I just took time to read the last edition of Dan Shawbel’s Personal Branding magazine. The cover story actually drew my attention. I am a great fan of Seth Godin because he has achieved what I am trying to achieve despite all the odd in my environment. Most African nations have not come to appreciate knowledge acquisition neither is reading culture part of us. The low levels of infrastructures that will support acquiring knowledge outside the school especially on the internet have not driven enough people to hook up to the net. This statement does not mean I do not value my heritage as I see improvement, but unlike the western world, we are still not there. So anyone with knowledge to share here has to work harder to be noticed.

That is the reason why this interview with Seth Godin really got my attention. Seth defines emotional labor factor as the act of bringing emotion, goodwill and a smile to a situation you do not necessary feel like being in. It is also the acts of giving speech even though you are afraid, and smiling, shaking someone’s hand even though they are shy. For me this is the pointer to success under whatever climate one finds himself while pursuing a goal that is worthwhile. I do believe personal branding project that will excel must be willing to incorporate emotional labor factor to its physical labor. I know most people do not want to blog here because they feel they are not getting enough traffic. I keep saying people here should check the track record of frontline influencers like Seth Godin and many others. Not many of them are overnight success. So there is need to use emotional labor factor to remain afloat. When a person embrace emotional labor factor to his physical labor, he/she will be compensated along the line. I have decided to stick to this.

People should understand today that many live on the receivers’ lane. Especially here. Many want every meal presented to them as a free lunch. The guy who continuously, consistently prepares the meal will one day hit the gold even though he may appear foolish today.  Why did we Africans lose so many discoveries that our fore father made? It was hoarded, never shared? The new age of emotional labor factor is for intending influencers to keep striving for more to share here. In the next five years or more, the equation will have changed.  With emotional labor, a personal brand can make a lot of difference. It can achieve more as a ‘go to person’ than a receiver will. With emotional labor factor, a personal brand will work his ‘ass out’ and crave for more to share even though there is no immediate gratification in view. With the use of emotional labor factor, an individual will step out of the comfort zone; jettison every excuse to drop his thirst for acquisition of knowledge, quality content and sharing that is not immediately valued by audience.

There is a major benefit in embracing the emotional labor factor, the individual’s paradigm usually shift for better. There is no guarantee that he/she would not have made mistakes, been criticized, misunderstood in the process, but what is certain is that such personal brands will eventually be rewarded for making an impact in his/her world. In conclusion, thank you Seth Godin for being such a tremendous influence and let someone out there let him know I heart him, and crave  to share a lunch with him for being a great inspiration.

Silence is golden is an age long cliché. I used to be a fan of this and I am still in love with it. But the events that are unfolding today require that a re examination of what used to be valid truths now require modifications or changes.

In the light of the age we find ourselves today, aimless silence is harmful. There is need to speak out your own side of the matter. It has been proven that being social today is far better than being dumb or silent. Every introvert brand needs to cultivate ability to mix with other brands, potential and actual customers. If you a keen observer, you should have noticed, everyone is talking; conversation is going on with or without your brand’s participation. If by chance, the conversation revolves around you and you are not there to present the complete version of the story, your brand will suffer in silence.

A Nigerian adage says ‘when you hear carry it, carry it and you keep silent, they will drop it at your doorstep/back yard’. The burden of bearing unnecessary loads as a result of keeping  silence may be greater than speaking out your mind. Someone asked me recently what if his brand does not have anything to say? Why trying to answer that question honestly, I stumbled on an article written by Chad levit on questions to ask about personal brand and I believe answering those 49 questions Levit asked in that article will give a brand enough things to say for weeks. In saying something, many feedbacks will be available to the brands to see more opportunities to promote, give value to the target audience.

But before your brand start talking, it will be great  to listen first, have  a strategic plan of what you are going to say and how, when, where to say what you intend to say. For corporate brand’s voice to be more effective, it will be great to get the top management buy-in. Also it is good to have a policy in place that will guide what to say. In addition to the above, honesty, transparence is important. It will be good to prepare for eventualities as there is no guarantee that everything will run smoothly without any hitch.

