Albums - not just for the music.

I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard.

It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline.

It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote.

It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want a job. Or a sale. Or anything at all. Social systems sniff out those who are out for themselves. They can detect them like a gas leak. And they’ll leave your house posthaste.

So how do you demonstrate the value of the social web in a culture with competing priorities?

Make no mistake about it: Building an effective social web presence is big change in many organizations. It’s hard work to change a culture into one that values online time to listen, converse, and add value for free. It’s also hard to make the kind of sustainable change necessary to do it again and again and all the time.

It’s a cultural issue as much, if not more, than an execution issue. The questions that need to be asked aren’t tactical: What Shall We Tweet or What Shall We Post. They’re strategic: How Shall We Connect and What Shall We Give Away.

For many, that’s a big cultural change that represents a disciplined approach to something very new.

Culture of Discipline: Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action — operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities — this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness.

- Jim Collins, Good to Great. Stage 3 Input Principle

So it’s best to find small wins when developing a social web presence, and build on it (yes, another leadership principle.) Have a grandiose goal, but start by finding a purpose that adds value to your organization and build on small wins. This is a sustainable approach based on your strategic context.

It seems to me that one of the most potent small wins for an enterprise lies in the very nature of social web itself: You can use the social web to connect. Forget forward facing campaigns, forget ROI. Use it to connect to people doing stuff in your space, and learn.

We forget about this, I think. But it can be just the toe-hold into the social web that enterprises can use to demonstrate value and build upon.

Boil it down even further than large-scale listening. Approach it simply. Like we use album liner notes.

Remember albums? Time was that we’d buy an entire collection of music from an artist who caught our attention via a single song. The album would include liner notes about other projects the supporting musicians, producers, engineers, or others had been involved with. We’d read these liner notes, and we’d buy another album based on what we learned from them. This process would branch us into all kinds of related but ever-growing experiences.

Follow your favorite author, journalist, CEO, or idea person on Twitter (you’ll be surprised who you’ll find on Twitter using Google). Watch those people’s re-tweets, then follow the people attributed. Watch their links (the things they’re finding value in) and subscribe to those blogs. Follow the links in those blogs and subscribe to those podcasts. Start small and manageable, and before you know it you’ll be sending company-wide emails with a relevant piece of industry news, competitive intelligence, or inspirational thinking.

At a former job I used to send out weekly internal email blasts called “Competitive Flash Reports.” It was a simple thing with blurbs and links to relevant industry and competitive news. It became very popular. People referenced bits of information from it in all kinds of meetings and planning sessions. If the social web was around then, it would have served as a veritable advertisement for the power of the social web. If I did it today, I’d put the source (or source-of-the-source) with the blurb. Demonstrating the social web’s value in this way could change the conversation from “I don’t care what people are having for breakfast” into something meaningful.

Small win. Value to the enterprise. Building blocks based on your strategic context.

I wanted to point people to this one in particular because (a) I love it, and (b) I agree. Big kudos to you, Maureen Johnson. (And you should have whispered it, btw.) We are not brands. We are, indeed, weird. And layered. And multitudinous.

I’m actually working through a brand platform for a client that pivots around an eclectic, multi-layered experience. I turn to New Belgium Brewery as a model for this – a great brand that captures their layered experience. It can be done.

But people aren’t experiences. We experience. People aren’t work. We work.

And people aren’t results. People aren’t products. People aren’t services. We make, and yes, brand those things.

Is branding really worth saving?

Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion.

It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage.

Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you could mark something with a fair degree of inspiration, but without much thought of listening to anyone else’s opinion on the matter. Here it is. Our brand.

Branding today is obviously different. So much so that it’s sort of turned inside of itself. It’s lost its way. What branding has become in the last five years or so is actually a re-brand of good leadership practices. Let me make that case.

A brand, in my view, is a set of coordinated activities that facilitate the telling of a story, all pivoting around a clear understanding of what that story is, intended to inspire action.

An enterprise story is deeply contextual within its prime function and those of the stakeholders engaged with it (strategy). The story drive decisions about choosing the most effective ways to facilitate the telling of it (tactics).

