2019/yourbrand
Defining Your Personal Brand
Defining Your Personal Brand was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2019.
Watch: βΆοΈ40:20s
Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/yourbrand
IndieWeb Summit 2019
Session: Defining Your Personal Brand
When: 2019-06-20 14:20
Participants
- Andi Galpern (session facilitator)
- Jared White
- Tiara Miller
- Marty McGuire
- mJordan
- Tomas Quinones
- Christopher Thomson
- Jared
- Kitt Hodsden
- Malcolm Blaney
- Katie Johnson
- Chris Aldrich (remote)
- Flaki
Notes
- personal branding guidelines created by us all
created a list of things to consider
- what are your personal branding goals?
- branding is more than just a visual thing
- what are things you love to do and people you associate with
- may take experimentation and realizing you don't like something
- it's a growth process
- should try a lot of things in order to filter out what you like and don't like
- not to worry about people falling off
- who are you?
- what is your specialty?
- Your audience most of the time will be you. What are you passionate about and where is the market at the same time.
- you get to define who you are and if you don't people will just guess. You can do this with content marketing, blogs, taking pictures.
do meetup groups
- attend or create
- anything you put out into the world is apart of your brand
- Costs involved $20/month
- Sometimes they can be heavily white/cis gender without actively pushing them to be balanced (especially when using meetup.com)
- the level of quality needs to be high (and that's part of your brand)
Used adventure.bike as an example case.
- tomas wants it to be a blog sharing bikepacking adventures. site shows off some good photography
- suggestion to add a call-to-action to read about the adventures. also, maybe add a suggestions section under each adventure blog post to keep people reading.
- kudos on having an About page, important to have a "who am i"/"who are we" page to build trust
using seperate accounts for your content/ideas
- have a clear focus
- talk about what you care about
- might want to partition accounts on silos if you cover topics with very different audiences.
q: how much "personality" to show in what you post?
- as you gain an audience they respect you more (so you have more freedom)
your branding is not always just sharing what you do. can/should also be a resource
- things you are learning / takeaways, even if brief.
- things you want to teach
q: re: about pages. on a personal website, should it be first-person "welcome to my website i wrote this"? some advice says third-person is more authoritative
- can be a mix. andi's example is third-person so she can copy-paste it into speaker bios
- example: chris coyier's expanding bio with radio buttons for first- and third-person, options for length, etc.
another way to help build your brand is to help other people and sharing experiences with other people
logo design:
- what kind of asthetic do you like?
- so you can be clear and descirbe to a designer what you want and so you are aware of things you like
use pinterest (or similar) to help with inspiration
- gather up examples of things that you love.
speak in a clear and concise way
- write carefully, clearly. edit. edit. edit. test it out with people.
multiple streams of content
- video
- photos
- audio (make a podcast; make a video version of the podcast!)
Introductions
- christopher - sees the possiblity for new software tools to be built
- marty-interested in the space of how other people demonstare branding. systems of branding of showing off what you do and and what you are into
- jordan- who is jordan and how do I make that work. balancing when to be non gendered and when to actually be able to tell people things
figuring out what I am showing
- Jared- trying to get into video/podcast. how to control what putting out and drive traffic to site
- Thomas- focusing on cycling blog. how to aim persona to other people
- katie- wants more clarity on what she wants to be doing in the world and connecting to those who would be excited about that
- kitt- how one starts with the branding. what processes are
- Malcom- my branding sould encompass documentation
- Flaki- curious about how to make branding sustaiable and how to maintain off the clock work and building a personal brand through contributions in the community.
- Tiara- not sure how to rebrand myself. Was a student and identified as that and now feel I need a rebranding and not sure where to start or even what to do.
- Chris - how can I own all my data on my site and create/reflect my well-rounded identity online while still doing "branding" and being authentic
- Andi - started on cascadesf; works with designers mostly in the Bay Area and help them do presentations, talks, etc. Started as a meetup group. http://cascadesf.com and meetup.com/cascadesf
See Also