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Recently I was preparing two social media workshops, one for business and one for community groups. That got me thinking about where the differences were. There is lots of common ground between managing business and managing social media accounts – but what are the differences? A few thoughts are below (with heaps of generalisations).

The post Managing Business or Community Group Social Media Accounts – is there a difference? appeared first on Agility Communications.

My decision to be photographed by Juanita required me to think about my physicality – how I appeared and how I was seen and assessed.

Not something I hadn’t thought about, but not something that I had seriously considered doing anything about. Authentic is very important both to me and to my clients. With me, what you see is what you get. Outdoors woman madly in love with animals, any animals, but particularly my pigs, horses, cows and of course Issy.

But all the same on a stinking hot day I arrived at Juanita’s studio, suitcases and business props such as my banner in tow.

First part of the transformation was hair and makeup. I loved every moment of this experience and wished that it was a skill I possessed, although even if it was, it is more likely that I would be found mucking out the pig’s yards than adjusting my makeup.

Several changes of clothes and we are off.

Given some of the anxiety that I felt, I think that it is worthwhile to mention some of the things that helped me on this journey and on this day:

Trust – I was putting myself in the hands of an expert, actually two experts, a hair and makeup expert and a stunning photographer, they were going to do their best with me and if it all went pear shaped I didn’t have to use the photos. But I trusted that they would be great and they were much better than great.

Trust that Juanita wasn’t worrying about how she could possibly get a good shot.

Prepare – Juanita suggested that I bring some business props – no brainer, but I would not have thought of it. I brought my banner, an easel that I sometimes use in workshops and pens, laptop etc. I am so glad that I did. Fantastic, immediately useable shots.

Plan – I spent time thinking about what I brought to my work and therefore to the work of my clients and what I wanted the photos to portray:

I have a wealth of experience and learned wisdom

My communications’ background helps me to plan and deliver engaging strategies

I have empathy for older business owners – many have a fear of this changing world of technology, I can help them to come to grips with it painlessly

Quick to come up with solutions

Transparent values and ethics

Sense of humour

Clothes – I brought every piece of clothing that I liked, I didn’t expect to use them all and I did not, but as the artistic director, Juanita chose with my input and she made great decisions.

If you would like to refresh your personal brand and want some new photos, you cannot go wrong. The photos, I hope, speak for themselves. Contact us for help with your strategy

Meet Juanita at Broderick Photography:

https://www.facebook.com/broderickphotography.com.au/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanita-broderick-9aa856100/

https://www.instagram.com/broderickphotography/?hl=en

The next post will be about important strategies in developing your personal brand.

Juanita Broderick brought out the cheeky, the zany and the professionals in this photo shoot of Noelene Gration

The post Upping the Public part of the Personal Brand – Part 4 in a series appeared first on Agility Communications.

I was walking around Lake Daylesford with my rescued greyhound Issy. Lorne was doing the same with his rescued greyhound Evie. Peas in a pod in appearance, night and day in temperament. Both beautiful, gentle animals, they facilitated a chat that resulted in a meeting with Lorne’s partner Juanita. Lorne and Juanita are two of the nicest people in the world and both incredibly clever at what they do.

However, it’s Juanita’s skill I want to highlight in this post.

Lorne mentioned that his partner liked to photograph women. And by God is she good at it.

But Juanita is not just a good photographer, she is brilliant. She brings out the essence of the person that she is shooting. Their strength, their vulnerability, the different ways that they want to be seen in the world.

Recently I was surprised and flattered to be asked if I would like a shoot. YES!

Then came concerns and fears that I am oh so familiar with… I can’t do this I’m too old too fat too unattractive. I don’t have anything nice to wear… I don’t think that I can do this…

I am not surprised that a whole lot of unhealthy emotions arose, but I didn’t really expect them either. When I think about my ‘personal brand’ I can’t help but ask myself “how did I end up in public relations?”

It was an odd career choice for someone who grew up with a mother who freely admits that she doesn’t like people. Therefore, our family had little to do with people. Few visits and fewer visitors and less than brilliant social skills.

My choice of career became clearer to me when a friend asked “How come you’re not in the media? Isn’t that your job? “I explained that it wasn’t about me, it was about helping my clients to get stories in the media (or stay out of the media). I loved the strategy, the liaison, the facilitating others into the media, while I stayed clear of the public eye.

So now, my personal brand was starting to take on a much more public hue.