And especially in today’s social, connected world where the audience is also the producer (”the former audience” as Jay Rosen put it) a brand must inspire a shared vision. Not the other way around. Which means an enterprise must find ways to listen to stakeholders and understand their values, align those values with the enterprise’s, and steadfastly communicate that their vision is in fact shared.

Agree with that? Then you agree with crusty old leadership concepts like those of Kouzes and Posner, Jim Collins, James O’Toole, and John Kotter. These concepts aren’t so crusty anymore. They’re more relevant than ever as it turns out. These guys were ahead of their time you could argue.

(By the way: Those activities – the work of strategy and tactic planning – are the work of groups of people within enterprises and groups of people outside it who have an interest in the outcome. When individual people do this, they aren’t engaged in personal branding. There’s no such thing. They’re expressing, as the always spot-on Doc Searls put it, their humanity and integrity.)

I’ve been playing around with the notion that brand management in our social world requires more leadership acumen than any kind of marketing smarts. What’s required is the ability listen, understand values, align values, and demonstrate that alignment to inspire a shared vision.

Hardly the work of art-and-copy alone. Yes, engaging content is critical. But where will your enterprise find the capacity to understand what is engaging without the ability to listen, understand values, and recognize what it will take to inspire action based on those values?

There are parallels all over the leadership corpora that illustrate this. Here’s one slide from a presentation I give on this topic:

In the context of today’s social world, a brand passes through several passages of maturity. It starts as adding value to a single type of person (or market segment, if you must). Once this is achieved, it transitions to adding value to many different kinds of people. Which is nice, but things really start popping when you inspire people to recommend it or remark about it. From there, a truly mature brand starts to set a standard in its space: it generates copycats and tail-riders. The most mature brands then transition into system-shifting movements – something that creates a new way of doing things.

A clear example of this is Flickr. Flickr started as a simple feature within a game in response to users who wanted to share photos while playing. As this feature matured into a clear value to many, the game was scrapped altogether. People started talking about it, signing up, and asking their friends and family do the same. It became clear that shutter-heads were highly social (who takes a picture for no one to see?) so it grew. Before long, as Flickr’s social capital grew, its ability to tag images became a standard for image sharing and organizing on the web.

And now? If you believe people like Clay Shirky, Flickr has fundamentally changed the way we store and access information, shifted our thinking in terms of how we wish to be informed as a society, and even disrupted traditional theories of institutions vs. collaboration.

Agree with this model? Then you agree with Ram Charan and his model of leadership maturity.

Today, branding is about how we inspire and intervene in our social networks – leveraging our social capital. That’s a leadership issue more than a marketing one.

It’s social capital that matters — an area of constant concern for any leader since the beginning of time. It isn’t about content capital.

Branding is leadership.

There are new bedfellows in the world of communications.

I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing.

Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing:

People know this stuff. Let them uncover it.

I co-facilitated workshops on creating a communications plan for a leadership summit of some 200 people. The context of this group is one of tackling an enormous, multi-year endeavor with a dizzying landscape of stakeholders – deep government involvement, private industry engagement, for- and non-profit group alignment, complex technology requirements, countless values competing, and all within an industry in the midst of very real disruption.

In a world where the web is social (thus communications to inspire action and change is all about building trust) the summit was a powerful reminder that much of what we’re dealing with is actually common sense. Appealing to the audience’s intuition of developing relationships and the kind of leadership acumen it takes to succeed in today’s interconnected world was surprisingly straight-forward.

Ask a few questions, get a few folks to share an experience or two and you’re on you’re way to inspiring a shared learning moment. Much more effective than imposing something outside of their context.

This is also how we built our template for a communications plan: we let the members of the audience who’ve done this work before share their best practices. Then we continued to share the peer-developed plan template and best practices throughout the day. I think it was much more effective than if we had stood up there and tried to decree something.

When I guest lectured a few days later, I did the exact opposite. I made assumptions about the audience from past experiences in similar settings. Then I promptly preached.

