4 Steps to Create Your Personal Mantra

 

30x30x30 Blogathon Post #13:  June 13th – Gini Dietrich

I am thrilled to have Gini Dietrich on Day 13 of the Personal Branding Blogathon. My initial connection with Gini Dietrich had nothing to do with my passion for personal branding, marketing, or social media. Gini is an avid, crazy cyclist like me and we were introduced on Twitter by another cyclist, John Falchetto. Gini is a PR pro, blogging queen, and down-right fun person. She runs one of my favorite blogs Spin Sucks. Check out this quick video for her new book Marketing in the Round, co-authored with Geoff Livingston.

Enjoy Gini’s post and create your personal mantra!

 

The 30x30x30 Blogathon is happening every day in June! Click here to add to your feed, and you won’t miss a day!

 

4 Steps to Create Your Personal Mantra

So you want to build your personal brand. Let me ask you a question: Why? 

Is it to grow a business? Get a book deal? Get paid to speak? Get noticed for that big job you want? Get your first job out of school?

Whatever it is (and it works for all of these things), know what you’re setting out to do before you start.

A Quick Story

A couple of years after I started my business, Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm Arment Dietrich, I hired my first second in command.

She came from the corporate side, had a few more years experience than me, and knew how to manage people (I’m a great leader, but a terrible manager). She also is extremely intelligent.

I’ll never forget, after she’d been there for a few months, she said, “Why aren’t we branding this firm?”

My response, at the time, was, “Clients want us to do good work for them. I can’t imagine they’d appreciate our working on building a huge image for us instead of them.” She just shook her head and said, “Clients pay attention to these things. They want to work with the firms that get a lot of attention.”

It took me a long time (two years, in fact) to understand what she was saying and to take her counsel to heart. It also took a terrible economy and some time on my hands to implement her advice. What I discovered along the way is she was right.

“People want to work with people they perceive as successful and at the top of their careers.” Tweet This!

Your Personal Mantra

Just like we do when we’re researching a company, product, or service, people will Google you before they meet you in person. In fact, they’ll look at how you interact online and off before you’re invited in for a job interview or a new business pitch.

Why leave that reputation to chance?

The very first thing you want to do is create your personal mantra. This will be used in your Twitter profile, your blog bio, your Pinterest description, your LinkedIn bio, your Google+ description…it’ll be used everywhere you need a two or three sentence bio.

In order to figure out your personal mantra, you want to follow these 4 steps:

Step 1. Determine your emotional appeal

• Do you want to build a reputation for being funny and quirky like Erika Napoletano?
• Do you want to be known for your solid, metrics-driven insight like Jay Baer?
• Or perhaps you want to provide insights into real-time technology changes, Big Data, and advertising and marketing advances like Mitch Joel.

Whatever it is, know why people like you in order to determine your emotional appeal

Step 2. Create your description

Think about the industry you’re in or what tangible skills you have in order to create your description. Ask yourself:

• What field or industry am I in (or want to be in)?
• What are the words I use to talk about my work (one word descriptive adjectives)?
• Who is my target audience?

Answers to these will help you figure out your description.

Step 3. Think about your function

Write down exactly what you do (or want to do). It might be something directly related to your career at this very second (graphics, writer, sales, financial planning, culinary arts) or it could be something more broad (creator, organizer, connector). Whatever it is, the following questions will help you determine your function:

• What service do I have to offer people?
• What do I do that is different from anyone else?
• What do I do that makes me stand out from the crowd?

Step 4. Put it all together

Now comes the hard part. How can you combine what you’ve written into two or three sentences? Once you’re able to do that, you have your personal mantra.

• In some cases it will be phrases like Geoff Livingston’s Twitter bio as an example.
• In others, it will be three complete sentences like Danny Brown’s bio as an example.

No matter how you write it, your personal mantra will be used consistently across the web as you begin to build your brand. This is how people will begin to perceive you so take control and make it happen!