Brand need to build strong engagement that can help when there is a smoke. Being ready to be on top of breaking your own brand’s news as fast as possible is also essential.

So according to Chad Levit, let us examine some of the relevant things to say which may/will give your brand leverage. What makes you and your brand indispensable, what kind of value do you provide, your brand’s differentiation, expertise, why should anybody listen to you, what trends are shaping your industry presently, do you have success stories, have you contributed to any project achievement, how have you made life simple, bearable for others, what are you doing, do you have any social responsibility initiatives that have impacted lives, do you have photos of events you recently held? These and other questions when answered may give you and your brand a clue to what to say when you already have a plan. Can you share your experience?

Everyday gives me an opportunity to learn and observe people around me. I learn from people who have been successful and those who are still on the radar of success as well as from a complete fool. In fact there is no one on the surface of the Earth that qualifies for such appellation as ‘complete fool”. The more we dig deep the more we find the wisdom in the lifestyle of someone we call fool. The kind of wisdom we may learn may not necessarily be what works but what may not work so one can distance his ways from such lifestyle.

In a recent chat with a group of individuals, someone asked me ‘how long should I stick to personal branding building? My answer shocked the individual. Because I could see he was actually looking for a quick fix it. I did answer by saying ‘as long as someone has his being’. The reason is not farfetched. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you have to manage the result of a misadventure in order to minimize its effects. Sometimes the journey may seem long, tiresome and one may think of quitting because of lack of immediate, quantifiable result. When someone is discouraged in the journey, it will be the best time to read biographies, minds of those we refer to as successful. One can do this by reading their books, listen to their audios or visit blogs of successful people.

Recently I read an excerpt of Larry King’s (Of CNN) book ‘The Art Of Talking’ where he maintained that his first radio job was gotten through enthusiasm about 37 years ago. That is not just an addendum but a pointer to something. The followings are some of my thoughts on how to make your personal branding efforts count:

Plan: you must know where you are going and chart a course to the place. Be ready to set achievable goals that will not increase your blood pressure unnecessarily. Set target on how to achieve your desire.

Patience: Never take yourself too seriously. You are not an instant super star. Otherwise you will get frustrated so easily. A time was when there was no single comment on all my blog post here. Along the line I nearly become bitter. Thinking my work is not getting recognition or attention. I almost abandoned the project. I guess I must be honest with someone out there. But later I changed my mind and continue; today the story is changing as everyone can see. Rome was not built in a day is still applicable to personal branding project. Individual needs high level of patience dose to excel.

Perseverance:  The higher level of patience is perseverance. This is the icing on the cake. Many people would have fallen along the way before they get here. This is how to add ‘extra’ to the ordinary to make it extraordinary. My question today is ‘are you given in to discouragement and you want to let go? Remember you are closer to the goal than when you first started. Keep at it.

Attention deficit disorder is a coinage of the new age. No one seems to have time for anything except those things that are of utmost importance to them. No one is extremely interested in your brand except if it adds value to them. The noise level is not even helping the matter. The noise level online today is just to high but that does not nullify the fact that everyone has a chance of making meaningful impact if one has taken time to know how to join the conversation.

In order not to be infected with this disease, your brand need to maximize every potential opportunity to make a lasting impact. For your personal brand to enjoy immunity against A.D.D, it is expedient that you continually show, market your competitive advantage. Getting attention today is huge work. Promoting a strong brand ‘you’ competitive advantage that qualifies you for targets’ precious time is important. To do this successfully, it is important that individual put a lot of effort in in preparing for their opportunities. When the teacher is ready, the student will show up and vice versa is still relevant. Treat every opportunity in form of attention given you as precious. You can also create your own opportunities by ensuring that you give out a compelling offer that will equate or surpass targets’ time investment.

