I recently attended a conference in Rome where Paul Hughes, senior partner and creative director at Lava Design, gave a presentation on branding. Incidentally, Lava Design just won the European Design Agency of the Year Award for 2010.  To sum up Paul’s presentation, he explained that the main elements needed in effective branding strategy were: Imperfection, Incompleteness, and Impermanence. We live in an ever-changing, ever-developing world with constantly changing needs and demands placed on people and companies.  Flexibility is key in this process.  We need to recognize that in building our brand we have to leave room for improvement, expansion and flexibility.

I hadn’t quite realised that I was following this little formula when I wrote What to do when “You” are the brand.   I can safely say that my brand ticks all 3 of those boxes.  That only means I’m on the right path though, as I have to keep working on learning and improving my brand constantly as I go along.

It has been a fun last 6 weeks figuring out how best to present myself and my consulting services online to the Northern Irish market and the big wide world at large. This website along with my presence on various social networking sites are, and will continue to be, a work in progress.  I guess that’s what I love about the communications and social media industry in the digital age, it is constantly evolving keeping everyone on their toes.  It challenges you to constantly learn and improve.

I came across this terrific post by Chris Brogan, a world-renowned blogger and social media entrepreneur, who has been in this line of business for over 10 years, “When You Are the Brand“.  This post provides great insight and advice on setting up and maintaining a personal brand.  I really agree with him on the aspect that personal branding is all about community and being of service to your community, not the other way around.

Well, good luck to everyone out there building their personal brand.  I have also found this blog to be quite a valuable resource, http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/

Ask yourself these 3 questions:

1. Who are you? (how do you perceive yourself)
2. How do others perceive you? (your stakeholders)
3. How would you like your organization to be seen and talked about?

Once you have determined a clear vision of the core purpose of your business or organization, it is now time to develop a credible and authentic voice to communicate this purpose through traditional and online media. The goal is to reach and engage sizable audiences around this purpose.  So make sure that you define clearly who those audiences are as some online tools are more effective than others in targeting specific audiences.

My Desktop

It is now the time to decide which online tools you are going to use to promote your brand on the internet. There are so many out there, and it is important that you evaluate your resources before embarking on this journey. Gone are the days of just putting up a static website and just leaving it there to grow moldy. With the movement towards a faster paced digital era, online content needs to be kept fresh and dynamic, but I will go into that in much more detail in my next post about website development.

For now, here is a list of the posts that I will be putting up about developing an online communications strategy:

1. Establish the message you wish to convey about your brand (kind of obvious, but you would be surprised how many people and organizations launch a communications strategy without being too clear on this aspect)
2. Website Development: how to start from scratch or revamping your old site
3. Blogs: how these may be implemented into your communications strategy
4. Social Networking: how to use online networks to further promote and enhance your brand
5. Online sharing: how to use these tools to share news about your brand
6. Integrate your online communications strategy with your traditional media strategy
7. Search engine optimization of your company’s online presence.  (Everyone wants to show up on the first page of a Google search!)