Monday 26 May 2014

Are we missing something with the Personal Branding?

Last week I was in Barcelona, for the Experimedia General Meeting. The Company I work for is an experimenter, so I had to go, to present it, meet other people involved and conduct a demonstration.

It's also an opportunity to do networking.

In one of the breaks, I started to talk to a person (I had briefly met before in Leuven) and I have to say, the more I listened to her, the more surprise I got.

She surprised me... a lot. In 2012, she started an online company about corporate criminal law dissemination and courses in Netherlands. To start, she has an online “news website” that publishes relevant news for people that work in the area of corporate criminal law. I asked her about the visitors... 7.000-8.000 unique visitors monthly. A website in Dutch. In order to really generate revenue, she also started an educational institute for lawyers with specialized courses on corporate criminal law. And also, they recently published a legal journal, in paper! 

I was curious, so I searched her in Google, also in Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. And of course, she had a good professional profile, a very good one indeed. What I didn't realize it was just the top of the iceberg!

She doesn’t have an active self marketing strategy, not blog, or too many followers in twitter, and no references at all that she was the founder in the company's website (just a writter). So, I asked her "why don't you follow a personal marketing strategy? It's you the creator all of this, it's your baby". 

And she told me: "I wanted to know if my product was good enough without people knowing who was behind it, just by itself".


And it was. Well, it still is. I always believed that companies do business with other companies not because they have to, but because they want to. According to that, companies need to be social and people must know who is behind it. If you are the CEO, you should represent your company and be social, very social.

But, she didn't need that. The product was good enough to live without her help. Astonishing!  

She has all qualities to be more than outstanding, to achieve greatness (but like no one I've meet before): humble, smart, hard worker, entrepreneur, charm, easy to talk with, young, good presence, inspires confidence... a brilliant person.

So it made me ask to myself: maybe we are missing something?

We get too much time to get value to our brands, our products or ourselves, worry too much. But if the content is honest and the product is good and, most important, if the customers want it... does out product or service need us to survive by its own? 

I have thought it a lot. 

I do believe in engagement and to create it, I used to believe it was very important to tell people that there are people behind the company. So, interact with them, a P2P (person to person) relationship). Give them part of yourself in order to gain truth and confidence

Funny egg-chicken situation. You want to offer a service, you want to tell the others it's different, it better, it's outstanding. But... it's you who stand out your product, or is it that stands out you?

Thanks to this person, I have learnt something very important: that it's also about not losing the perspective. Don't sell yourself, sell your work, because if it's good, it’s going to sell itself. Your product or service can be as important (or even more) as you.


Let your product talks about you. 

Because of that, I wanted to thank you, Joyce. It’s been you who told me about all of this and made me think. I learnt a lot from you. 

I don’t have to wish you luck, you don’t need it. Winners don’t need luck, they just win!

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