We are fortunate this week to have a guest contributor – my colleague and dear friend, Rahna Barthelmess. Rahna is an expert in branding and personal branding and today’s guest blogger.
She and I first met when she was a brand manager at LEGO. We both attended a “Train the Trainer” program for personal branding at The Tom Peters Company. That was nearly 7 years ago and our relationship has grown immensely. I consider Rahna to be one of my Top 50 Contacts.
That training experience was the launch of our friendship and our mutual interest in the subject of personal branding. We have both been speaking and coaching on personal branding ever since.
Rahna is celebrating the launch of her new book,Your Branding Edge: How Personal Branding Can Turbocharge Your Career with a virtual blog tour, and I am happy to host her first “stop.” Personal branding and networking go hand-in-hand, so it’s only natural that we would have become friends. We have done several corporate leadership training programs together, and she quoted me in her book. Read on to find out what she said about networking as an activity that builds your personal brand.
Networking and Personal Branding Go Hand-in-Hand
by Rahna Barthelmess, author of Your Branding Edge
Networking is a critical part of any personal brand and certainly a key aspect of turbocharging your career. You want people to know who you are and what you’re all about, and you can do that in person, on the phone, at a networking event, or even digitally.
Your branding edge is that “special something” that calls out to people that they need the unique value that you have to offer. The discipline of developing one’s personal brand consists of identifying what is unique about you and then shining a spotlight on that so that others can see what value you have to bring.
How does your career advance? It is always through people—bosses who promote you, clients that hire you, consumers who buy from you, customers who rave about you, people who see and acknowledge your value. So it stands to reason that it’s crucial to be connected with other people and to communicate with them in order to benefit from having a really strong personal brand.
Think about your various networks. You have a network of friends, family, and business colleagues, as well as your community network. These people experience your personal brand on a regular basis. All of these networks can be interconnected and can help you strengthen and deliver your personal brand to a wide audience.
My good friend, Kathy McAfee, author of Networking Ahead for Business says, “Networking allows you to grow your sphere of influence in order to manage your career, create new business opportunities, and increase your personal influence in the world. This can be done by accessing three major spheres of your network: your active network, your lost network, and your future network.” She is a master networker and helps others break down their networking efforts into manageable chunks. Think about each of these networks and identify those whom you value and those whom you can help. Kathy recommends that you identify a “Top 50” list of your inner circle of people with whom you network, and then suggests you contact them at least once every five weeks or so.
Some people say that it’s not who you know, but who knows you that is important. Personally, I think they are both important. If you are going to contribute, you will need to refer your friends and family to people who can help them, which means you need to know other people. When you focus deliberately on your networking activities, with an eye toward developing your personal brand, you will be more purposeful about connecting with people and helping people—people in your current network as well as those whom you’d like to add. And as you focus on giving to other people, you’ll discover a richness to your life that will benefit you tenfold.
Personal branding is a form of marketing yourself, becoming known by others for your strengths and value. Strong personal branding helps your career because it paves the way for opportunities to come to you. So expand the list of people who know you and the value you can bring, as this will strengthen your personal brand.
***
Three simple tips from Rahna to help you leverage networking and personal branding to your advantage
Subscribe to Rahna’s YouTube channel and get more insights to help you sharpen your branding edge. Click below to hear Rahna’s three simple tips to make networking EASIER!
More about Rahna
Rahna Barthelmess is a branding and personal branding consultant and the author of Your Branding Edge: How Personal Branding Can Turbocharge Your Career. Rahna trains corporate sales teams, mentors CEOs and entrepreneurs, and coaches professionals across the globe to help them make more money and have more fun by leveraging their personal brands. To receive your own special guide to personal branding and access the full virtual book tour schedule, visit www.YourBrandingEdge.com
LIKE Rahna’s Facebook Fan page – https://www.facebook.com/Author.Rahna
