Today, there are many books, blogs, and podcasts that promote personal branding as a strategy for managing your professional persona. Realizing personal branding is important is one thing, but it is another matter to be able to apply a usable framework to build, maintain, and grow your personal brand. Published works on personal branding are often impassioned pleas by the authors to adopt a personal branding mindset. What is usually missing is how to get there. For example, personal branding experts give advice like “clearly articulate your value proposition” and “cultivate your network of contacts.” Sounds good, but what do they mean and how do you do those things?
The 3Ms of Personal Branding
Let’s simplify personal branding by reducing it to three pieces that can be called the “3Ms” of personal branding:
- Meaning – Understanding the purpose, values, and mission that guide what you do
- Makeup – Combining traits, talents, skills, training, and attitude that are potential sources of value for the people that you serve
- Message – Communicating your brand through face-to-face interactions and online presence.
Manage your personal brand by focusing on these three areas. There is significance to the ordering of the three dimensions of personal branding. Meaning must be clear to you; after all, it is your brand. The other two dimensions are irrelevant without Meaning known and lived on a daily basis. Makeup plays off of Meaning; the knowledge and skills needed to compete in your chosen field are best determined once Meaning is recognized. Message is all about communication, but you will have no idea what the relevant brand messages about you should be unless Meaning and Makeup are clear and are transformed from words on paper into daily actions.
More than Message
Be careful about how you use most personal branding advice dispensed as a large majority of it tends to focus on the Message dimension of your brand. Articles, blogs, and books describing how to create a great LinkedIn profile, recommended timing and frequency of social media posts, and how to stand out via blogging are three topics written about often as personal branding strategies.
The flaw with advice related to these topics is that it assumes, if not disregards the importance of clarifying Meaning and strengthening Makeup. I am not suggesting that most information about personal brand Message is wrong. What is concerning to me is that there is much more work to building a distinctive brand- whether it is a product or personal brand- than having a well orchestrated communications platform.
Once You Start, You Never Stop
Embrace the 3Ms as a framework to manage your professional identity. Once you “open for business” and accept the idea you are a brand, your work will never be complete. Brand building is an ongoing process in which you will evaluate and clarify Meaning, add to the tools that comprise Makeup, and rewrite and update the story of your brand that is Message. Congratulations- you are now manager of the world’s most important brand.
