I am so pleased to say that this section of the book is completely done, and has been awarded a green flag in Scrivener indicating that. It doesn’t mean I won’t be doing a final editing pass as I get this beast closer to publication, but for now, I don’t have to worry about writing this section any more.- dp
Focus on your expertise—
but make sure it’s based on your experience.
The concept of personal branding is sound, but I think the way some people practice it feels a little bit icky to some. And for good reason. Think about the typical ‘follow your dreams’ inspirational quote posting guru-wannabe on any of the popular social media channels out there. Or the dude flaunting his late-model testosterone-fueled roadster covered in fat stacks of cash. And what about the ‘ten ways to MILLIONS’ beach house-owning, twenty-something that got it all by following ‘these AMAZING hacks that’ll get you a big bunch of Benjies fast!’ The worst of all? The ‘fake it ’til you make it’ perma-smiler who is just ripping off other people’s ideas, and presenting them as their own.
Fact is, all of the above aren’t personal brands, they’re good ol’ American carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen. While some may attain some level of fame and name recognition, in reality, they are no better than ‘fly by night’ flim flam artists. They give personal branding a bad image and an even worse name.
How can you be sure you’ll never be one of them?
By being something they can never be: yourself.
There’s just so much repetitive and redundant conventional wisdom floating around social media, that actually finding anything of value is like digging through a pile of dirt (or worse) looking for the occasional grain of gold. My social media feeds are full of the same people slinging so much of the same slush back and forth that when I do run across someone who has a well-considered opinion that’s backed by data, and reinforced by links to other smart people, I immediately cherish the person posting, and add them to my list of trusted and preferred human beings. They provided value. They came off as human. And they created a distinct image in my mind, earning a spot in my life.
Such people are rare and precious, prized and enthusiastically passed onto others that appreciate the finer things online. These are the personal brands I’m writing about, and the personal brand I want you to discover, craft and communicate for yourself. How on earth can you do that? By sharing a unique expertise based solely on your hyper-specific experience.
Experience and expertise are two words that not only share a great many letters in common, they are inextricably conjoined from the very start. Through your experience you develop expertise, and the quality of your expertise is founded upon the extent and rigor of your experience. Another way to look at it is, your experience is where you’ve worked and what you’ve done, and your expertise is the toolbox of capabilities you developed along the way.
In episode 92 of my NONFICTION BRAND podcast, special guest Matt Barnett, Founder and Papa Bear of Bonjoro (read more about him and his company later in this book), and I had a fascinating conversation that revolved around experience and expertise, with a heaping helping of personal brand folded in. You can tell a lot about the guy by looking at his ‘About’ statement on LinkedIn:
Just take a listen to the two episodes in which he’s my guest, and you’ll find out that ‘About’ line isn’t just lip service, it’s one of the foundational pillars of his company Bonjoro.com. In episode 92, he tells the true story of Ollie, Bonjoro’s Chief Marketing Officer. I don’t know how Matt and Ollie met, but I do know it was when they were both four years old in the UK. Fast forward 20-some years later, and Ollie (Oliver Bridge) is now CMO of Matt’s growing business. Not because of his résumé or CV, but because of the relationship the two developed between way back as wee boys. Matt said it best in the podcast,
“We hire ‘culture first.’ We tend to talk to people before we kind of look at their skill set…. I don’t really care too much about CVs, I don’t really care about what university you’ve been to or what school. I doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t particularly care about where you’ve worked. If you can do your job, if doesn’t really matter to me. But what I do care about is, do you fit our culture, will you fit with us…. It’s amazing, people who are just not right for our culture.”
Do you see what he’s saying there? That the endless pursuit of résumé padding has little to do with whether you get hired or not? If you listen to the episode, you’ll also hear him say that he keeps a casual, but serious, list of around 100 people that he’s dying to bring into his business whenever the time is right. When I asked him how he met or discovered these people—online, in person, via friends, etc.—his answer was ‘all of those things.’ And if you ask me, all of those things are directly tied to creating a personal brand based on your reputation, personality, and unique skill set as demonstrated publicly via any number of channels, not the least of which is your personal network.
