Best Practice / CRITICAL CONCEPT: Personal branding is your suite of strengths, edited to ONE sweet spot.
Your personal brand is your hard-wired, who-you-are attributes, deconstructed and edited to uncover and promote the ONE thing that is at the core of everything you do—the ONE thing that is constant, consistent, and promises value. A strong brand is powerful and energizing. When you focus your career or business around your brand you create momentum, attract opportunity, and feed success and satisfaction. A consistent brand focus is the bedrock, immovable foundation of your career or business. It will sustain you in times of crisis and keep you true you in times of growth. Your brand is you—potent, pure—your path to your dreams.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / CRITICAL CONCEPT: Personal Branding is a spin-free activity.
By definition a personal brand is the antithesis of spin. It’s authenticity and differentiation. If you spin branding, if you “make it up” or “build it to specifications” other than your own true self, if you try to mold it to the marketplace or to a corporate culture, it’s no longer branding. The promise becomes puffery. Power becomes pretense. Poof … your brand is meaningless, and you’re ultimately miserable. Avoid the temptation to play to what you think others want you to be. Use the power of your authentic self to attract appropriate opportunities that are “on-brand” and in your sweet spot. That’s what builds branded success.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / CRITICAL CONCEPT: You need a professional brand, too!
There is a difference between your personal brand and your professional brand. Your Professional Brand is what your brand looks like when you take it to work. It’s what you DO with your personal brand in the workplace or in your business. It offers something VALUABLE to your target employer or client. Employers or clients don’t care much about your personal brand. Employers and clients care about themselves. They care about you only in terms of what you can do for them. Your professional brand speaks to them.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / CRITICAL CONCEPT: Your personal brand is initially meaningless to an employer or client.
Your brand is all about you, yet it is not all about you! Until you hit the short list, or get close to booking a deal or client, your Personal Brand (who you are) takes a back seat to your Professional Brand. Your Professional Brand is all about delivering value—return on investment/ROI. Your personal brand allows that to happen in a way that is differentiated and specific to you. Until you identify the impact that your personal brand (fit) makes on your professional brand (value), the employer or client won’t care. But once you do, that combination of ROI and fit is the sweet spot that gets you past your competition and into the job.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / CRITICAL CONCEPT: A clear branded value proposition is your professional brand’s sweet spot; it’s what employers want and need.
A powerful branded value proposition is the key to attracting the right opportunities and compensation. A branded value proposition makes your personal brand tangible, it gives it ROI, and it engenders trust as your brand’s tie to outcomes becomes trusted and transparent to the organization or client. A branded value proposition predicts future success as well—transfer value—proof you can take your process and do it in other environments to deliver similar results. A branded value proposition says—”I know what you need, I can do it, and I can prove I can do it!”

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Engage a guide for the journey.
Branding is tough-self assessment. Most of us need help to do it. If you can, invest in a certified personal brand strategist or a qualified coach to help you—the ROI is worth it. At a minimum, read Career Distinction (Arruda and Dixson) or other proven books on personal branding to absorb the concepts. Then work with a colleague or friend whom you can trust to be frank and impartial as you go through your personal brand process. Discovering your personal brand is almost impossible to do well if you do it alone.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Trust the process.
Be patient—branding is not an overnight gig. You’ll need to dig in and face energizing and tough truths. You’ll be in the mud a lot of the time, struggling to climb out with a sweet spot that is exactly you. Hang in there and you’ll come out of the swamp clean, happy, and powerful.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Reach out and in.
Branding does not work in a vacuum—you need “outside-in” feedback to test the validity of your perceptions. Be sure to poll a wide assortment of friends, colleagues, bosses, family, and others to compile feedback on your attributes, strengths, etc. Anonymous feedback is best—use a 360Reach assessment (the basic level is free—see http://www.reachcc.com/360reach) to obtain valuable insights delivered with the clarity that comes from respondents’ freedom from identity disclosure. (Note: a personal branding 360 focuses on reputation and is not the same as a corporate 360 that focuses on performance.)

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Be fearless and free.
Trust the value of authenticity. Stop hiding behind corporate-speak. Stop being a “suit”! Embrace how you do what you do, how that delivers big impact, how that ties to your passions, and talk about it in YOUR voice. That’s hard for people immersed in corporate culture. You may have to work hard to eradicate corporate-speak (it will creep back into your vernacular), but once you feel how good it is to use your voice—and how well it works—you’ll relax into it and relish it. The bonus benefit is that the ripples from your change touch your team members and stakeholders. They become more attuned to their particular voices and brands, and the impact of your brand extends to them and beyond.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Know your goals. Know your target’s goals.
You need to market your brand like any other valuable product, and that means that you need to know what you want to do with it and who needs what you have. You need the courage to project that level of specificity into the marketplace—you cannot be all things to all people. Once you narrow your sights, you broaden your success. This may seem counterintuitive, but true branders know this to be true.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Be opinionated, passionate, and extraordinary.
People will hire you for being YOU. Not for being a pale imitation of someone or something. Don’t mold to convention, to the status quo. If you have a strong point of view, a strong process, a strong passion, project it! Shout it out! There are companies out there that want it. And if they don’t know you have it, your reticence will take a potential win-win and make it a lose-lose. And who wants that? Go for the gusto and make your mark.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Become the hunter, not the hunted. Get visible to be valuable.
Get out there and be seen. Get out from behind the desk and make something happen that gets you traction, play, and awareness. Let your voice be heard. Network, write, blog, tweet, volunteer, give back, serve on a board … whatever you need to do to get known past your circle of company colleagues. Don’t be famous in your company and/or industry yet faceless outside of it.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Get online. Now!
Choose your venues carefully. Don’t scattergun. Pick several points of contact and maximize each. Some ideas: Use LinkedIn as a business networking tool. When used strategically it’s a powerful online brand extension, pseudo-resume home, and essential reference machine. Use Twitter frequently (even daily) to build immediate visibility by delivering sound bytes of attention-attracting, branded thought leadership. Comment on blogs and/or write your own blog. For not much effort you can get big returns in visibility and you gain a voice that will be heard.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Don’t be a sissy—be savvy!
Use the savvy that made you successful and translate that to job search and career management. No one said work was easy, and no one says job search is either. Who decided you could leave your skills / drive / execution at the door? Would YOU want to hire a lazy / boring / uninformed / depressed job seeker? Buck up and jump in, no matter how tough or depressing it seems.

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst

Best Practice / TOP TO-DO: Create a brand plan today.
Be proactive and make a plan for your daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly brand-enhancing / job-seeking / career-building activities. Systematic, positive, brand-driven action (as opposed to busy-work that makes you feel productive but does little) drives momentum towards success. And if it’s not working, course correct until you get somewhere. Branding gives you the best shot at achieving the best result no matter what the economy. Be patient, be proactive, be branded. Just do it!

Contributed by Deb Dib, RCPBS, CCMC, CCM, NCRW, CPRW, CEIP, JCTC, Certified 360Reach Analyst