About a third of the way through, when I sensed some disengagement, it occurred to me that I never polled the audience to better understand their level of understanding (head slap). And it was difficult to recover.

Why didn’t I apply what I know to be true and effective for the guest lecture engagement, especially after I saw it work so well in the workshop setting a few days before? Dunno. I had some new speaker-support stuff that I was excited to show. Maybe that exuberance (hubris?) led me astray. But the difference was clear.

Surround yourself with smart people who don’t do exactly what you do.

I co-facilitated the workshops with Judah Thornewill. A brilliant guy (and fellow creative-mind, frustrated musician). He’s one of those rare combinations of researcher and professional-world doer who has some exciting things to offer in the domain of social capital. He’s developed a method for measuring social capital and collaboration, and he’ll doubtless set the world on fire with his new entrepreneurial effort. His time is now, I’m convinced.

The time is clearly upon us to better understand social capital now that the way we connect and communicate is social. There’s plenty of work on this subject already in the milieu. Chapters are dedicated in just about every leadership book. And there are leaders and their books that focus on the topic exclusively like Bowling Alone, The Hidden Power of Social Networks, The Whuffle Factor, and Connected to name a few (Nicholas Christakis actually spoke earlier at the event – a brilliant mind who’s time has also obviously come).

As communicators, we need to understand how to intervene in the construction of social networks like never before. This is not a branding, marketing, or communications issue. It’s a systems thinking issue. It’s a leadership issue. If marketing people are able to adapt to our new-world reality, people like Judah and Nicholas will be key to our understanding of this new landscape.

Take market segmentation as an easy example. It’s almost intuitive that our social networks affect behavior. But Judah and Nicholas convincingly demonstrate that the way a network is constructed truly matters. This, without hyperbole, redefines market segmentation. It presents a much more complex challenge than what we believe to be true about distinctiveness, homogeneity, response to market stimulus, and reach-ability.

It so happens that my new friend Judah has a market segmentation background. He’s combining this experience with his work on measuring social networks and collaboration effectiveness. He’s the perfect example of the kinds of minds that need to lead marketing and communications professionals today. He broadened my thinking, to be sure.

Judah also demonstrated the kind of leadership style that is called for in our social times during our facilitation: he knew when to pull back, support, and jump in to comment or get us back on track at just the right time. Our workshops were better for it. He kept me from rolling too fast downhill as I’m sometimes apt to do.

The guest lecture? I went it alone. Lectured. Spoke. Presented. I rarely connected and too infrequently looked for the peers in the group to help create a shared sense of learning. I don’t think it was a bad experience overall, but it wasn’t great.

Now that our world is connected and social, the degree to which we can communicate effectively within it depends on understanding its social constructs. Collaboration rules. How we build and intervene in networks is paramount.

And winging it alone simply won’t cut it.

Lesson learned: Facilitate learning. And do it with great people.

But what stood out was his reminder that “people want to play in the fun sandbox.” That sustainable solutions to business and our world should be joyful. Think of the innovation that’s going on in this space, he challenged us. The amazing technology. System-changing ideas. Massive shifts in the status quo. The wondrous problems about to be solved. The human spirit and joy behind it all.

If those interested in sustainable development focus on the doom-and-gloom, the catastrophic problems looming ahead, who will want to play with us?

An excellent thing to remember when managing a brand. Collaboration, partnerships, and action happen when it’s exciting to be a part of something. It’s something I learned a long time ago during college when I worked for an environmental group. People want to be a part of something that’s working, that they feel is making a difference, and is solving something as opposed to bringing attention to a problem.

Same in business and the brands and leadership tactics we use to mobilize people. And not just in the creative, messaging-driven myopia that we often associate with branding and leading. Think of the left side of the brain, too. What can be measured can be managed, obviously. But data and demonstrable results also demonstrate momentum. Momentum begets engagement. Engagement: collaboration, partnerships, change.

And if you don’t have the data right away to demonstrate forward movement, turn to the right brainers for help. If you don’t have data, you’ve got a story. Work on your story from the very beginning. And then when you do gather the data? Aw yeah.

