Social branding – developing your voice

Recently, I watched an interview on YouTube with Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook’s COO. Not only did she talk about her current book, Option B: Facing adversity, building resilience, and finding joy, she also provided some fantastic tips on how to pursue a meaningful and successful career.

One of the key points she spoke about was, that developing your personal brand is a bad idea. Now, being that social branding is something that I speak and write on very extensively, this comment grabbed my attention.

The idea of developing your personal brand is a bad one, according to Sandberg. “People aren’t brands,” she says. “That’s what products need. They need to be packaged cleanly, neatly, concretely. People aren’t like that.” Sandberg furthers adds, that focusing on developing your voice, asking “who I am” and working out “what’s important to you” is much more “valuable” and has “integrity”.

Now I completely agree with Sandberg’s comments, however, I also still believe in social branding. Because social branding is an opportunity to reveal who you are and what you are passionate about. It provides a platform to find your voice. Most of us don’t have Sandberg’s public platform for our voice to be heard. However, social tools give us this possibility for our voice to be heard through commenting, sharing and inspiring.

When I speak on social branding there are a number of things I talk on. Here are 3 key tips:

Embrace who you are

This goes with Sandberg’s “who am I” question. Understanding who you are and embracing this is important. Everyone is different in some way and this is a great thing otherwise our world would be fairly boring.  It is your differences that make you who you are.  Accept and welcome your quirks as this is the unique value you bring as a human being.

Reputation

This is what I like to refer to as ‘your story’. It becomes the ‘word of mouth’ of your career and it defines who you are and what people think about you.  I love this quote from Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com, “personal brand is what people say about you when you leave the room”. Everyone has a brand even if they don’t want one or don’t believe in it. Because your reputation is your brand.

Respect

At times, it seems that this word has almost become ‘old-fashioned’. Everyone is rushing off to do ‘something’ or be ‘somewhere’. Superficially, it appears that we value ‘things’ more than ‘people’. However, overall I don’t believe this. Respect is more important today than it has ever been. People build relationships – we are social beings. Individually if you are authentic, give of your time and respect people; then people will come to have trust and respect in you. And this is the greatest sign of integrity.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ‘tweet’ or ‘repost’ this blog or subscribe to our newsletter for more tips.

Take a look at our website or Facebook page for more information about how we can support your business.

Tags: Online Reputation • Social branding • social Media • social media branding