Officers. A checklist for creating a solid personal brand. A publication by PaySavvy

Transcription

1 Personal Branding for Chief Financial Officers A checklist for creating a solid personal brand A publication by PaySavvy

2 The Importance of Personal Branding The Basics of Personal Branding 3 Easy Ways to Get Started with Personal Branding Seize Opportunities to Speak Your audience is waiting for you

3 The Importance of Personal Branding

4 Developing a personal brand is not just for the narcissistic and younger, Internet-addicted generation. Even the executive level within a company can benefit from communicating their unique brand of leadership, and their personal and professional successes to a wider audience. In their Fast Company article Brand or Die: The Downfall of the Institution and the Rise of the Personal Brand, Nick Nanton and JW Dicks write that: You, as an individual, have become your own brand, whether you like it or not. You can control your brand to your own advantage or you can let your personal brand be run by others who comment on what you are doing. Nanton and Dicks write that the proliferation of personal branding is a result of various societal changes, including increased access to information, the ability to publish our thoughts and interests to Internet platforms, and the downfall of institutions, like collapsing banks and popped real-estate bubbles. Although the hype around personal branding has died down a bit since 2010, when Nanton and Dicks wrote the article, their observations still ring true. There is considerable benefit to an employee, even the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and to the company that employs them. Nanton and Dicks remark that you can become an internal evangelist and a thought leader for your industry...this buzz about you in turn raises your profile and credibility.

5 A strong personal brand will draw attention and build credibility for your current employer, but also help to increase the employment options available to you. In fact, Cindy Kraft of CFO-Coach.com, wrote that research shows that executives who are socially well-connected typically make more money, are less likely to lose their jobs for poor performance, and transition quicker if they do lose their jobs. For the sake of your current and future career, personal branding activities should be a priority in your workday. Luckily, getting started with personal branding is a very simple process. Once you understand the foundation of a good personal brand, there are just three simple steps to creating your own personal branding strategy. We will help you get started executing your personal brand on three different platforms, which will only take 15 minutes a day to maintain. It s too easy not to do it! Share this guide

6 The Basics of Personal Branding

7 There are many similarities between branding yourself and branding an organization or product. The act of personal branding involves distilling the unlimited aspects of your personality into major themes and passions, which are much easier for other people to understand and connect with. The act of personal branding involves distilling the unlimited aspects of your personality into major themes and passions, which are much easier for other people to understand and connect with. Despite what activities you undertake to build your personal brand, according to Nanton and Dicks in their 2-part series Keys to Personal Branding Success, everything you do will aim to enhance 6 important personal branding concepts: 1. The best personal brands are credible Your credibility will be a combination of your education, your designations, and your experiences. Essentially, anything that proves that you have knowledge and history in the subject matter of your personal brand.

8 2. The best personal brands are visible You will want to display your personal brand in the most visible ways possible for people to connect with. In the beginning, this might mean creating your own website, and managing your own social media accounts. Further down the line, you might want turn to media outlets, who are often looking for expert sources or guest writers for their platforms. 3. The best personal brands appeal to the right audience The middle-man between communicating your personal brand and reaping all the benefits is the audience who listens to you. Consider the type of person who would be interested in what a CFO has to say. This might be a young entrepreneur getting familiar with the financial complexity of a corporation, or a colleague that looks to you for industry news and commentary. It s important to realize that you don t want to appeal to everyone, instead you will have to pick a sub-section of people who will benefit from connecting with your personal brand. For example, you may choose to share information that will benefit the young entrepreneurs, particularly if you have plans on working with young entrepreneurs in the future.

9 4. The best personal brands display expertise By now, you have realized that all of these personal branding concepts are inter-related. You can narrow the right audience down only so much, without considering what field you are an expert in. You must be capable of becoming an expert in that field, and you must also desire becoming an expert in that field. Again, consider the type of people who would be interested in learning from the expertise you display, and let that influence the delivery of your personal brand. 5. The best personal brands display personality It s your personality that will set you apart from all the other CFOs who are also building their own personal brand. It can be a delicate balance between sharing too much and too little of yourself, but it s usually a good rule of thumb that opinions should be kept professional. Still, don t be afraid to give a little glimpse into your personal life - it is your personal brand after all. 6. The best personal brands stay consistent It s important to settle on a few ideas and key messages about yourself in order to firmly establish your personal brand in your audience s mind. Yes, you re a multi-faceted person, but your personal brand should be overwhelmingly focused on a few key ideas.

