You can’t build a personal brand until you do a little soul searching and research. Let’s take a look at some things to think about when developing your brand.

First, perform a self-assessment. What are your most important values? Consider these carefully for they will form the foundation or heart of your brand. Here I’m talking about personal values – honesty, trustworthiness, patience – that transcend workplace values.

Do you exhibit these values consistently? Ask for candid opinions from colleagues, family and friends.

What comes to mind when they think of the brand called you? You may find the answer to this question fascinating because each person has a little different view of who they think you are and how they describe you. Is this view consistent with your stated values? If not, what can you do to change these perceptions?

Next, review your personal image as it relates to the workplace. Clothes may not make the man, but – like it or not – they do make a visual statement about who you are.

Do you dress for the job you have or the job you want? What is the state of your personal grooming? What is your body language like when talking with co-workers, or supervisors?

Are you always prepared for meetings? If a colleague asks for something that you should have, could you find it or access it quickly? How do you service your colleagues and your company’s customers when they make a request of you? Do you answer the telephone politely? How is your email etiquette?

Are your workspace and your computer desktop organized so that you can get to things quickly and efficiently? How does it appear to someone coming to your doorway?

Are you up-to-speed on all the skills you need to excel at your job? Do you take advantage of all training offered?

As with businesses, only a few people ever do the upfront work necessary to bring their personal brand to fruition.

Will your brand thrive thanks to a coordinated effort on your part, or will it always need brand aid because of neglect? You hold the key.

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The best brands always try to do the right thing, so that their reputations will remain unsullied. But beyond that they grow, evolve and get better with time, while maintaining their special qualities from the past.

We all have a personal brand with social, cultural, intellectual, and personal needs that may not necessarily be addressed in our daily work. Address these needs and you begin to improve your brand. Here is my agenda for building your brand.

• Join and participate in community and professional organizations
• Generate media coverage about your brand
• Stay in touch, or renew old ties with friends, family and business associates

Let’s examine how each one improves your brand.

Join and participate in professional and community organizations

The best brands grow, evolve and get better with time, while maintaining their special qualities from the past.

Professional and community organizations provide ample opportunity to learn and grow.

They provide professional development opportunities. They allow you to network with peers as well as with people you would not necessarily ever meet in the normal course of your workday.

For instance, I served on the board of our local International Association of Business Communicators chapter. This allowed me to broaden my contacts in the corporate communications world, as well as form a number of friendships I probably never would have developed. As a member of the North Carolina Citizens For Business and Industry, I met people from all walks of life and all work disciplines. Finally, I have been involved with Charlotte Reads, a local non-profit that focuses on literacy issues. This allowed me to use my communication experience in support of an issue I feel very strongly about.

But it’s not enough to just join groups: you must participate to benefit fully. As a participant you have the opportunity to stretch, to gain confidence in yourself. Learn to lead by involvement on the board or in a special project. If you are a communicator by trade, try being treasurer for the group to exercise the other side of your brain, or take on a special project about which you feel strongly.

Generate media coverage about your brand

All that professional and community involvement will certainly lead to opportunities to leverage that involvement into news about the brand called you. And, of course, there will be promotions, new assignments, and awards at work, too. More opportunities to make headlines.

Your achievements are of interest to local print, broadcast, and online media, particularly the business pages. In Charlotte, the Observer has a weekly feature called On The Move spotlighting someone in a new position. The Charlotte Business Journal has a similar feature called Moving Up. If it is a big enough move and your company won’t do it, pay to place it on PRWEB, BusinessWire or PR Newswire. Consider it an investment in your future. Don’t forget trade publications serving your industry and alumni publications.

Seek out speaking engagements and write guest articles, too. This is yet another way to publicize your brand. And don’t forget to do news releases when you make a speech or write an article. It’s all about merchandising.

To stay top of mind, you might even want to develop your own monthly e-newsletter. Keep it mostly informational and limit the commercial material.

Stay in touch, or renew old ties with friends, family and business associates

Everyone you know can be a brand ambassador for you, so stay in touch or reach out to those you haven’t talked with for a while.

Yet another reason for having a monthly newsletter that shares your expertise.

The network of contacts you have built over your lifetime will be instrumental if you decide to start your own business, or change jobs.

So, heed this word of advice: always deal fairly with people. One bad experience with your brand can negate 10 positive ones.

Now, get out there and start branding.

