Personal Branding’s Not About You

Being thrust into the social media revolution as a marketing professional, I was almost immediately confronted with the idea of the personal brand, the notion that you need to use these sites to brand yourself in a certain way so that you’re noticed for job opportunities, consultant work, or anything of that sort. Over the past two years I’ve come into a lot of contact with personal brands, and not only do I think people are misusing this concept, I think people are becoming less social because of it.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that everyone seems to think personal branding is about them being the next star. When we opened up our Community Manager position for example, we had a bunch of candidates apply that had thousands of followers on their Twitter accounts. We didn’t hire them. It was obvious they were good at representing and promoting themselves, but it didn’t show us at all how good they would be about representing and promoting us as a company. We hired someone who didn’t have a thousand followers, but who showed us that she could do what we want for the company. When you are trying to be a star, you are not going to spend the same amount of energy making the company you work for a star. If you’re a marketing professional, personal branding shouldn’t be about you, but about what you can do for a company looking to hire you, or a potential client looking to solicit your services.

The second thing I’ve noticed is the focus on the personal brand means that everyone has created their own brand, and is doing their own thing. Everyone is a consultant for their own company. Everyone has their own website, or their own blog, or their own startup project. People are more connected than ever on these social networks, but none of them are working together on anything. They’re all just working on their own personal brands and their own projects. Personal branding seems to have made everyone so selfish that no one is collaborating anymore, and because of it, no one is being successful. Ideas are brought to life when people work together to make them happen. Successful companies don’t run with just one employee.

Look at your personal brand. Does it say how you can help others? Does it say that you can be a team player?

Don’t Be Social Until You’ve Grown Up A Little

I’ve been meeting with a lot of people lately that are launching their own web businesses and hearing about even more. Naturally, they get very excited about what the site’s going to look like, all of the features it’s going to have, etc. There’s just one problem. Their site isn’t live yet. And it doesn’t have a launch date. I’d be much more impressed by them if I could see something, anything really. Reid Hoffmann, the founder of LinkedIn and a serial entrepreneur/investor once said, “If you aren’t embarrassed by what you launched with, you waited too long to launch.”

I’m going to take this thought a step further.  One of the most common features people will talk about in these cases are all the ways you’ll be able to interact on the site. They’ll talk about how they’re going to have a blog, a comment system, a forum, a social network, rss feeds – a myriad of ways their audience will be able to interact with the site. But, there is just one problem: they don’t have an audience yet. So when people do start to show up, they’re going to see an empty forum, only one blog post because they don’t have a blogger yet, no comments on the launch blog. Basically people see a site that’s dead or unpopular instead of a site they’re dying to interact with.

Social aspects to a company should be added over time as a company builds an audience that requires those interactions. It is best to wait once you have an audience or a community that wants to interact with you more before you suggest ways to do so to an audience that doesn’t even exist yet. Then, when you add these aspects, you can be seen as responding to the needs of the community and be confident that they are things that will actually be used. You may find that customers want to interact with you the company, but not others that use the service. You may find the opposite. Those outcomes require completely different services. It may be a forum you need, or it may something totally different.

These are things that are important to learn over time instead of predicting at the start of a company. You’ll end up with a company that grows with its audience, is responsive, and understands their needs. This is a relevant for a website as it is for a brick-and-mortar business. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment, but it does mean you should understand your audience before you determine how they’ll interact socially with you and with fellow customers.

Life on Record

When I graduated from high school, I wanted to move away from my home town and really get off the grid. Have no one from my school be able to find me, know where I was, or what I was doing. An innocent invitation to Facebook made that impossible. Now almost my entire high school class has sought me out through the social network to build their friend network, and if they ever actually look at my profile, they know where I am and what I’m doing. Thanks to Netflix they know my favorite movies. Thanks to last.fm my favorite music. Thanks to Twitter they now know what I’m thinking about all the time. And thanks to Foursquare they know where I’m at at this very moment. New startups like Blippy are even getting more personal with storing everything you buy.

