The term ‘personal branding’ has always intrigued me. A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Brand-Yourself.com and one of the questions I was asked was “What’s the difference between personal branding and social branding?”. Here’s the answer I gave:
Last week I posted a video of Gary Vaynerchuk talking about branding. In it, Gary said “You need to build brand equity. When you have brand equity anything can happen.” He went on to talk about some of the things that people ask him, like “Which tools should I use?” Gary said, “All of them. Your user base—and the people that care about you—you need to connect to them anyway you can, everywhere you can, as often as you can. That is essential.”
I couldn’t agree more with that statement. It is imperative that you use all the tools available to you. Why? Because your users are using them. The people you are trying to reach out to are in these social communities and more and more of them are popping up every day.
It is important that your users can find you on any network they use. Creating a social brand means having a presence in every community. It means making yourself available for interaction with your user base.
I occasionally write posts on various tools you can use to leverage social media, but in today’s article, I’m going to show you how to find all of the tools you can use to reach out to your community—the tools to find the tools, so to speak. Once you find them, you can begin development using the 4 C’s.