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Rewarding Creativity - Extrinsic motivation–especially based on monetary rewards–has a detrimental effect on creativity. But is this really true?

Innovation Requires Both Ideas And Action - Some say the lack of innovation within organizations isn’t because of a lack of ideas, rather a lack of action. There are too many ideas and not enough implementors.

Mark Twain On Originality – Is combinatorial creativity plagiarism? Let’s ask Mark Twain.

What Chimpanzees Can Teach Us About Inspiration - Zoologist Desmond Morris performed some interesting experiments with chimpanzees which may provide some insight into intention. In one experiment, chimps were given canvas and paint.

Doubting & Creating – Do you worry that you will awake one morning and people will have discovered you are a fake? Doubt is a good creativity motivator.

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Are you using Pinterest to drive traffic back to your blog? I am experimenting with it. Why? Well, a recent study indicates that Pinterest drives more sales than Facebook. Is this true? Don’t know. But a little experimentation doesn’t cost me anything. So, why not?

I’ve set up two boards, the one you see above about How To Use LinkedIn, and another on marketing communications, primarily to direct traffic back here to THINKing.

If this idea gains traction, I’ll be developing additional boards where I have a lot of content in a specific topic, such as creativity.

My digital colleague, Joan Stewart, also is utilizing Pinterest in this manner. She has a very solid board on Best Ways To Get Free Publicity. Stewart says there are many ways to use Pinterest for publicity:

1. If you sell to women, this site is the place for you because women dominate it.

2. Create a board and “pin” the most beautiful photos of your own products, or photos from your book, with links back to your website.

3. Don’t have beautiful photos? Buy them for next to nothing on the stock photo sites. You can buy photos related to what you sell.

4. Link photos to your old blog posts, how-to articles and other content at your website.

5. Nonprofits, pin photos of your volunteers, or products you’re featuring at a silent auction fund-raiser, and link to a page where people can volunteer, or buy tickets.

Our friends at Childress Vineyards also are using Pinterest to drive traffic to their website. They have boards to help sell their wines and their wine accessories, as well as to promote visitation to the winery.

Here are some other resources on using Pinterest:

Blogworld has produced a free e-book on the topic

How To Use Pinterest To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Use Pinterest To Drive Massive Traffic

7 Hot Pinterest Tips 

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There are some writing errors that can make you appear stupid, particularly if you call yourself a professional writer. You would not believe – or perhaps you would – how many times I have received content from “writers” containing some of these errors. So, I have compiled my list of things you need to know if writing is your vocation or avocation.

You might be a writer if you know:

- – how to use there, their and they’re correctly

- – the difference between its and it’s

- – when to use peek, peak and pique

- – the difference between affect and effect

- – how to use an apostrophe correctly

- – when to use a hyphen to form a two-word adjective

- – the difference between loose and lose

- – when to use roll instead of role

- – that it is never correct to use “should of” in place of “should have”

OK, that’s my list. Which ones did I omit that really irk you?

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5 Effortless Postures That Foster Creative Thinking - Literally sitting outside a box, rather than in it, makes you more creative, according to new psychological research.

Doodling For Dollars - Employees at a range of businesses are being encouraged by their companies to doodle their ideas and draw diagrams to explain complicated concepts to colleagues.

201 Ways To Arouse Your Creativity - Creativity is like sex. You fumble your way through, you get lost in it, you fall in love. Both are passionate, rhythmic, pleasurable, and flowing. Both can bear fruit. And both can rack your soul with vulnerability, bliss, fear and awkwardness.

Why Innovation Dies - Faced with disruptive innovation, you can be sure any possibility for innovation dies when a company forms a committee for an “overarching strategy.”

Daily Creativity: Double Page Spread - Every day, open a sketchbook and create anything you want on two facing pages, or the double page spread (DPS).

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LinkedIn – Branding - We’ve been talking recently about LinkedIn and the numerous ways you can utilize the platform for yourself and your organization. In this post, we take a look at branding.

Creativity Boost #1 – Mindtrip - Creativity is one of the key topics we discuss here at THINKing. So, we decided to develop a series of posts that focuses on ways to boost your creativity. This boost: the mindtrip.

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Our digital colleague and social media public relations counselor, Rodger Johnson, has written a series for THINKing about issues management. This post provides you a brief overview of each installment plus a link to get to them easily.