Key Learnings

• Feel the fear and jump at opportunities anyway.
• Your values and attitude are what matter
• Even though you do the job every day don’t forget to reflect

Post 4 in the series is what I learned from my photo shoot experience

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This was new for everyone and there was no-one else in my community working with social media the way I was. It was becoming something that I was known for. However, once again, that was happening without any conscious intent from me. Having only recently learnt my lesson, I spent some time trying to decide if this was something that I wanted to do or if it was just a distraction.

I worked in media and media was changing at an incredible rate. My journalist contacts were losing their jobs and becoming PR consultants themselves. Writing for business was still required but more and more, this was writing for digital mediums and online audiences.

I had just decided that this was the direction that I wanted to go in when I was asked to become a social media facilitator and mentor for Federation University. A new 3 year federally funded program, Digibiz wanted small to medium business to be using the Internet for business when the NBN came to their neighbourhood.

I went on to deliver many workshops on social media in my community, but also to another four local government areas in the region. I mentored many small businesses in strategy, practical uses and application of social media and met many of the local businesses that I had not until now known.

I was in front of businesses, I was becoming known, I was successful and I decided that yes, social media was on the ascendancy and so important to the goals my clients had, that I would continue to do this work that I loved, was good at and could become part of my personal brand.

Not the only thing I did, not the only thing that I wanted to do, but something that I was passionate about and that I enjoyed.

Key learnings

• Jump at opportunities to do what you love, stay up to date so that you can go on teaching in an ever-changing medium
• Don’t worry about what people think – mostly they think that you are great! The occasional person may not, but let it go
• Stick to your values and be transparent about them

Thank you to Helen Thompson and Gerrie Carr-Macfie for the opportunity to work with CERDI.

This is part two in a four part series on developing my personal brand.Part three will be available shortly.

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The view from my house – who wants to commute to Melbourne?

Personal brand is something that has excited my thinking for a few years now. I have worked with entrepreneurs, artists and business people on their personal brand and I love that it is one of the services that I offer.

But it wasn’t always thus.

Seventeen years ago I moved from Melbourne to a small farm just outside a busy tourist town 100 or so km’s away. For a few years, I commuted to my job as PR Manager for a national organisation creating and implementing strategies along with my team of five.

After a while, I realised that although I had moved to paradise, I spent very little time there and knew few people, because the bulk of my time was travelling to or from my Melbourne job. So, I took a plunge, left a well-paid job to start up on my own. Something that I had never considered doing before.

Ascend Public Relations and Communications was the result and for a while my previous employer kept giving me work that I could do from home so I was in a good position while I started the planning and marketing process.

My business moved forward very slowly. So slowly, sometimes it felt like I was going backwards. I was unknown in an industry where word of mouth is very important and where, at least in the immediate area, most businesses were small and on tight budgets.

My major concern was income. I had a mortgage, 20 acres, cows, and horses – and they are expensive!

This was the background to my first BIG mistake in personal branding. I was encouraged to tender for some community consultation work for the local Shire. It was work that I was skilled at from a long and varied career, I jumped at the opportunity – a chance to meet the community, a chance to earn some income. I loved the project and soon after tendered to do the same thing in another town in the Shire.

What had not occurred to me was that this was the work the public were seeing. This is what they thought that I did. They had no way of knowing that this was a stopgap for me. Good honest work, but not what I did.

The next mistake was that while looking for work, I offered my services for little or no cost to community organisations.  I still do this, it is very much a part of my ‘brand’ but I am more discriminating about where my effort will have the greatest impact and how much I can do without compromising my paid work or undervaluing the work that I do.

None of these things occurred to me when I was thinking of my brand.

I was to go on and create a second business, same services, different audience about 5 years later, potentially very confusing to my audience. But I had learned from these experiences and mitigated the confusion wherever possible. And, I built a much stronger personal brand in the process.

My Key Learnings:

• Do what you love, love what you do, but try not to get sidetracked – even for money!
• Network, Network, Network. I was feeling lethargic from a perceived business failure when I know that when I leave the office to network, business comes to me
• Provide assistance where you think that you can add the most value, but do it in a way that it does not undervalue the work that you do

This is the first of the series in my own personal brand process you can see the next three posts here

Meet Juanita at Broderick Photography

https://www.facebook.com/broderickphotography.com.au/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanita-broderick-9aa856100/

https://www.instagram.com/broderickphotography/?hl=en

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Who do we (and our customers) look to when making decisions about products and services? Well, the strongest influences are these:

·      88% of buyers consider online reviews “very influential” when making a purchase decision.

·      90% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 33% trust ads.