Like the artwork around its vats, the New Belgium brand is made up of many individual parts, while well considered and considerately crafted.

Craft beer on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the perks of working for yourself.

OK, so we didn’t drink beer. But a prospective client and I spent the better part of the day visiting the New Belgium brewery in Ft. Collins, Colorado yesterday. I’m recommending some branding initiatives for this prospective client, and New Belgium provides an excellent analog to what we’re after. (We’ll see where it goes.)

The New Belgium brand is special on many fronts. But one dynamic we saw first-hand stuck out above all the others.

If you haven’t heard about the New Belgium approach to running a business – and their branding work that seamlessly integrates with it – you owe it to yourself to check it out. Writings and studies are all over the place. Here’s a more academically-minded one (PDF – © O.C. Ferrell 2006), here’s a local b-school video, and here’s a nice write-up from Elephant Journal.

I’ve been to the brewery before but with friends. I’ve had to constantly control my urge to be the wet-blanket marketing weenie among these fun-seeking groups that aren’t the least bit interested in things like holistic, values-based, integrated branding. So it was refreshing to be there purely to experience New Belgium from a business perspective.

We arrived around 11:00. We were just about the only non-employees meandering about. We interrupted someone working on a laptop behind the bar in the Liquid Center (New Belgium’s remarkable name for the tasting room) and asked if we could see a certain area of the brewery I had remembered as particularly impressive during a past tour.

Tours start at 1:30, he said. We looked at each other, trying to decide if we had the time to come back and if it was worth it. We did this because like most consumers we’ve been conditioned to accept policies, and we’ve been further conditioned to understand that employees at this level aren’t empowered to work outside them.

Instead, our man in the Liquid Center took advantage of his moment of truth: I can’t leave the bar unattended, but let me see if anyone’s available to take you.

A few minutes later we were immersed in a conversation with Andrew Lemley about the company and its brand. Not a tour-guide script of New Belgium beer, not why we should buy it. But responses to our questions. Things we were interested in.

Of all the impressive tactics New Belgium employs to build and manage a values-centric brand, the fact that an employee felt empowered to work outside the norm was the most remarkable.

At the end of our “tour” my prospective client pressed Andrew about his role in the company. You’re in sales, he said, you just don’t know it.

You’re right, Andrew responded. I sell an experience with a story.

Straight from his mouth, not a marketing professor or blogger.

Well-crafted beer and well-crafted branding on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the perks of working for yourself.

Have you ever experienced employees empowered to act outside their policies or job description? What kind of impact did it have on your perceptions of the brand you were experiencing? Did it cause you to act differently?

You could see Mos Def hesitate at first. A self-censored moment where he wondered if a transparent answer would somehow mitigate the fantasy we put around artists in the entertainment industry – the necessary fantasy for him and those like him to sell records and fill concert halls. But he came through, mos def:

To quote my good friend Malik Sayeed*, he said ‘Inspiration is for amateurs’… to quote Octavia Butler, she said: ‘Habit is more reliable than talent.”

A few days after the airing, Seth Godin posted some random rules for creating ideas worth spreading. One of them:

Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.”

Marketing requires acumen. The creative mind works with a process. People who change their life after layoffs worked hard to get there. Creating content requires a discipline. Businesses may be inspired, but they fail to grow if they rely on passion.

Inspiration? It’s the spark. Transforming your inspired idea into action? Seems to me that’s the work of professionals.

________

* I’m actually not sure who he was talking about. You can make your own assumptions with a Google search, like I did.

It isn’t unusual for the people managing the creative process on the client side to come from non-creative backgrounds. This magnifies the challenges for the creative mind in these environments.

Managing the creative process on the client side is different. Different from what I imagine it to be on the agency side, and different from managing other departments in a business.

There are no templates for effective management, clearly. People are people, wired differently, motivated differently. Maybe you’ve heard this notion: If the golden rule is do unto others as you would be done unto, then the platinum rule is do unto others as they would be done unto. In my experience, nothing could be truer for the unique personalities on creative teams.

Still, there are some general principles that I’ve seen result in better work, better teams, and better engagement. (Not that I’ve been perfect by any means in executing with these principles. See my standing footnote on this subject.)

