What is personal branding? Your name working as a brand

What people find when they look you up

With personal branding your own name works for your company, not only your logo. It is not self-promotion for its own sake. It is what happens when someone looks up your name before a first meeting, and whether they find something that reassures them.

For a small firm it counts twice. A client of an accountant, a lawyer, an architect or a software studio chooses a person, not a logo. In a company of ten or twenty people that person is often the founder. What a company page says reads like advertising; what the founder says reads like a conversation.

A 1997 article on the brand called You

The idea took off with an article by management writer Tom Peters: The Brand Called You, in Fast Company of 31 August 1997. His argument: big companies understand brands, and in the age of the individual you have to be your own. "We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.," he wrote, and the most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

Peters wrote for employees in a changing job market. Since then the idea moved to founders and professionals, and to a platform that did not yet exist: LinkedIn, founded in 2002 and launched in May 2003. According to LinkedIn, it now has more than a billion members in more than 200 countries and territories.

A software founder, worked out

Take the founder of a fifteen-person software firm in Rotterdam who wants German and Belgian manufacturers to think of her when their planning runs on spreadsheets. She starts with her profile: a recent photo, light and calm. A headline that says who she works for, not just "CEO". A custom profile URL with her name; LinkedIn allows 3 to 100 characters, no spaces or symbols, and up to five changes in six months. An about section of three short paragraphs on the problems she solves, with a link to her company's custom software page.

Then the rhythm: eight posts a month. Three on a question a client asked, without naming the client. Two on rules that change, such as an EU deadline. Two from behind the scenes. One with her opinion. Every working day she spends a quarter of an hour reacting to posts from people in her market.

Count the time honestly. Eight posts at 45 minutes each is six hours. Twenty working days of fifteen minutes is five hours. Eleven hours a month. At a rate of 120 euros an hour, that is 1,320 euros of time she does not bill. It pays off if one or two qualified conversations a quarter start on LinkedIn, or if prospects mention her posts on a first call.

Company page or personal profile: who reaches whom

You need both, for different jobs.

If you sell across borders, write in the language of your buyers. A post in German for German buyers beats an English post they skim, and a profile with sections in two languages shows you mean it; that is the same reasoning behind multilingual websites.

An hour a week, and a photo shoot

A LinkedIn profile is free, and you need no paid plan for personal branding. The real cost is time, as in the example: ten to twelve hours a month to do it well. The second cost is imagery. Plan the portrait you use everywhere, on LinkedIn, your site and your email signature, on the same day as your company photos; day rates are in our guide to corporate video cost.

Measure the return in conversations, not followers: how many enquiries mention your name, how many candidates read your posts, how many partners invite you. A personal brand also works for the company: what the founder says makes the firm's positioning believable. Plan a month ahead in a content calendar with the social media plan beside it, and where you can, tell a story rather than a list.