How To Manage Issues Before They Become A Crisis - Organizations large and small, for profit or not, must struggle with issues that affect the way they do business. Learning how to spot, and take part in shaping issues can strengthen brand equity and give you a competitive advantage.

What Is The Life Cycle Of An Issue? - Understanding where issues lie in their cycle is important because where they lie will determine how you will engage and manage them.

What’s The Difference Between An Issue, A Crisis And An Emergency? – In the grand scheme of things knowing the difference between an issue, a crisis and an emergency can help you craft appropriate communication strategies to weather the storms.

How To Plan For Issue Management & Successfully Engage The Marketplace - “Pink slime“  is a prime example of how an organization failed to manage an issue before it changed the course of its operations and tarnish its brand along the way.

What To Expect In A Crisis –  Crises are particularly nasty and unpredictable. Needless to say, they will also change the very fabric of how your organization does business. They are game changers, and because of that, there are several traits of a crisis you should know.

How To Repair Your Company’s Image And Regain Brand Equity – Managing a company brand is about doing the right thing when something goes wrong and a customer gets the short of it. Let’s discuss several brand reputation recovery strategies.

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Brainstorm Like A School Lunch Tray – In brainstorming, we need to get beyond the old adage: there are no bad ideas. How? Compartmentalize.

An Absurd Idea To Create Wonder - In your own work and life, what are the elements missing that should be there? What absurd ideas can bring wonder and beauty into your own work?

Taking Action: 8 Ways To Classify Ideas –  A great way to evaluate your ideas is by categorizing them into what Edward de Bono in his book Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas calls ”End Categories.”

How Geniuses Think – Geniuses, it seems, don’t stop at the first answer, or the second, or – you get the picture.

How To Nurture Your Creative Spark To Benefit Your Career – How much of our creative and true selves do we lose in the process of conforming to corporate culture?

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My plan to publish the last in a series of six crisis management posts was delayed by a mountain of work from my clients. But these things happen for a reason, and for this post, I have a great story of a moving company whose owner hasn’t the first clue about damage control.

About a week ago I moved cross town to a new condo in an eclectic neighborhood of Indianapolis. Planning for this move had been months in coming. I did my homework, shopped the Internet for local moving companies and found one that seemed a good fit. To be honest, the move went well until the moving team broke my headboard.

Minutes after the two-man team left, I began to unpack, starting with my bedroom. As I moved boxes and began to arrange furniture, to my surprise a large chunk of my headboard was missing. Either the moving boys dropped it and didn’t tell me. (That’s irritating!) Or, the load was shifted in the truck, which might have cause the damage. In any case, the moving company was liable.

Typically, local family-owned companies do  the right thing and make good with customers when something goes wrong. But not this company owner. No. The owner met me a few days later and assessed the damage. This is when things turned ugly.

Managing a company brand is about doing the right thing when something goes wrong and a customer gets the short of it. But there are several other brand reputation recovery strategies:

• Denial: This is a typical finger-pointing strategy, where executives try to put the blame on someone or something else.
• Reducing impact: Executives employing this strategy will stress positive attributes of an event, try to minimize the seriousness of a crisis, do more finger pointing, or compensate those involved to shut them up.
• Corrective action: Executives understand and accept the gravity of the crisis and plan to solve the problem and prevent it from happening in the future.

The best and right strategy to take is the third one. Unfortunately, the moving company’s owner told me, “Well, my boys said they didn’t do that. Perhaps your girlfriend accidentally tipped it and broke it. Embarrassed of what she did, do you think she might blame my guys?”

He denied and put the blame elsewhere, which was a bad move. In our conversation, which became terse, I told him that would have been impossible. Then I told him the right thing to do is replace the headboard. But he would have none of that.

I don’t have to tell you that this made me mad and he tarnished his brand. I even told him so, but he refused to listen. We are now on the verge of meeting each other in small claims court.

What could have been resolved quickly through direct, swift corrective action followed by an apology will cost the moving company and me more money and resources we don’t have.

The best way to control damage and repair a brand image is to do the right thing. Restore the situation and the people involved to their rightful state before the crisis happened. Apologize. And set plans and procedures to prevent such calamities from occurring again.

About The Author: This is the sixth in a series of articles on issues management from our digital colleague, Rodger D. Johnson, who is a social media public relations counselor. He helps global companies, small businesses, and non-profits use public relations and social media strategies to strengthen brand equity. You can learn more about him at Get Social PR. 

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