What are your key principles? And how does this differ in an agency environment?

1. Before offering your opinion, ask why.

Creatives do not pull rabbits out of hats.

It’s easy to get excited about an idea and rush to react without taking a moment to remember that there’s a someone behind the work. Or worse yet, make an assumption that they intuited their way to what you’re reacting to.

The creative mind is every bit as thoughtful as the analytical mind (I could argue more so… but that’s another post). Never assume a creative decision was intuitive, as if designers and writers just plop stuff in there. The time creatives spend before presenting work isn’t some kind of mysterious period of waiting for intangible and mystical inspiration. They’re working through a process.

Ask them about this process. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll learn, and you’ll probably get better work.

Think about this in the context of the other disciplines in your business. The financial analyst in the cube down the hall? She just invents those models on the fly, right? She’s working on intuition. The plans you present to the boss? No process there. You invent it every single time, I’m sure.

2. As much as we wish to be, we aren’t designers (unless we’re a designer).

...nor should a manager of the creative process.

I still remember that day when it dawned on me as a junior marketing coordinator (of sorts): I don’t do creative. I can have an idea or two, but I just don’t do it. Kind of like turning 40 and realizing that there are just certain things you can’t do (or wear) anymore.

Happy birthday. Sucks to be you.

Design might be the fun stuff in your day-to-day duties. But you’re gonna have to let it go. You can be a designer in your next life. It’s disappointing that you can’t participate in the design of the project to the degree you want. But believe me: trusting your designer’s sense of things like balance, negative space, optical center, depth, color, space, and size will result in better work than if you try to add your intuitive design sense to the project. If it doesn’t, then you need a new designer.

Just because the good folks at Microsoft (lodestars of good design, certainly) have trusted us with what we think are design tools does not mean we’re designers. Nor have the everyday opportunities to react to and form opinions about the designs around us given us the required training.

Again, try thinking about this across the other areas of your business. Just because you interact with people everyday does not mean you understand HR. You can prove this by strolling down to your legal department and telling them why the sexual harassment policy is unnecessary (give specific examples of your own behavior and how it gave everyone a good laugh).

3. Business objectives matter.

Without business data, how can you expect creative that aligns to business objectives?

Maybe it’s my music background that has always surrounded me with artists who are really good at math (note: I said surrounded… I am exceptionally not a part of that circle myself). But I’ve always had a hard time understanding it when business-minded, analytical-driven professionals assume that the creative people won’t get the business stuff.

Don’t avoid talking to a writer or designer about objectives and purpose. It’s not in your best interest to assume the creative mind won’t understand all the linear, left-brain business data. It’s insulting, you’re stereotyping, and you’re missing an opportunity for insight. It’s a horrible trap to believe that the creative mind will do just fine without knowing what it is you’re trying to achieve.

You know that frustrated, demeaned feeling you get when your boss suppresses your ideas at meetings as if you can’t contribute beyond your job description? As if you won’t understand anything outside of your immediate domain? Don’t think for a minute that the creative mind doesn’t feel any of that. If you think that they’re just artists with day jobs, that the business stuff distracts them, then you’ll get the kind of creative that isn’t aligned with business results.

4. Literal won’t sell it When trying to sell, a literal approach is often the least effective.

Accurate. But not terribly inspiring.

Agency professionals have servers and servers of blog posts and cartoons about the stuffy client. The client that won’t let the creativity (and presumably the effective advertising) flow. Many of these rants and jokes miss the point. It isn’t about a client’s inability to see creativity. It’s about the client-side’s lack and fear of empathy.

The most powerful asset that the creative mind brings to your organization is empathy. Trust it and use it. Whenever you can, but especially when trying to reach the emotions of your customers.

Let your creative team stray away from the literal. Be open to ideas. If a line of copy isn’t making rational sense or is grammatically incorrect, refer back to thought #1 and ask them about their thinking behind it.

Here’s a nice post about the business of eBay vs. the emotions that result from it. Let the creative minds on your team lead you away from talking about the fulfillment center in your business and toward the emotions: the bits of stories that matter to people.