10 Recap: Your Personal Branding Strategy Based on the personal branding concepts above, here are the steps you can take to start creating your personal brand strategy: Write down all the key topics and messages that you want your personal brand to convey Go through your past, and pick out the experiences, education and designations that support your topics and key messages Consider what type of person you re trying to reach with your messages, and use this information to further refine your messaging The great part about personal branding strategy is that it doesn t matter which of the steps above you start with, since it s a circular process. Each step you complete will feed into the next, and you can further refine as you see fit. In the next section, we will go over the 3 specific platforms you can use to put your personal branding strategy into action as quickly and easily as possible. Share this guide

11 3 Easy Ways to Get Started with Personal Branding

12 When getting started with personal branding, you are going to want to focus on a few platforms, including one that is owned by you. In this section, we will cover 3 different platforms, a website, Twitter and LinkedIn, with a checklist for getting started on each. A Website: Your Personal Branding Headquarters Setting up your own website is critical to your personal brand. Firstly, this might be the only platform that you use for personal branding that you actually own, unlike Twitter and LinkedIn, meaning you will always own the data and work you put into it. Second, a personal website is a great headquarters for all your personal branding activities on the Internet. You can have links to all your social networks, a full biography, and anything else you have written or done.

13 Are you going to outsource development or design your website? Before creating your website, you will need to decide whether you will be creating your own website, or hiring a web developer to do it for you. Either way, you are going to need to have a clear idea of what you will be using the website for. Will you be posting blog posts often? Or do you simply want a webpage with your contact information? Decide on the purpose of your website and that will help drive how it looks and feels. Register your personal brand s domain name Some people use their first and last name, some use their first and middle name, and some people choose a different word or phrase to represent their personal brand. It s best to choose something that is intrinsically evocative of what your personal brand means. Just make sure your domain name is not already taken, and then purchase it.

14 Utilize your key messages With the objective of consistency in mind, your website is a place where you should echo the key messages and ideas related to your personal brand strategy. One of the most important messages to come up with is your tagline, which is a short phrase encapsulating your personal brand. You will want to include the keywords that best convey the areas that you display expertise in. Luckily, in the age of the Internet, a little formatting can go a long way toward packing as much information into your tagline as possible. You will have the opportunity to expand on your tagline on the Home or About page of your website. You will still focus on your key messages, but you can write as many words as are necessary. Example: CFO-Coach.com As you can see, this tagline adds extra punch by separating the words with bullets.

15 Build a Community with Twitter Twitter is a great communication platform for sharing expertise and building an audience. Spending a few minutes every day sharing links and conversing with people on Twitter is the best way to gain a following. Set up your Twitter account with your personal brand name It s important that the name you use to identify your personal brand is the same across all online platforms. When someone searches your name, they are much more likely to find all your online identities if the naming convention is the same. Create a professional bio on Twitter Your Twitter bio is a 160-character description of your personal brand. A recent Buffer blog post, How to Write a Professional Bio for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & Google+, recommended including keywords that convey your expertise, similar to your website tagline. They caution against using buzzwords, which will go out of style, opting instead for fresh language. That isn t to say that you won t revise your bio, but it should be revised as you undertake additional projects and achievements, not as trendy words go out of style.

16 Start sharing content and interacting with your audience There s a delicate balance to maintain on Twitter. Even if you create your own content, for example, through blogging, you should spend the majority of your Twitter time interacting with your audience and sharing content from other sources. In their report, How Chief Financial Officers Engage on Twitter, Leadtail.com analyzed 50,000 tweets shared by CFOs on Twitter. They found that the top 3 most shared business and technology information sources were Forbes.com, WSJ.com, and BusinessInsider.com. This is a good place to start curating content from, particularly if your target audience is up-and-coming CFOs.

