First off I am a fan of Gary Vaynercuk he has inspired me to make more of myself and realise that “Ollie Parsley” is a brand and that I can utilise that to both make myself better and also help my career.
With that in mind I thought I would just talk about how I use my personal brand and spread the word of Ollie Parsley! This is not a post about trying to boost my ego but to show you what your personal brand is and how you can be more effective in the way you connect to your community/audience and expand your personal brand.
WTF?
You might be thinking, what is my “personal brand” and why would I want to use it? Well your personal brand in terms of the internet is everything you do. The majority of the time this is using social networking, or having your own website. Basically anywhere that your name is written or has a link. Immediately you have a personal brand a community based around that brand. If you have communications with people who visit your site, send you an e-mail, tweet on Twitter then you are starting to utilise your personal brand and community.
Now you personal brand can be used to help you, chat to or support you. So there are lots of ways of utilising the community.
Better than zero
This is actually the name of a video blog by Gary and it fits well with what I want to say. The chances are that if you are on any social network that you have people following you and what you are up to. If you do, then you have a personal brand already!
First of all, to me the people that follow me on Twitter a really really important both as social interaction but also using them to help me out. This is because these people have similar interests to me and are likely to think in a similar way to me.
Facebook is a different entity altogether. I use it for just friends and using these people for helping me is not really that effective, but remember never to leave anyone out!
So I have 120 odd followers on Twitter, that is a great number, but there is also a lot of people that have thousands more than me. Of course I would love follower counts as big as them, but at least I have more than zero! So be thankful that someone is following you, if one person is, then there are a lot more people out there that can find and interact with your personal brand.
How do I use “Ollie Parsley”?
I am a member of numerous social networks and to me that, along with this website (ollieparsley.com) are the main focus of my personal brand. People that follow me, who may certainly be reading this (hello loyal Twitter follower! post a comment below if you follow me please!).
As a web developer, designer and podcaster I am always trying new things and pushing myself to learn new technologies. When I have done a website, for example, TwitterLeague, I immediately went to my community and sent them out a link with an invite code to use the site. I posted these invite codes on here, pownce, identica, twitter and all over the place. This was because the people visiting those sites, if they know me at all, would maybe want to look at what I have done, use it and comment on it. Now this is not a guarantee that even one person will visit that site, but if it is more than 0 then I have utilised my community. The art of utilizing your personal brand is to push that percentage of your “followers” up and up.
Making everyone happy
Another aspect to personal brand, in my opinion is to make sure you have a good name. Even though “all publicity is good publicity”, that is not always what you want!
So how do I attempt to make everyone happy? Well I respond to every single e-mail, comment and message I receive. Now I think this is just common sense but it is surprising the number of people that do not realize that. If one person doesn’t get a response from you that may lead to that person now following you any more. If so, that loss can be noticeable and others might pick up on that, possibly if that persons talks about his experience.
Another thing I do is respond to people that have talked about me in a bad light. Even if I am unsuccessful in changing someones opinion of me, I put the effort in and if I can’t turn them around then they are not the right person to be following me anyway.
Real world example of using the community
On top of that I respond to people talking about me, a website I have done or anything I am involved with. An example of this is a tweet that was written about TwitterLeague.com. The lady saw that the league was not ordered correctly if two people had the same follower count. Now she didn’t tell me, but she did tell her followers on Twitter. I immediately saw that this could cause her followers to steer clear of TwitterLeague. So I solved the problem as quickly as I could and sent her a response back and explained the problem had been solved.
Now I thought that might be enough to possubly fix the situation and her followers might pick up on the fact that I replied to her. But she then sent a tweet out saying how effective I was at solving the problem and actually talking to her about it. It was only 3 tweets altogether, but I turned round what could be a negative impact on TwitterLeague into a more positive impact than If she hadn’t said anything at all.
Her initial tweet:
GillClough: @mweller twitterleague democratic. If 2 twitterers have same no. of followers, it alternates which one is top. Am competing with Openpad
My response after fixing the problem:
ollieparsley: @GillClough I saw your tweet about TwitterLeague. I now have set the ordering so 2 people on same follower count are ordered by username
Response to her followers:
GillClough: TwitterLeague author saw my tweet and modified application to improve how it worked. Role for Twitter as channel for rapid app feedback?
So that was a very brief introduction to your personal brand, if you have any comments at all please don’t hesitate to add one below. If you feel I have missed anything out or you have an opinion on what I have written then please let me know in the comments.