Again: observe other areas in your business. Is a good CEO most effective in inspiring a vision when literal? Metaphors and colorful language tell stories, engage us, and get us to act. Trust the creative minds in your organization to help you with that.

5. There’s crying in creative.

Dealing with emotions can be scary.

I remember a boss many years ago tell me that I should not get emotional with the creative team. I’m paraphrasing, but she essentially said “They’re an emotional lot anyway, and if you show even the slightest sign of being human it will only escalate.”

I’m not a very emotional guy in the workplace and this last principle is something I really have to work at. That bit of advice could have served as the excuse I needed to not deal with emotions and I think that’s exactly what happens in some in-house environments.

What helps me is keeping in mind the platinum rule. If you can’t connect with people how they need to be connected with, the results will be disconnected. Said another way, treat the creative minds on your team like everybody else and the output will be like everybody else’s.

Not respecting the emotions on a creative team might force out the creative minds who can’t tolerate your style, and they’ll go put all that “irrational” behavior to use with your competition. There’s no reason to believe that the costs of turnover don’t apply to creative departments.

You’re supposed to keep these blog posts short. Cut ‘em down, keep ‘em succinct.

I recognize there are those who’ve refuted it. But as someone who scans online content like a Labrador scarfs a snausage, I appreciate brevity.

I’m sitting on posts that seem incomplete – even disingenuous – because I’m trying to keep them brief by leaving some of the context stuff out*. And I’m concerned that the context stuff that gets cut in service to brevity might hurt my brand.

I’ve decided to create a post to act almost as a standing disclaimer about this blog. An ever-present justification about the stuff I leave out.

The stuff I leave out in service to brevity tends to fall into two big buckets:

1. I don’t or won’t always take the time to explain that I’m not necessarily good at the best practices I write about. An idea, study, or belief might be something I’ve observed or am learning from as much as something I’ve actually practiced to any degree of consistency or with brag-able results. Does this matter? I don’t think Seth Godin actually practices all that he preaches and I don’t mind his definitive attitude. Still, it bothers me that I don’t always directly address this dynamic. I explain it fairly well here I think. But re-reading this post I think I came across more self-righteous than I intended.

I guess it’s safe to say that when you decide to blog, you have to be comfortable to some degree positing an idea every now and then that you won’t take the time to fully explain your experience and results with practicing it. But to what degree exactly? I’m not sure.

2. Taking the time to credit and tell the story behind those that have influenced a post. Mentors, friends, partners, my wife. The list of influencers on my perspectives, practices, life is endless. This entire post could have been written almost entirely by my wife. Practice fields, something I’ve written about more than once, is another good example. A former colleague/boss and now friend/client introduced me to the concept a long time ago, and I’ve gotten a ton of mileage from it. And literally anytime I write about the social web I really should tip my hat to my friend Glen Turpin. He’s my technology compass, guiding me to what’s new, important, and meaningful.

But I’m not always going to take the time to credit folks who aren’t, I guess, directly attributable to what I write about. That’s a really big squishy gray area that I wish I had a better handle on.

There. I feel a bit better. Maybe I’ll release some of those in-limbo posts now.

Still, I wonder. Like communication shortcomings in emails, to what degree does brevity in blog posts leave the wrong impression of our brands?

———

*My posts are actually pretty long mostly because of my inability write succinctly. I’ll get better at that.

Update: Just after publishing this, I noticed that a tweep that I dig guest-blogged about this very topic. He links to it from his blog, and I wish I would have seen it before I published this one. (And it should come as no surprise that I’m pretty sure I found this guy on Twitter from Glen Turpin.)

Unfinished Inscription: Richard Dorrell / CC BY-SA 2.0

If you’re on the wrong train, it matters not two wits that you’re going somewhere.

There’s clearly a personal branding gold rush. People and firms willing to take your money to tell you how important it is and how to do it. And of course the blogs, mainstream media, new media, Wikipedia, and even a magazine buttress the rush. Wherever we look we’re told we must brand ourselves.

