Personal Branding means trusting and communicating your vision
Interview with Personal Branding Coach Simone Brett-Murati
Is Personal Branding a must-have that will give your career a boost?
“Basically, anyone who positions themselves with a clear message in a job interview, in the company or within their industry has an advantage. Those who back up their words with actions and draw attention to their achievements according to the motto “Do good and talk about it” are more likely to be seen. In this respect, Personal Branding is an important tool for attracting the attention of the right people.
But: Personal branding is not a panacea. If you only talk the talk, but can’t back it up with results, you’ll quickly be exposed. Just like in advertising. If a product fails to deliver on its brand promise, no good campaign will help. Once the image has been damaged, lost trust has to be painstakingly rebuilt.”
So personal branding means building trust in myself?
“Exactly.
Think about why you keep going back to certain brands: because you love the taste of a particular type of coffee, for example. Maybe you like to go on vacation to a certain place because it’s your favorite place to relax. Or you buy sports shoes in a certain store because you appreciate the personal advice there.
All of these things have in common that they deliver reliable performance of consistent quality over a long period of time.
It’s the same with your job performance. Your Personal Branding process starts with becoming aware of what makes your results unique and why others can trust you.”
How do I start building my persona brand?
“You are an influencer in your own sense. This requires that you know what is important to you personally and what is your attitude towards important trends in your industry. In this way you are an identification surface for your followers and give them a reason to follow you.
Where do I build my personal brand? Will everyone need their own YouTube channel in the future?
That depends on who you want to reach with your personal brand. As a personal fitness trainer, YouTube and Instagram are perfect for staying in touch with your clients outside of training hours and, of course, for getting found by new clients.
If you’re an entrepreneur and interim manager looking to build new business contacts, LinkedIn is the place to be. This is also true for employees who want to reach potential future colleagues and employers.
In order to achieve trust, your personal brand should be just as tangible in analog as it is in digital. Credibility only arises when your real world behavior and digital presence are congruent.”
How private can or should LinkedIn posts be — the more private the more reach?
“No one expects a soul striptease, that’s cringe content. It has become a common habit on LinkedIn that stories are made-up, copied and reposted x times just to gain reach. Unfortunately it works — but only for the moment. Why should you care about thousands of likes for one post, which everyone has forgotten the day after?
Branding means building your reputation over a long period of time and building deep, personal and emotional relationships with your audience. This doesn’t happen overnight.
A good benchmark is to ask yourself: what would I also share of myself in the office or at a business event?
An important learning is that more public visibility doesn’t mean having to reveal everything about yourself. Don’t confuse being personal with being private.
Being personal means showing yourself in a human way, for example, by using your own words and not just passing on posts from the marketing department. Setting the content framework with a social media manual, and allowing employees their own scope of action, is what I recommend companies should be doing.
My advise:
Every post, comment and article you share publicly should always clearly answer these three questions:
→ Does the post deliver an AHA moment to your contacts.
→ Does the post consider the professional interests of your contacts
→ Does the post relate to your workplace
→ Do you include people from your network into the post by tagging them
If this is the case, your post fulfils all requirements to gain high reach in your own community.”
How do I market myself if I am rather introvert and don’t want to appear too self-promoting?
“Many of my coachees ask themselves this question, and I have asked it myself. For example, I want to be measured by my coaching performance and the impact my consulting has on the lives of my coachees — not by the number of followers, likes or LinkedIn Lives I do.
The fact is, especially if you’re not a born entertainer, your personal brand helps you identify what’s really important to you and what’s worth standing up for and becoming visible.
In many coaching sessions I have noticed that especially those who describe themselves as introverts have a particularly strong will and often already a very clear vision. On the other side, however, their belief system is keeping them from making it public.
That’s a shame. Because only if you show yourself, you have the chance to find people who support you and your cause.
That’s why in my coaching we first talk about what drives you and only then about how you sell yourself.”
How do I control my digital identity — once I have a LinkedIn profile, the information stays online forever, right?
“The best way to control how you are perceived digitally is to be authentic and share honest information. The image people get of you online has to be confirmed in a face-to-face conversation, otherwise your credibility is gone.
How your brand is presented on your LinkedIn profile and in the feature box is something we work out in coaching. What is written there about you should essentially hold true, even if the general conditions change over time.
Basically, your LinkedIn profile can be restored within 30 days of deletion. If you overwrite your LinkedIn profile with new information, the old version is deleted and can no longer be found.
In the privacy settings, you can set whether your profile should be indexed and found by search engines like Google. If you disable this, your profile will not appear on Google. Additionally, you have to be logged in on LinkedIn to see profiles of other members.”
What advantages do I have when I become active in social networks?
“First, you should define clear goals for yourself: what do I actually want to achieve with my personal brand?
→ Am I an entrepreneur and do I need investors and awareness because my product is linked 1:1 with my name?
→ Do I want to shape debates in my industry and initiate changes that go beyond my company?
→ Do I want to attract new employers to my company
→ Do I have a personal story that can inspire and help others in the same profession, along the lines of “what I wish I had told my 20-year-old self?”
→ Am I looking for new networking opportunities because trade shows, business trips and events are cancelled
Depending on what your goal is, social media is a great fit. LinkedIn in particular, as a platform, also offers its members free opportunities to network with the right contacts and gain reach for your own purpose. This is precisely the greatest benefit for most.”
How much time do I have to invest to be permanently visible on LinkedIn?
“You should schedule about 30min every day.
In this time you comment on the posts of your contacts and answer comments and messages that you have received. Additionally, you should schedule about 1hr per week to write your posts for the next week and upload them to a tool like Buffer.
Your posts will then be posted automatically, leaving you free to interact with your network. This is much more important than the posts themselves.”
What makes your THINK DREAM LOVE DO Personal Branding concept so special?
“I help you to recognize what you stand for and what makes you valuable and irreplaceable for your company and your customers.
Within four weeks you will have a completely new personal appearance and an imagination of yourself as a valuable personal brand.
I identify behavioral patterns that prevent you from realizing your full potential and develop an image of yourself that matches your strengths.
Your transformation through coaching with me takes place on three levels:
→ Consciousness: You find out what’s driving you and what’s actually your vision in your workplace and life.
→ Relationships: With the newly gained clarity, you consciously shape important professional relationships and control how you are perceived by external and internal stakeholders.
→ Actions: You will receive important tools and strategies for your appearance and your elevator pitch in social media, in job interviews, in negotiation talks and in all situations that are important for your career.”
Where do I get more information on your Personal Branding Coaching?
“I train Executives from companies like Salesforce and Microsoft as well as Interim Managers, founders and entrepreneurs. Best is to get in touch with me via LinkedIn. We’ll schedule an appointment and figure out where your Personal Brand should take you and what I your coaching will look like.”
About Simone Brett-Murati:
Simone Brett-Murati is founder of Personal Branding Online Coaching and offers strategic Thought-Leadership coaching as well as LinkedIn training.
With nearly 20 years of international professional experience in PR, communications and sales marketing, Simone Brett-Murati’s vision is to enable everyone in sales to generate warm inbound leads and forgo cold calling. As a personal branding coach, she helps leaders identify what makes them valuable to their company and their customers, and what makes their contribution irreplaceable. Simone Brett-Murati held various leadership positions in agencies and medium-sized companies before becoming self-employed.
She is a certified systemic business coach and author of “Personal responsibility in a digitalized world — or why I allow my child to watch YouTube”, published by SpringerGabler Verlag, Berlin. Multiple award winner and jury member for marketing, PR and creation of the German Stevie Awards and the Asian-Pacific Stevie Awards.