For myself, there’s been value to storing all of this information. I can look at my Yelp profile to find the name of that restaurant I wanted to try, last.fm to figure out the name of that song that popped into my head, or Foursquare for the name of that bar I went to the other night. The internet has essentially replaced my need for in depth memory, because I can refresh my memory as easy as refreshing my browser by looking at my various profiles or order history on certain sites.

The side effect of that value is now all of that information is public. What does that really mean though? What it will mean, if it doesn’t already now, is that we are now, inadvertently, documenting our entire lives through the internet. In 50 years, obituaries won’t just list highlights of lives like degrees and jobs held or the names of your children. They will more likely be links to your public Facebook profile, with links to Netflix showing your favorite movies, your order history on Amazon, where you ate on your 30th birthday. All of that information will be available, stored, and digestible for those who care.

Think of the power of this information. Let’s say an Einstein exists in a coming generation. When he passes, historians can look at the music he was listening to before his biggest breakthrough or the books he read during his formative years. All of that information will be documented, searchable, and accessible, with the possibility of cross-referencing it with current members of society. Fill in the blanks on where that data takes us; there will certainly be interesting complications when it comes to things like decisions on public elections or job openings and even effects on parenting or school curriculum.

There are many that will push against this trend, but it is unavoidable. The internet generation now defines itself by what’s on its Facebook profile and the content of its tweets. Just look at IBM’s latest commercials. They’re actively working on stuff like this already with electronic systems. And if analysts don’t transition that research to individuals marketers certainly will. It’s easy for data junkies to get excited about this future, but it’s also easy for normal people to get scared, and both sides are probably right. Now, everyday people will start to have to consider questions like: what will the internet say about me when I’m gone? What does my personal data say about me?

If you had access to this data today, what would you search for?

The Michelob Effect

When I was a kid, I used to see quite a few ads for Michelob beer. They advertised on TV in the 80s quite a bit, so much so that in my head, I had placed the brand as the #4 beer, behind Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. It’s crazy how well ads work on you as a kid, but that’s a tangent. Anyways, after a certain amount of time, I stopped seeing ads for Michelob on TV, or anywhere for that matter. Ads for Bud, Miller, and Coors didn’t disappear, and ads for many other brands of beer started to appear, but I no longer saw any ads for Michelob. So, I assumed they went out of business.

Flash forward to the middle of this decade, and all of a sudden, I’m seeing TV ads for Michelob again. Lots of them, in fact. Hey, that company didn’t go out of business. Wait, it’s a not a separate company, but a wholly owned subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch? Well, I’ll be damned. What has their marketing department been doing for the last 15 years?

The point of this post is not my lack of knowledge in beer brands, or to hate on Michelob’s marketing department, but that Michelob, by heavily investing in an advertising medium for a long stretch of time, and then, at least in my eyes (I’m not sure that they actually did), pulling out of that medium for an even longer amount of time, created the illusion to me of them going out of business, when in fact they didn’t. By not advertising via television (at least that I watched) anymore, they still communicated an advertising message to me: that they didn’t exist anymore.

It’s important to remember that an advertising strategy is a long-term commitment to a communication channel with your customers, and that once you decide a certain advertising medium is something that works for your company and invest heavily in it, customers expect you to commit to that channel, basically forever. So, if you stop, you’re still communicating to your customer though the channel, but what you’re communicating is that you don’t want to talk to them anymore. This is as important with television ads as it is with a Twitter account or a website. If you’re putting that communication channel out there, you should be ready to cultivate and maintain it forever.

It’s Sometimes What You Don’t Remember That Makes It Personal

With the rise of behavioral targeting in advertising and personalization on websites, companies can deliver very targeted and very personalized messages to their customers. Companies can greet customers by name when they return to a website, ask them on another website why they didn’t buy when they abandon an order, and make recommendations based on previous purchases. This kind of personalization can work well, such as when Amazon recommends a new album coming out from a favorite artist or remembers my credit card and shipping info when finalizing a purchase. This kind of capability can also create a negative experience though, especially if what a company recognizes about a customer’s behavior is embarrassing to them. It’s important for companies to figure out when their customers want to be noticed and when they want to be ignored, online or elsewhere.