Without commenting on whether or not there’s value in all of this (plenty of others have already chimed in, like @carlosmic’s common-sense insight) I believe there’s a big link missing from the dialog.

In essence, there are four key areas for brand building at the enterprise level that can easily be leveraged toward building a personal brand. In my experience with personal branding, too little attention is given to the first while there’s a flood of advice on the other three:

1. Strategy
   1. Where I’m going and how I’ll get there
2. Identity
   1. What I do well, how I do it differently, why it matters, and how I articulate it
3. Management
   1. Where and how I’ll facilitate the telling of my story and how I’ll integrate it all
4. Experience
   1. Measuring how successful am I in authentically telling my story and adjusting

Like an enterprise brand, before building a personal brand (the development of your identity and  managing the facilitation and experience of your story) it helps to understand where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

This isn’t to say you can’t experiment and change along the way. But the less your tolerance for and recovery from mid-course corrections is, the tighter your personal strategy must be for successful execution in the other areas.

Before you choose your train—let alone the seat on it and who’ll you’ll travel with—you have to know what your destination will be. If the destination changes, you need the time and acumen to get off, re-rout, and make good to those who were on board with you.

Before starting this process, I’d suggest thinking hard and long about Jim Collins’ notion of confronting the brutal facts. You have to be honest in your process of defining your personal strategy, or you’re just cheating on a test. You’re building a house of cards.

Reserve judgment and be willing to honestly confront issues like:

• How much do I value money? Really. Do I want nice things for myself and my family? Do I enjoy the finer things in life, or do I need them?
• What am I really good at? Not what do I wish I was good at, but what do I do well time and again with extraordinary results without hardly trying?
• What gives me energy? Not what I hope gives me energy. But when I go home, high with energy and talk with a friend or partner about a really good day, what did that day look like?

A personal strategy (like a business strategy) begins and ends with your values—your non-negotiables. All else revolves around them. Creating your values is a highly personal exploration (and deserves much more attention than this blog post). But sometimes you can get at your values from a negative perspective:

• What will I not do to succeed?
• Who will I not associate with to get where I’m going?
• What will I not sacrifice to move ahead?
• What doesn’t matter to me?

Your values will inform six essential elements to your personal strategy. (But in my opinion, these elements are all but impossible to define honestly without a clear sense of your values.)

1. Vision and mission

It’s easy to make Vision and Missions unnecessarily complicated. So keep it simple:

• Vision: where am I going and what difference will I make in the world?
• Mission: what’s the work required to get there?

Depending on your personality, you can write them down, you can keep them in loose in your mind. But give yourself a north-star vision (something you may never attain and is larger than yourself) and a real-world mission (a few sentences or thoughts about the work required to get there.)

2. Economic Logic

This is another highly personal exploration, but critical. Do you need financial stability for a large family? Is a high salary necessary to support the kind of lifestyle you desire? Do you want to retire early? Can you afford a few years of lean revenues to build something of your own design?

Getting to those answers sometimes involves some smaller issues. Can you walk and take the bus or must you drive and park? When you go to a networking event do you care that your clothes aren’t the nicest in the room? Do you cook? Is a gym important to your health or will a YMCA do? Can you pack a sandwich? Can you say “no thanks” to those that lunch out regularly?

Then there’s the cash flow issue. What is my debt load? Have I saved enough to live paycheck-free for two years? What is my invoice strategy? Will I pay contractors, vendors, employees on credit or in cash?

Your Economic Logic defines your direction in many ways. Career path within a large organization. Taking risks with a startup. Working for yourself. Office-ing from home. Long expensive commutes. Overhead of a professional vs. a plush office.

3. Employment Logic

Will you be pursuing a career with an organization in well-defined industry or will you work for yourself? These two paths involve different stakeholders (those who you must consider when crafting your branding plan). Engaging potential clients for entrepreneurial growth is an entirely different matter than engaging supporters within an organization or industry for career mobility.

Here are the next three areas to develop when building your personal strategy. If there’s interest, I’ll blog about them in future posts:

4. Core competencies
5. Market and competition
6. Stakeholders