Personal Branding¶
To be a great technical expert, you do not only do exceptional technical work, and also exceptional job to let people see your skills.
Build your personal brand¶
Your personal brand is how others perceive you. It means you can ask others, capture their language, use their language in your branding.
First, let’s write down what is your personal brand is.
Then, you can do the followings:
Do these things
Answer questions
Document your learning
Share your failures
Build something new
Talk about your development process
Justify your technical decisions
Share updates on what you’re building
The channels you can utilize are, blog, conferences, usergroup, stackoverflow, github, hacker news, Reddit programming, etc.
Methods¶
There are various methods to build personal branches, some of them are easy while the others are hard.
Easy |
Hard |
Hardest |
|
Conference |
Attend |
Speak |
Create |
Forum |
Lurk |
Post |
Build |
Blog |
Read |
Write |
Tribe |
Framework |
Learn |
Master |
Create |
The personal brand needs to be built step by step.
Define brand boundaries
Tagline
30 Second Pitch
Business Cards
About.me
LinkedIn Profile (Summary, etc.)
On-brand picture/avatar
Testimonials: Find influencial people and say something about you or recommond you
Blog
Ebook, Pluralsight course
Toast master
Regarding to business card, there are creative examples in the following link:
https://mashable.com/2013/05/16/crazy-business-cards
The business card can also be interactive:
Push it further¶
Start acting like a thought leader. Fake it before you make it.
Pay for your own travel to speak across the country
Post consistently to your blog as though readers already exist
Write a book - even if you have no publisher
Act like you’re rich
Pay others to free up your time
Start working only part-time so you have more time to learn
Speak in public
Startup weekend/code for charity
Connect people: create a meetup/user group/mastermind
Do open source project
Be social: never eat alone
Help your evangelists
Measure your brand¶
You shall measure the brand to see where you are.
Google Alerts/Talkwalker/Social Mention
TweetBeep
Online ID Calculator
Bit.ly for shared links
CEO of Me, Inc¶
It will be interesting to treat yourself as a comapay: Me, Inc. And you are also the CEO.
Key questions you need to address:
How do people perceive me?
How do people find you?
You have a market team (you): who do I market to?
If you want to market to the whole world, then the effort will be huge, how can I achieve that?
Think differently¶
People with less programming/technical skills but much better communications skills will often be more successful than you.
Stop, think, speak!
Search for Scale:
L1: Work: fix bugs, bill by the hour, do as you’re told
L2: Lead (Talk about work): Select architectures & technologies, mentor, hire & lead teams, define project scope & process
L3: Own: Product: SAAS, PAAS, framework, author
Luck Surface Area¶
Your Luck Surface Area is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.
by Jason Roberts (see details from Bit.ly/1heY4uo)
Networking & Communication¶
You network and relationship means your brand, employability, revenue stream.
The best networkers are listeners rather than talkers, have a clear agenda, and are not shy about asking for feedback and guidance.
Remember that networking is more about giving than it is about talking. - Martin Buckland
Give more than take, but ready to receive
Power Connector¶
Should you be a Power Connector?
You provide value to your contacts
You strengthen your relationship with others
Your brand solidifies and includes: ‘seems to know everyone!’
You focus more on giving
Quality of communication¶
For communication: Quality is over Quantity
Impact of words - 7%
Impact of voice - 38%
Impact of body language - 58%
Be careful of the inconsistent message.
Listen with all your senses. The truth about multitasking - just a fantasy!
Written by Binwei@Singapore
