Let’s get to the simple side of complexity. Try this on for size, fellow branding geeks.

Branding happens in three stages:

1. What you think you’re gonna get
2. What you actually get
3. What you’re gonna do about it

Building a brand is about asking and answering three questions:

1. What do I/we do well?
2. How I/do we do it differently?
3. Why does it matter?

And managing a brand is about one thing:

1. Inspiring a shared vision.

Will that work?

Erika Napolefuckintano. The Readhead.

I say Entrepreneur is lucky to have her.

For anyone who’s attended one of my presentations – Branding for the Rest of Us or Leading in a Social World – you’ve probably heard me talk about Erika. I often use her as an example of remarkability – a section where I mash-up Jim Collins and Seth Godin to talk about declaring and being that thing that sets you apart.

I use Erika for two reasons. One, I try my hardest to avoid the banal and not-very-helpful examples of Apple and Starbucks. And two, because she’s the perfect example of being remarkable.

Here’s the slide from the section of my Leading in a Social World presentation. You tell me if Erika isn’t a shining example of a leader who demonstrates characteristics of remarkability:

When I talk about Erika in presentations – her f-bombs, her sex columns, her bitch slapping – I often get quizzical looks from the audience. Love or hate her brand, I say, she’s authentic to the end. Everyone knows what they’re gonna get, they always get it, and they know exactly how to remark about her. And remark about her we do. A lot.

Kudos my friend. Looking forward to having you up in my business for a long time to come.

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.

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Your network is made of people. People who are not sitting around waiting to show you unconditional love.

Now that your act is together, it’s time to get thoughtful about networking.

We shouldn’t have to tell you this, but you won’t find a job without help, and you won’t get help without a network of supportive people. If you think landing a job happens with resumes and cover letters, check out this study. Or this one (PDF).

Remember this: rare is the contact in your network who will actually hire you. More common is the person who puts you in touch with someone in your target company. Or asks a hiring manager to put your resume at the top of the pile. Or simply gives you an insight to the job you’re interested in.

The gold in your network is found in relationships, and the expansion that happens when you build those relationships. Not in the immediate.

If you’re just now building your network, here’s the bad news: The most enduring networks are built when you don’t need one. Why? Because you can spot a person building a network with their own aims in mind a mile away. It’s exactly like spam in your social media stream. When someone is out for themself, they stink up the joint.

We’ll say it again: Networking is about relationships. There are people with feelings and limited time behind the contacts you make. If you’ve ever heard the adage “if you want something done, find the busiest person,” a similar truism applies for the people who will help you with your job hunt. If they’re the type of person who’s taking the time to help you, they’re doing the same for other people. It’s their nature, but it keeps them very busy with these types of activities. Honor that by developing trust and adding value.

Here are our tips for building network relationships. You won’t find the typical tips on clothing, smiling when you meet someone, or where to go to do it. These are the things that build relationships.

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Learn how to demonstrate value. Without question, we see this as the toughest corner to turn for would-be working professionals. Changing your mindset from “why I’m great” to “why I’ll be great for you” can take some time and experience. But it’s everything. If you can’t translate your value into something meaningful to the person who’ll help you or hire you, you’re at a disadvantage.

So spend some time with a friend or mentor in marketing and sales, and ask them how they’d translate your Me First declarations into something that’s meaningful to the person that’s helping you. Again: It doesn’t matter that you’re great. It matters that you’ll do great things for them. Since this isn’t always second-nature to people, you should find someone whose living depends on the ability to do it and ask them how they’d sell you.

They’ll likely spend some time also challenging you to talk about results. Another hard thing to get your arms around, but critical. All the great stuff you’ve done or are capable of doing are – without hyperbole – decorations around the tangible results of your work. Even if you think it’s small and meaningless.

“Managed the student union coffee shop” sucks. “Served an average of 1,500 students every morning” shines.

“President of the Students Against Bad Things” is lame. “Launched the first social media campaign for SABT, generating an online following of over 1,000 fans” is nails.

“Studied a semester abroad in Zambia” is stale. “Contributed research to an NGO in Zambia for clean water projects” is heavy.

Always – always - follow up with the contacts made for you. The people helping you value their network too, and if they’ve gone out on a limb to make a connection for you, it damages their network if you don’t follow through. Always take the meeting (or at least try). If it doesn’t lead to something valuable for you, it was valuable for the person who set up the meeting. Send your thank you note and move on, but always take the meeting.

Find the right person to help you. Stop wasting your time casting wide nets. Focus on developing a strong relationship with a few key people who see value and will invest in you. And in order to develop that relationship, get to know that person beyond their work role. Knowing their hobbies and interests will help you provide something of value to them. Be creative and think of the ways you can be of value. Offer to help them with work projects. Watch their dog when they take vacation. Introduce them to someone who doesn’t need anything from them. Share a resource with them about one of their interests. Find something – anything – that will make your relationship mutually beneficial.

Get someone to invest in you and stop scattering your business cards to hundreds of people who forget your name (if they ever noticed it in the first place).

Don’t forget the people that are helping you. Don’t be afraid that you will bother people who have offered to help you.  Most job seekers have one meeting with a contact, send a thank you note and then write it off as dead. Realize your value and follow up with your contacts. People who have offered to help have already seen your value and are beginning to invest in your success. Show them that you are treating that investment wisely by keeping in touch and following up consistently.

Stop networking and start volunteering. Instead of paying money for expensive networking events that are hard to make impressions in, volunteer to sit on a working committee for that same organization. Meet people more regularly and develop relationships. Add value, demonstrate what you can do. Get mentioned and thanked in front of the rest of the suckers at the event that you just saved time and money avoiding.

Learn and practice this: when networking, don’t say anything about you until you have learned three things about the person you’re talking with. This will force you to ask questions, understand, gain insight, and develop a relationship. How many people do you consider friends who only talk about themselves? Same principle applies in the professional world.

Up next:

Part 3

Tactics: Finding a job is hard work

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.

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