Remember optimism alone will not do the magic of getting attention from your target. Opportunity without enough time invested is a dangerous syndrome. Let me conclude here that the world is indifferent about who you are. Everyone wants attention. Yours is an extra baggage on them. They will only tag along if you have a compelling offer that will not make your extra baggage a burden but a delight to them. No one wants to waste his time. So beware, do not allow Attention Deficit Disorder to catch up with your personal brand. It has infected many brands. The result of this disease is that many brands have lost their relevance.

A person’s personal brand lives with him/her for life. Though there are many things in- between that will eventually add up to the full manifestation of the brand. Because established personal brand lives with one forever, calculated step must be taken towards demobilizing the in-between from destroying the lifelong journey. Personal brand must be seen as a life long journey to manage it well. The in- between has capacity to make a person forget that he/she is in a journey. Success is a wild animal, if it is not tamed, it can destroy. Position (that is transient) can make some commit fatal error that will permanently destroy their personal brands. When the title is withdrawn, they will become empty.

Making the vital mistake of thinking that position determines who you are will lead to total destruction. You are not your position; your personal brand is greater than your present position. When you equate your personal brand with your present position- especially when you are the overall boss, you will be digging a grave that will soon consume the brand.

Someone is wondering why is the above important? Yesterday I was billed to see a Director General in one of the government’s agencies here. I must admit he is not a type of all. I got to his office and requested to see him. After signing the visitor’s note, I was allowed to meet with him. I entered the office and greeted him with all enthusiasm, introduced myself and all that. I told him my mission and he started following the official “jargons” instead of being a real person. I did not mind that as I assumed his age is making him lose touch with the reality of time. But this so called DG actually betrayed his personal brand when I was about to leave his office. I appreciated him for his time and just because I thought he forgot to introduce himself while I did that, I asked him for his name again. His answer shocked me ‘please go and I ask my secretary”. I was shocked to the marrow that his position has overwhelmed him so much that he felt telling others his name is out of order for a person of his status.

My advice, be your own brand manager, never destroy your personal brand because of the position you have today. Tomorrow, the position may not be there what you will have left is your personal brand.

In about two weeks ago, I had the opportunity of anchoring a reunion meeting for my Alma matter where I did my undergraduate studies. As the custom is, during most reunion meetings, each person has opportunity to introduce him/herself to the group. The first thing that dawn on me was that many still do not still have a sellable personal elevator speech in this age and time. Personal selling speech is ‘insanely’ important today because it tells people at a glance who you are.

May be one day we will focus on that here. Most people that I listened to confused this great personal marketing tool with what their job titles are and  what their companies are offering.

Personally, though I learnt a great  lesson that day as a professional. Because I assumed this gathering brings together graduates who have left college for years and most of whom are gainfully employed, I played the expert game when it came to my turn to introduce myself.

Ideally on a good day, my elevator speech runs like this: I am Yinka Olaito. I help individuals, organizations to maximize values in their brands/ideas through adequate positioning of their brands to the target audience that can pay premium. My competitive advantage is in developing engaging strategy that turns customers to advocates .I am a multi-skilled individual who combines passion with right skills to make my unique difference. If there is time, I now add those skills I use that you can find here.

With the assumption that I am talking to learned persons that they are, I just used my usual byline above. The chorus of: ha ha, ha ha, caught my attention and I was wondering what I did wrong. The truth I learnt was that, while using your elevator speech, look around at your audience and break it down to their levels incase you may be sounding too big to the people you want to sell yourself to. I learnt that day to look around and see whether I need to simplify my elevator speech based on the environment. I immediately coined a simpler one for audience that may find the above too big to comprehend. So here is what I came out with: I am yinka olaito, I help individuals, organizations create, find opportunities that give them vantage position .Do you agree with me, can you share your own experience in this regard?