I’ll portray a few parallels to illustrate. Let’s say a person wants to see a psychologist. One of his good friends is a psychiatrist. Instead of using that friend, he solicits a stranger for his sessions, because he’s too embarrassed to admit to his friend that he needs this type of help. He is more comfortable sharing his thoughts with someone he doesn’t have a relationship with. That same person might be someone who loves that they remember his name at the local coffee shop every morning though.

Different people have different preferences when it comes to how personal they want an experience with a company to be. Companies need to create frameworks that indulge those who love to get personal treatment from their company and those who want to remain anonymous as well. It is also important to know that the same person might want a personal experience for one element of a service, but an anonymous one for another element.

Offline businesses seem to have developed a sense for when personal interaction is appropriate and for which customers. For example, at that coffee shop, they know to greet the soccer mom by name every morning, but also know not to bother the man with his newspaper. It’s a little harder to tell online sometimes. A person may not want to receive email recommendations from a service, but that same person might get angry at the fact that the website didn’t remember his credit card information.

Going back to that first example, with that psychiatrist, that person would likely want the psychiatrist to remember his last session upon return for a second visit, but he might not want that psychiatrist to say hello to him if they cross paths on the street. I imagine it’s very important for a psychiatrist to know those boundaries. It’s also important for a business. To truly personalize someone’s experience, you first need to understand what elements a customer wants personalized and what they don’t. Sometimes not remembering their names might be the best way to personalize their experience. Does your company know when your customers want you to say hello and when they want you to pretend they don’t exist? It should learn.

Why You Should Be Watching Porn

In the early days of the internet, web entrepreneurs didn’t have a lot of great role models. Sure, Amazon was around as was eBay, but the primary business owners in the early days of the internet were from the porn industry. My boss when I worked at Apartments.com relayed a funny, but important story to me as I was learning this new industry. He told me about a time he was out drinking with a representative from the analytics company WebSide Story (now HBX, a part of Omniture, which is now a part of Adobe. Yay acquisitions!). After a few drinks, the representative starts telling me boss about the old days of the company, when WebSide Story’s only clients were porn sites. They were the only sites that saw the value of tracking where their traffic was coming from and what their users were doing once they arrived on their domains.

The porn industry was by and large the first industry to understand the power of the internet as a distribution channel. They were the first to develop profitable business models from it, and the first to develop and practic many of the online marketing techniques we use today to drive revenue for our own businesses. The story above shows how they were the first to start using web analytics to understand traffic patterns and consumer behavior. But porn websites were also some of the first to understand search engine rankings, and use that knowledge to manipulate their own sites to rank higher for their important keywords (which at the time I would imagine were fairly generic: sex, porn, xxx, etc.). Later, when Google rose to prominence, they were the first to partner with other websites for link exchanges to boost each other’s authority. Look at pretty much any online marketing tool, and I can probably prove that porn sites were some of the first to do it (not to take anything away from Amazon or eBay, the former of which invented affiliate marketing. Thanks for keeping us classy, Bezos!)

These days, porn sites are mostly associated with viruses, spyware, and other frowned upon techniques. Many of the techniques they use now and back in the early days of the internet might seem unscrupulous or in bad taste. But that’s the point of this post. Porn sites were the innovators of the early internet, but because they were from a frowned upon industry, legitimate business owners refused to pay attention to what they were doing. As a result, billion dollar companies like Nike are years behind some undignified porn site owner in the middle of nowhere when it comes to certain online marketing techniques. Pay attention to what the fringe are doing. Their lack of ties to the mainstream allow them to experiment with new ideas more than anyone else. Some of these ideas may be in bad taste, but some of them might be great ideas you can apply to your business.

Who are the pornographers in your industry? Are your paying attention to what they are doing?

