online is a bit different though and I admit that I’ve had great help!
My sister saw in my bio that I’m editor for Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Magazine. She & I work together pretty closely but she was wondering how it came to be? Well last July I blogged about branding & Dan posted a couple of comments. That started a conversation between us & I browsed his blog. Dan has an amazing amount of information on his blog. And what struck me the most was his understanding of the human spirit. At 23 he has achieved what took me until my late 30’s to realize. He asked me to write an article for his magazine & shortly after reading the first issue, I agreed to serve as editor.
You can get get his magazine here – Personal Branding Magazine
Thanks to Dan I realized some important things & did the following to make it easy for people to find me:
- purchased multiple domains:
- digiscrappinginfo.com; conniebensen.com, conniebenson.com
- created gmail accounts that match
- and started planning this blog
By the time I brought this blog up, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to brand it. My photo is used across all the forums I participate in as well as Facebook, Twitter, etc. It dictated the color here. Red has significance for me. I wear it when I have an important meeting (or dark purple). It’s a bright loud color that makes me feel good! So coming here is cheering too. :) When I asked about choosing a blog style on Twitter many said choose something that represents you. My sister has personalized it to suit me.
Dan made a comment recently that I’ve been mentoring him… that must have been my encouragement about Facebook & Twitter *grin* I’m probably a bad influence! I was looking at the meetup list for Boston in October. It’s my pleasure to connect my friends to each other. Enjoy!
Connie,
Great post, and one that can be used to help people get an idea on how to start in personal branding. Good idea on snapping up the “conniebenson.com” domain as well! ;)
Thanks Rick,
You’ve done some incredible writing on branding too! I’ve enjoyed reading it & reflecting on it.
[…] ‘personal branding’ like this nice one by Jeff Pulver or this one by Johan Myrberger or this one by Connie Bensen deal with the issues of (non-) anonymity and consistency, scratch the surface of ‘niche […]
[…] 1. Branding […]
hi, andar here, i just read your post. i like very much. agree to you, sir.