How to avoid Burnout for your Brand
A Personal Brand is not a set and forget tasks. It is an evolving process and needs attention as much as your skill sets, your health and your fitness. It need constant attention and refinement as it is what others perceive you as.
All it takes is one major mistake, especially one that you handle poorly, and all that you’ve built can go down the hill.
To avoid that, here are some No No’s when it comes to your Personal Brand.
SET & FORGET: LETTING IT GO STALE
Your personal brand, no matter how well crafted it is, is never “done.” If you think that developing your personal brand is a one-time event, think again. Your personal brand can easily grow stale. As much as you get bored with the same outfit, message and movie, you can get boring for your audience if you become too predictive and repetitive. You grow and so does your audience - make sure your brand does too!
HAVING NO CONSISTENCY
Whilst you shouldn’t go stale, you should still be reliable and show up. Every.Single. Day. Your Followers count on you showing up and want to know what to expect; this builds the trust and relationship that you need to take it to the next level to ensure you are the right person for the job.
So whatever you do, say, how you look, the marketing material you put out there … it needs to be consistent with the values you want to stand for. This builds a brand identity that can make an impact.
EXHIBITING BAD BEHAVIOR
Whatever you do, it is part of your Brand. So if you are going out and dance half naked on a bar, be mindful of the potential consequences and if that is really want you want your brand to be associated with.
BEING UNRESPONSIVE
Not responding to messages reflects badly on your Brand and your reliability, especially in business as it shows lack of respect to your audience and can quickly become part of your brand and what others associate with you.
Personal Branding is all about how you can benefit others, so if you ignore them, nobody will want to work with or recommend you. Remember - it’s about how you make people feel that makes them remember you - being unreliable is definitely not one of the traits.
HAVING AN UNPROFESSIONAL ONLINE IMAGE
What happens on Facebook … stays on Google forever.
You may put in all the hard work to establish yourself as a solid professional - from dressing the part to working overtime to exceeding in your output but then a photo shows up showing you drunk or in inappropriate settings.
If it happens once a while you may justify it with celebrating a win but it will become part of your online profile and visible to the world.
Take the test - Google yourself and see what comes up when you select ‘images’. How many of the photos are from you and show you from a good vs bad side?