Don’t Coupon What You Can Get For Free, or the Economics of Value

I seem to be pretty unique in my attribution of value of products. I pretty much have an internal dollar amount in my head for every good I’d like to buy in terms of what much I would spend on it. This is the value that product provides for me. This value is in no way related to market value. Most consumers don’t necessarily have this quality. Consumers tend to abide by market value for products. So, for example, let’s say a leather jacket originally cost $500. It now costs $250, so it is discounted by 50% from market value. Person A might say this is a deal and buy the jacket. But let’s say my personal value for the jacket is only $100. This is still not a deal for me, so I would stay away. The jacket is bought by Person A, and Person A is now a customer of the store or brand of the jacket.

jacketprice

With the economy still struggling, people are trying to save money, but instead of sticking to personal value, people are responding to discounts on market value. Just look at how coupon sites like Groupon and CouponCabin are doing (Congrats by the way on your success. Fantastic work). These sites have built value by providing consumers great deals, and providing businesses great exposure. Seeing the success of these businesses, I’m sure many other businesses are seeing what they can do to discount their products. Don’t be so quick to jump to this method.

Any business you create should revolve around a core value. For Groupon and Coupon Cabin, coupons are their core value. But if the service you provide is not coupons and you are just discounting your service in the form of a coupon, you may doing your business a disservice. Discounts are an extremely powerful motivator in consumer behavior, and that is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that consumers really respond to them. Perceived, not necessarily real, discounts are a strong motivator, even if the consumer did not value the product at all at regular price. Discounts are primarily used as a marketing tool to entice purchases for things that don’t normally have value to users. This is the basis of high-low pricing in retail stores, and Wal-Mart’s antitheses, always low pricing. Sites like Groupon are using coupons to provide a large amount of exposure to local businesses that would otherwise have no way of getting that exposure. These are both valid uses of discounting.

But if you are now following the high-low pricing paradigm and you already have built awareness, the curse is that if you offer a discount, the value of your business before you offered a discount is replaced by that discount. Let’s say the core value at GrubHub.com to consumers is online ordering for delivery. If we offer a 10% off discount, our core value to consumers becomes “10% off delivery”. So, when we remove that discount, the consumer associates no value to our business. So, to entice repeat use, we have to offer that discount again.

As a business, you should focus on building a core value and have that value be something people are willing to pay for. If they are willing to pay for it, it has value. You can then elevate how much you can get users to pay by providing more value. Using a discount to market to your current consumers is just paying for what you would get for free by reinforcing your core value.

Don’t Be Unique: A Lesson in Applying for Jobs and Schools

When I was a high school student applying to universities, I had this assumption that application evaluators read thousands upon thousands of applications each year. To stand out, you really needed to show something unique in your application. So in all of my essays, if there was any sort of “other” option, I went for it, and crafted very unique essays. I didn’t get into any of the schools I wanted.

When I was applying for graduate schools right after college when I didn’t have any jobs lined up, I made the same mistake. I went for the unique essays, and again didn’t get in anywhere. Since I was a graduating senior, I was offered application feedback from one of these schools. The evaluator told me point blank, the evaluators extremely disliked your essays.

I didn’t quite understand why until I started evaluating resumes for a position at GrubHub.com. I had clear requirements of what I was looking for, and overall knew what I wanted. What I realized when I started evaluating these resumes was that I only wanted to see what I expected to see: experience in the skills necessary, a cover letter that actually mentioned things related to the job. Really simple requirements that almost no applications met. I probably received more applications that said they enjoyed windsurfing than those that said they were proficient in Excel. That’s when I finally understood where I went wrong in the past.

Evaluators of resumes for jobs or applications for schools don’t want uniqueness in their applications. So few people follow the directions of meet the requirements of what they want that a perfect application is just one that meets the basic requirements requested. Applications that are flashy or out of the box just make it harder to evaluate whether the candidate is right for the position or school. So, a lesson for those applying to jobs or schools: just do what the application asks, and do it right. Don’t try to be unique.