17 Supercharge your LinkedIn Networking LinkedIn is often considered a social network for job seekers, but it has proven considerably useful for enhancing a personal brand, even for already employed people. Adapt your tagline for your LinkedIn headline You will find your headline right underneath your name on your LinkedIn profile, making it a very important part of your personal brand. Some will be able to copy and paste their tagline, while others will want to adjust their wording specifically for the professional audience on LinkedIn. For the most part, there are two ways to do this. First, you could write down your professional keywords without mentioning your current work position. Second, you could write down your title and current workplace. Robert Bruski utilizes professional keywords in his headline

18 Expand on your headline with a LinkedIn summary Your LinkedIn summary allows for a more in-depth, 2,000 character explanation of your personal brand. This is a great place to expand on the tagline you provided for LinkedIn, but in a way that caters to your target audience. In How to Write a Professional Bio for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & Google+, the LinkedIn summary is described as an elevator pitch in writing. You will want to hook your audience with a story that describes who you are, what you do, and why they should care. Note: Many people started adding a Specialties section to the bottom of their LinkedIn summary. This is a great place to add a lot of keywords that will help you appear in LinkedIn search results. Steve Sordello, CFO at LinkedIn, keeps his Summary short, but sweet, by including a little information about where he came from.

19 The value is in the connections you make One of the great things about LinkedIn is that each person that is added to your audience is a reciprocal relationship, since you are also added to their audience. This is a great way to learn what your colleagues are up to and what your target audience cares about. It s important to get into the habit of connecting with people on LinkedIn, after having made their acquaintance in real life, often at business events and conferences. As you build your connections, your Home section on LinkedIn will start to become a feed of recommended news, and shared status updates from your audience and colleagues. Join your colleagues in LinkedIn groups A great place to learn about industry news and trends is a LinkedIn group. Often, the groups are closed to the public and only admit members who meet the criteria laid out. This provides for a focused community experience, where you can make connections that will help advance your personal brand. The DigitalCFO LinkedIn group was created for tech-minded finance executives and professionals. There you will find discussions and career opportunities shared by finance executives, accountants or management around the world. The Finance Club LinkedIn group aims to help finance professionals grow their industry network, enhance their career and close more deals. With over 400,000 members in the group you have a sizeable opportunity to connect with other professionals.

20 Personal Branding is just a means to an end The ideas we covered in this section are very pragmatic and tactical, but the outcome is less tangible. The connections you make on LinkedIn, and the followers you accumulate on Twitter, are actually relationships. Digital or otherwise, these relationships are the foundation of any personal branding. Connecting with your audience, and then providing them with value, is the clearest path toward professional and personal success in our new Internet age. Share this guide

21 Seize Opportunities to Speak

22 Nick Nanton and JW Dicks specifically call out public speaking as a uniquely powerful personal brand building tool in Personal Branding: Why You Need to Start Giving Speeches. Nanton and Dicks acknowledge the anxiety that public speaking brings on for many people. But, there are ways to mitigate any anxiety, all while advancing your personal brand. Choose a specific topic that you very well-versed in When you are getting started with public speaking, you should choose a topic that you have the most expertise in, as well as the most credibility speaking about. Especially if your comfort with public speaking is low, it s best to deal with that without also having to worry about your comfort with the subject matter. Start on your local stage Before graduating to TED talks and commencement speeches, it is helpful to seek local speaking opportunities for practice. Services like Meetup.com make it easy to find groups of people organized around specific topics, like finance or entrepreneurship. These groups are often looking for experts to speak on the topics, so consider reaching out to the group organizers. You can also attend a speaker event to get a better feel for what works and what doesn t. Record your talk We are big fans of dual-purpose actions around here. Recording your talk will allow you to review it, and if you re happy with the result, post it on your personal website. By reviewing a recording of yourself speaking, you will further refine your presentation for next time. Posting the recording to your website for other people to enjoy will make it known that you are available for speaking opportunities.

23 Your audience is waiting for you

24 In the past, the professional and personal lives of Chief Financial Officers have not mixed together. Due to the sensitive nature of a CFO s role, there wasn t very much to talk about with regard to specific business activities. Cultural and technological changes have reversed both of these trends; businesses and their employees are becoming increasingly transparent (for some, whether they like it or not), and the boundary between personal and professional life is blurred beyond recognition. Personal branding can feel unnecessary, in part because so many different types of people have branded themselves for completely different purposes. For some, it is to increase employment prospects, and for others it is to advance a political or professional agenda. For all, it becomes a way to connect with people around the world who share interests and passions, and that, in and of itself, is reason enough. Download PDF