Recently an online personal branding expert from Iraq, Mohammed AL- Taee  asked for my opinion of what personal branding is? We have heard several definitions which include: it is personal uniqueness in the market place’, a weapon that one uses to market personal core competences and taking advantage of such in the marketplace, a way of selling one’s uniqueness and promoting self differentiation, the rush to re-apply the marketing process from products to people, to give them a beachhead in a million minds, is the great converging point of the modern world among many great definitions.

Self branding like product, service, corporate, institutional branding is now a must. When you open newspaper advert/vacancies for jobs today, the employers are looking for brands that match their DNAs.

Over time many are losing the will to participate because they do not want to follow any rule or guideline. Some complains rules make them inhuman. If you must excel in your personal branding journey, you must follow rules that will guide you against being a copy cat, robot or ‘crammers’. My take on this as expressed in a recent interview is that personal branding is an opportunity to influence others.
Every opportunity also carries its own responsibility. There is nothing like total freedom in life. The more freedom you have the more responsibilities you have to take. The difference is that the dividend of the responsibilities is the fun you enjoy as an individual. Take for instance, a financially independent person at twenty five can impact his/her environment (if he/she desires) than someone who becomes financially independent at sixty five.

So personal branding to me is never a ‘me too, I have arrived’ game. It is work. It is a permission given to you by your niche (when you have honed your skills, differentiated yourself in a niche) to use your developed, differentiated skills and make a contribution. To impact anyone you have got to honor, respect them and play the game according to what they feel, perceive is right. Anything outside the box will be a violation of trust. Violation of trust affects your perception and influence.

Personal branding has become the current buzzword since Tom Peter’s article of 1997.It is no longer news that your personal brand is your face in the marketplace. It is your ability to use your own uniqueness to help others who buy into you. Getting and sustaining attention today is huge work. Many wonder why their efforts are not appreciated as much as they want. The problem with most of such efforts is fabulous self promotion that adds little value to their audience. If your personal branding will get, sustain attention, there are basic principle to follow. The followings are what I believe will aid an individual, These 8 Rs are very vital and I think Rajesh Setty captures them very well while talking about social media. What is true for social media as proposed by Rajesh setty is extremely relevant to Personal Branding. So consider the following opinion of Rajesh Setty with modification, inputs from me to fit this context.

 1. Resources: An individual has to be a good resource point for his market. Aside from this, this resource has to be dedicated to market’s good. Being resourceful will demand that you dedicate considerable time, energy to your personal branding project. Use the resource generously for your network. Remember that a shoddy result here will affect your personal identity.

2. Relevance: Understand that personal branding is not all about you. The resources you share must be highly relevant – not just for you but for your audience.

3. Reach: What is the positive effect of your reach on the target audience? Remember the guy with the highest positive reach will always carry the day.

4. Relationships: When it come to getting and sustaining attention in personal branding; think long term and not short term, Short term approach does not work most times. Long-term relationships provide a huge competitive advantage on this or any other big project. Your audience will appreciate it that you do not just want to milk their cow and run away with it.

 5. Reciprocation: Personal branding is not just one way traffic; everyone should know that by now. It functions better when it flows in a two-way street. You give and you get (and the order is important) Giving does not entitle you for getting anything back but not giving is a sure way of ensuring that you don’t get back anything. Unleash the power of reciprocation by giving first.

6. Results: Personal branding has to show testimonials to build trust and credibility. Past results will influence the willingness of stakeholders to be willing to promote your Brand. Remember that everyone is busy with their own lives. But past results accomplished are often proofs of your relevance.

7. Resonance: You also need to ask yourself if your contributions, impacts resonate with the audience you are seeking attention from. Everyone plays WII FM. Where there is no linkage to them, never expect any attention. If you get attention that way it is a product of chance.

 8. Remarkable: Make your personal brand project stand out. Do not be one of the crowds. Everyone wants to be associated with something unique, different, hot and they sing about their association to family and friends. If you want to really get attention, I guess you should start from here.

