How to brand a person.

I got a great question from John Moyer of the Chicago Rush Arena Football team. You can see him interviewed on YouTube. He asked his question through LinkedIn…

“How to brand a person? What steps does a person take to create their presence?

My answer starts with the most important piece of the puzzle: what are your goals?

The first thing you have to know is why are you creating the brand? What do you have in mind? This is the same process whether you’re creating a brand for a business, a city or a person. And you have to remember—you aren’t really creating a brand, you’re uncovering it. It’s already there, you’re just polishing it a little.As a professional athlete, is your goal to be able to sign autographs and give talks about your career? Maybe write a book? Perhaps you want to be well-known enough that when opportunities come up, people come to you first. All these are legitimate.

 

So now you have that part under control. Next, get a sense of who you want to communicate with. Is it people near by? Is it people in a specific industry? Are you planning on talking to every human being throughout the world? That last one was a joke, by the way.

Then put a plan in place on who are the people that have influence over the audience you want to talk to. It could be the press. It could be people in an industry. Then you start communicating with them in a clear and constant pattern. Keep coming up with ideas. Also, make sure you have ways of keeping in front of the people you want to influence. It could just mean going to the right meetings and hanging at the right country club. You’re already using LinkedIn. Make sure you use MySpace, Facebook and post comments to the appropriate blogs.

But the most important thing is be consistent and be believable.

It doesn’t hurt to find a charity that you feel strongly about and give them a chunk of your time.

If you read my blog posting on “Get Famous” you’ll see that I got some great advice on this very subject when I was a young guy.

 

OK? Get out there and Get Famous!

You can see John Moyer’s company if you click here.

Tags: get famous, personal brand

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 12:31 am and is filed under Advertising, Issues Management, Marketing, Publicity, Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.