Creating and identifying your personal brand is about making important choices. How will your highest self show up in certain situations? After all, your brand is all about you! Adam Nugent and Kate Strong have an incredible conversation with marketing and brand consultant Caloni Michelle. From humble beginnings in a small town with nothing more than hard work, perseverance, and a dream, to extensively building personal brands for elite clients, Caloni shares how you can build your personal brand, meet your true potential, and live the life of your dreams.
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In this podcast excerpt, personal branding expert Caloni Michelle explains what a personal brand is and how we are constantly building our brands, intentionally or not.
AN: I’ve recently hired your firm and your team and am excited to learn all the things around building a personal brand. There’s some people that have blown up on social media for a number of different reasons. And my whole thing for me is wanting to always be authentic. What are some pointers, some things that people should be aware of when they’re building their personal brand on social media.
CM: So, we have company brands, we have product brands, and then we have personal brands. So each of us represent our own brand as an individual. Even if you may not be putting the effort, or you might not think that you have a brand or a reputation, you do. Even if you’re hardly posting on social media or you go to events, people are going to have a perception of you. And that perception of you is your brand, whether you’re intentional or not intentional about it. When we’re looking at a personal brand, it’s who do we represent? Who do we want to represent? What do we want to portray online? Not that we want anything to be fake when we’re portraying it, but what do we want people see?
As you’re building your personal brand, it’s important to know what your values are. . . . We want [content] to be innate to who we are because we’re also going to connect with other people through that content. That’s where they will come into our circle or become a member of our audience, if you will.
But also, you have to realize social media is a marketing tool. What do you do in marketing? You do what works. The marketing avenue that you choose to be with high integrity. However, you have to realize when people approach your social media profiles, there’s a vanity metric that they look at, and they look at the number of followers. They look at your likes, your comments, to your engagement, and the thing that a lot of the successful personal brands that are in the online space, they understand that game, and then they also play to it.
Visit calonimichelle.com and brandstrom.co to learn more.
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