Today is the beginning of the last weekend in September 09. So I just thought of sending out a warning signal to those who have labored so hard to work on their personal brands till now.Building a skyscraper takes months of laboring, hard work, designing as well as inputs from many professionals. Interestingly when it is time to pull that down, it will not take a lot of energy it requires to build it. We have maintained that those who start out early in building their personal brands live to enjoy greater benefits than those who start late. Though it is better to start late than never at all. We know that building personal brand is a life long process. It requires hard work, expertise, building emotional connection. We also know that results come in bit and sizes as one continues in the personal brand journey. For those who have labored and have continued to labor on their personal branding, here are few landsmine to avoid so you do not quietly destroy your efforts.

1. Inconsistency: If you want to keep at it, never forget what brought you up to where you are. You have remained consistent in doing something. You are known for that, following the inconsistent road will gradually erode your brand from the mind of your target audience.

2. Fake it: Realize that people can see behind the camouflage even if they keep silent. If you push it beyond limit, the audience may disconnect with you and that is where the trouble begins.

3 shamelessly self promote: Self promotion is a highly effective tool in personal branding. But like success, it is like a roaring load, if one does not know how to tame it. it can tear the owner into pieces. So beware, be careful how you use this tool so that it does not destroy the brand you have labored for.

4. Build negative interaction: Watch your interaction and always get feedbacks. This help. Anything opposite is self destruct.

5. Tell audience they are not important: Never take your audience for granted. They make you what you are. Without them you have no brand.

6. Never bother about what you put online: We have people of dual citizens now. They live offline and online. You must beware of what you are doing at both end of the divide. Watch the videos, photos, comments you post online, they may be hampering your personal brand.

7. Continuously hang out with wrong crowd: The crowd you constantly hang out with may hurt your brand so watch your association.

As a passionate branding strategist, communicator I sometimes comes up as a prophet of doom to some. This is because part of the trade prerequisite is the ability to see the end, at least to some extent, from the beginning. This helps and serves as  a great skill. In one of my oldest posts, I did analyze that executives need to take proper care of their brands as anything that happens to them has a way of affecting corporate brand’s performance. The reason is that people will first of all buy into personal brands of the executives before they buy into the corporate brands. Some of the responses I got then particularly through phone calls were mostly influenced by emotions and not reasons. In less than a year of that post, we now have a case study at hand and we will continue to monitor how events unfold. On Friday the 14^th August, 2009, The Governor of the Central bank of Nigeria summarily dismissed the board and Managing Directors of five major banks in Nigeria for reason that were widely publicized in both traditional and new media.

As a fall out of this, a close friend told me that immediately the announcement was made, the company she works for terminated all their over five hundred million naira in one of the banks. One of the reasons given was that they would not be so sure of the news helms’ man capacity and unfolding events.

Renaissance Capital, A Moscow based financial industry rating firm brought out a new rating for some of the affected banks. As we can imagine, their rating dropped. What has happened to this is traceable to personal brands of the executives. For we want to believe that nothing has changed in banks structure or system except for the removal of the Executives of these banks.

Despite all the promises made to assure Nigerian investors whose money are in those banks, many individuals used their ATM cards to withdraw money during the weekend and those who could not throng the bank on Monday morning- which was yesterday.  If the traditional media news is anything to go by, many wanted to withdraw their monies yesterday through the use of ATM cards and could not because of shortage of cash in those machines and they have to throng the banks’ branches all around Lagos Nigeria. The federal Government today also suspends these five major banks shares on the stock exchange market. Even though I am not a shrewd financial analyst, but I do think this step will damage every communication to help people continue their relationships with these banks.The affected banks If I may need to mention again are Intercontinental Banks, Union Bank Plc,Afribank Plc,Oceanic bank Plc and Finbank.

The purpose of this post is not to analyze the action of the Federal government but to buttress the fact that brand owners, managers; Executives need to watch their backs while they are leading their own lives. Becareful of associations, management styles etc as these will definitely affect corporate success