(grouphigh.com/social-media-influencers/)

That’s why many good marketing strategies steer us to what are called ‘social influencers’ – people who others trust to recommend products and services. Celebrities, well-known bloggers, people with recognised expertise – they can help bring in clients and sell products.

Using social media influencers comes with some requirements for truth and transparency, and it’s good to be aware of these.

Consumer law requires advertisers to prevent misleading communication, deceptive conduct and misrepresentation, including in testimonials.

Certainly testimonials need to be true. If a writer says he’s visited your facility and found it a terrific place, that visit needs to have happened. But what about when you provide some reward or benefit to those who speak in favour of your work or brand? When do these rewards need to be disclosed?

So far, there is no definitive answer to that (it’s likely to come later via court cases), but there are a few guidelines. One is to look at what impression is created by the posts from an influencer. Is it fairly obvious that this would be a reward-based post? This person might be known to be your brand ‘ambassador’, for example. Or so famous you can’t imagine he wouldn’t expect reward for his services – like Usain Bolt.

But if the posts give the impression of an independent, unscripted, genuine recommendation of your brand – and yet, you’ve paid or rewarded the speaker, this could be a bit murky and could be perceived as misleading or deceptive. One of the ways around this is to include some tags that fairly subtly identify paid advertising – like #spon, #ad, or #ambassador.

Despite these new rules and the challenges of making sure your social media and ad work stay within the law, the positive impact of using thought leaders and social influencers is so strong (88% and 90% are big numbers…) that it’s worth doing, and worth doing right.

If you’d like a hand with a strategy for boosting your brand via social influencers, Agility can help – just give us a call.

(If you want to know more, a good resource explaining this topic comes from lawyer Stephen von Muenster)

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‘Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.’

This beautiful quote from Carl Jung reminds us that if you present all of your information in the same way, regardless of the audience, you are presenting information that is of no use to at least some of your audiences.

One way that we can show respect for our clients and customers is to make sure that our messages will resonate with them. To do that we may need to find a number of ways to connect.

Every client, potential client and past client is important to us. We will always strive to make our messages meaningful to the very different people that we work with.

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In the last few weeks and months I have had lots of calls from people wanting to know how they can get an online presence, (actually what some want to know is how people can find them online without  understanding that it requires something from them).

They have recently come to realise that people can’t find them or their service/product via Google.

Others are online, but in a particular role and they want to be known in a different way or for a different skill. Or they want to be seen as leaders in their sector, but do not really have an online voice.

I understand that social media is not for everyone, but if you are a leader in your sector, it is one of the important ways that you can be recognised as such.

One client is a highly successful Dietician.  She had never had a need to market her services because all of her clients came to her through word of mouth.

She was now finding that clients were still referring people to her, but that instead of jumping on the phone, they were jumping on the Internet. They would google her name and nothing. She didn’t exist.

Another client wants to raise funds for an exciting and creative business project. He is really excited about the project and so he should be. But, when he starts prospecting for investors, they are going to want to know something more about this person other than that he has a good idea. They will search for him online and find nothing.

A few that I have spoken to are wanting to stand out within their organisation, or have been told by their employer that they have a responsibility to build their personal brand.

Actually, social media can’t build you a personal brand. You need to do that, and it is a lifelong process – who you are, what you want to be known for, what your values are. How you lead, How your product is produced, how you give back within your world.

Social media can’t create that. It can lead people to you and if you do it well, their questions will be answered and they will gain an understanding of who you are and what is important to you and about you.

Social media is also the thing that can bring you undone if you are not consistent, if you make a big mistake which can be broadcast around the world, if you are not really the person you are trying to portray. We are getting savvier at identifying those who are not authentic.

Just like business does, you need to create and protect your brand. You need to live your brand, online and offline.

How can you assess your personal brand?

A few points to start off with:

• Do an online search on your name – do you come up on the first page? Page 26 or not at all?
• Do an image search on your name – Are there images there? Are they images that you would not want the world to see?
• Know your purpose – If you do not know clearly what you stand for and what you want to project, your messages will be confused. This might take some time to think about. This really is the essence of who you are
• Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Does it help people understand your values?
• Use a variety of media to give you a chance to express your personality. Do you have video, blogs, media?
• Have you gone too far? Offended, bored, boasted?
• Who are you connected with? Positive people in your sphere? Do you share others’ content?
• Are you authentic? Will people trust and believe in you?
• Are you credible? Do people trust and believe in you?
• Do you inspire?
• Are you up-to-date? Will people find current news and information on your site(s) or old, outdated information?

If you have done a check and think, I need some help with my online brand. Contact us today and we will work out a plan for you.

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