Given all that, ask yourself this question: do your friends, family, colleagues, current customers and potential clients know how to describe who you are, what you do and how you do it? If not, you need to arm them with that information so that when they run into a Matt Barnett-type they can advocate for you should the time be right. Are you confident they can? That’s why you need to codify your personal brand. And what’s that personal brand based on? The expertise you acquired throughout your experience.
The biggest advice writers ever get (or give) is simple:
Write what you know.
That writerly advice is right on the money, and applies perfectly to personal brand building too. But keep in mind, experience and expertise are two different things—and I can prove it.
Let’s say you’re a project manager who’s employment background has always been in the Architecture / Engineering / Construction sector. Experience would dictate that the only things you are truly expert in are related to the designing and building of structures and facilities. But the expertise you’ve developed over your career spans a much broader group of subject areas.
Things like team building, group communications, comprehensive planning and quite possibly deep experience in specific project management concepts and systems like Agile, Scrum, or Kanban. Were you to focus solely on your experience, you might find yourself painted into an AEC corner. But if you broaden your sights to focus on the much larger topic of project management, you could increase the number of the relevant subjects you might talk about, and also greatly increase the size of your potential audience of readers, viewers, and/or listeners. After all, project managers deal in everything from software to hardware, and apps to apartments. Being able to speak ‘project manager’ includes a whole lot more people than those speaking the sub-dialect of ‘A/E/C project manager.’
This concept of sharing what you know also keeps you from doing what way too many personal brand-oriented newbies do: over generalization with a tendency to spout common conventional wisdom instead of hard, and personally earned, insight. You ever notice how trendy those ‘inspirational’ posts on Instagram, Facebook, and even LinkedIn are?
Here’s an example: Imposter Syndrome. It’s a real thing and worth talking about (I’ve even touched on it in this book), but what I’m really talking about was a while back when out of the blue suddenly everybody was doing a blog post, video, or livestream about the subject. It’s like we all saw the same TED Talk at the same time and decided to riff off something we actually know little about. Yes, there are experts who undoubtedly have some great information and insight to share, but every passing poster with a keyboard who just read about the subject? Spend some time on it, come up with your own ideas about it, and then MAYBE consider sharing your $.02 about it.
Why not instead go deep on something you actually have expertise in? Like the completely improbable pop-culture phenomenon known as Brené Brown. Don’t know her? Don’t worry, I’ve written all about her in a section of this book called MD, CPA, PhD, EIEIO. She’s an expert in shame, having done great scholarly research into the topic. Now who could possibly be interested in learning what she’s discovered about shame? Oddly enough, the entire thinking world apparently. Read more about her, check out her TED Talks, and you’ll understand why her laser focus on what she knows in great depth has earned her the respect of millions, and a major cameo role (playing herself) in the 2019 Amy Poehler-helmed Netflix comedy Wine Country (and an entire 2019 Netflix documentary about her called Brené Brown: The Call to Courage). Shame is her niche, and boy how’s she’s been able to capitalize on it.
Write what you know. Share what you’ve learned. Teach your completely true / completely you expertise. There are already enough people creating conventional wisdom inspirational quote graphics. We don’t need anymore of those.
…and there’s much more to come.
BOOKWARD BOUND / Daily Build is just what it says: the writing I did today in order to get my book a little bit closer to its publication. Posted the next day, it is presented here exactly as written and complete with all the typos, misspellings and grammatical errors you’d expect of a rough draft. Don’t worry, it’ll be edited later. The above was written during a livestream video of BOOKWARD BOUND that you can find on my YouTube BOOKWARD BOUND playlist any time you’d like. – DP Knudten
@2020 DP Knudten LLC – all rights reserved.
