As anyone with access to the Internet can broadcast his personal stories without any difficulty, this medium has become a major tool for personal branding.
The ease with which users can put the details of their personal and professional lives out there blinds them to the fact that personal branding is essentially hard work.
Technology has not altered the essential rules of personal branding. One of them is validation. Here’s a hypothetical situation of someone bombarding his friends and connections — on Facebook and LinkedIn — with pictures and accounts of his achievements. If getting more eyeballs to what he does is the aim, he has indeed succeeded. Does this indefatigable effort translate into effective personal branding? In all likelihood, it doesn’t.
Such posts may garner considerable likes. However, he is likely to come across as a big braggart to the majority of those on his list.
Even some of those who regularly give his posts a ‘thumbs up’ are likely to see him as one. In contrast, if somebody else, one highly respected in his professional circles, posts pictures and accounts of this man’s achievement, the latter's stock is bound to go up. Because, the validation comes from outside. Often, to get such validation from highly esteemed peers one has to maintain high professional standards. Donn Kabiraj, a personal branding expert active in Canada and India, says personal branding is often equated with public relations, which is a fatal mistake.
“PR is one aspect — a very small one at that — of personal branding. Personal branding is about communicating your core values powerfully, so much so that they shine through whatever you do,” says Kabiraj.
Pointing out one’s personal and professional milestones is legitimate, provided it’s done in a manner that does not draw too much attention to oneself.
The reason is simple. We often hate to see in others the frailties that we ourselves suffer from — one of them is obsession with self.
Eshita Prasanna is a professional photographer with an offbeat focus — her clients are pet owners and her main subjects are pets — and therefore she has to continually explain to the world what she does. She believes personal branding is indispensable in her profession. She however is aware of the pitfalls — one of them is excessive personal branding.
When you do too much of it, you are likely to be in the face, says Eshita. Such a branding exercise can turn off people and lead them to question a professional’s abilities. “For personal branding to be effective, it has to be spaced out thoughtfully,” says Eshita.
Professionals build their personal brand effectively when they make what they do meaningful for many others.
It’s not a coincidence that many of those professionals who are seen as legends, have espoused causes — some of them are masters of self-actualisation. The bigger the cause, the greater the number of people it touches and the more irresistible one’s personal brand becomes.
People instinctively ally with those who are seen as going beyond the need to gratify self-centred goals. Another rule of effective personal branding is blazing a trail that others could follow. It’s usually an effort that inspires other people to conquer their sense of limitations.
Neville J. Bilimoria is an immigration consultant who has a passion for running, cycling and rowing. He developed a fascination for long distance running when he was forty one and in four and a half years he took part in 39 marathons — international and domestic — managing the feat by setting aside his weekends for these events. Not only that, he is now identified in a few Indian metros as the dawn-to-dusk (D2D) man.
In this event, he runs non-stop for six hours and cycles non-stop for another six hours to raise funds for charity. For many people whose paths he has crossed, he has become a synonym for endurance.
Neville gets invited to schools and colleges to talk about running and cycling. Another incontrovertible truth of effective personal branding: trying to be the best when nobody is watching. Neville believes people who become big brands believe in sincerity. When they show themselves sincere in small assignments, they are entrusted with bigger ones.
Another hallmark of effective personal branding is the faith people continue to have in someone during the times he hits low points in his personal life or career. “Once created, personal branding can be encashed anytime,” says Kabiraj.
The career of Sachin Tendulkar is most illustrative of this. He built so much goodwill for himself — both by his on-field brilliance and off-field behaviour — that he was worshipped throughout his career. When he went through a rough patch and the critics were clamouring for his ouster, his fans fabulously rose to his defence.
To give one example, two diehard Sachin-ites Vijay Santhanam and Shyam Balasubramanian wrote a book — If Cricket Is a Religion, Sachin Is God — which essentially explained what they have believed all along: that Sachin is the God of cricket.
