February 8, 2014: Chris Brogan is an oft-quoted author and digital marketing expert who’s been counseling brands and businesses about how to distinguish themselves online for many years. As part of our continuing series of interviews with online marketing experts, we wanted to catch up with Chris to discuss personal branding, social media, and community building, and are grateful that Chris was able to set aside some time to talk with us.
Didit: Hi Chris, and thanks for taking our questions. I want to talk about personal branding, since that seems a strong part of your bailiwick. Give us a little bit on who you are, and how you got your start in social media, personal branding, and consulting.
Chris Brogan: I’m Chris Brogan, Publisher & CEO of Owner Magazine, a business magazine about helping people grow their business. In the past, I ran a few very small marketing education companies where I consulted and spoke with some very big brands like Coke, Microsoft, Google, Build a Bear, Disney, and way too many more neat names.
Personal branding, the way I see it, is really just being clear about what you do and doing it well. But it’s also telling the story in such a way that people understand why to bother with you in the first place. On various boxes in the grocery store, you see a “serving suggestion” picture. That’s the best way to think of personal branding to me.
Didit: It seems now that a lot of your work focuses on building a personal brand, and integrating that into lifestyle choices. Some folks, like Virgin Air’s Richard Branson, embody their personal brand, actively tweet, and entirely integrate their personal brand into their professional presentation. Other personalities, like actor Matt Smith of Doctor Who fame, stay off of platforms like Twitter and very carefully moderate their personal brands. Do you think that any professional today can avoid social media, with the requisite personal brand building work that requires? Do you think there are a variety of approaches?
Chris Brogan: A lot of my work doesn’t focus on building a personal brand. It focuses on helping people understand how to be helpful. That’s the thing most people get wrong. You want to fail fast? Worry about what people think about you. Want to own the world? Do something exceptionally well in the service of others, and do it such that others want to talk about it to their friends. Sir Richard Branson is a huge idol of mine. Be him. Okay, don’t share every little thing that happens, but don’t be so buttoned up that people don’t know who you are.
Didit: Who do you look towards for inspiration, ideas, and so on?
Chris Brogan: I look to the challenges of the community I serve as my biggest inspiration. I learned just today that something I think of as “easy” with regards to entrepreneurial practices turns out to NOT be a typical mindset. I had no idea. We all suffer the curse of thinking that people are just like us. Clearly, this isn’t true, but it’s a huge issue. My inspiration comes from learning how to help someone accomplish what they need in a way that then lets me help more than just that one person.
Didit: What do you think is the biggest issue in personal branding today?
Chris Brogan: Are there issues in personal branding? I think the issues that humans face most is “I’m not being heard/seen.” We start as an early child saying, “I need your attention here!” and that never ends. “Look what I can do!” Grown ups trying to get their job done are not that different from toddlers in our needs to be seen, recognized, praised, and accepted. Humankind’s greatest need is the need to feel wanted.
Didit: Tell us how you use social media analytics in your projects, and how one can use social media analytics for one’s own personal brand. Does Klout mean anything, for example?
Chris Brogan: Klout’s the silliest tool ever. Great intention. But any tool that thinks I’m as influential as Ellen Degeneres is severely flawed. I don’t use social media analytics. I measure simple things like revenue and subscriber acquisition. There are very few tools that succeed at figuring out how social translates to dollars, so I just track dollars.
Didit: Look into your crystal ball for us. What will be the next big issue facing social media and brand building (personal and otherwise) in the next 5 years.
Chris Brogan: Five years is an eternity in tech. Here are the challenges: the space is crowded, humans are attention-starved and you’re trying to take some to sell your product. People aren’t interested in eating big “meals” of information. They want to graze. In the 1980s when USAToday launched, people thought it was stupid and simplistic. Now, every paper and site is USAToday’s baby. We need tapas (a wide variety of appetizers), not buffets, and I think people need a lot more handholding to get where they want to go.
Didit: You talk a lot about Google+ and Google Hangouts when others have written off the platform as dead. Aside from the SEO advantages of Google+, share with us what you feel the advantages are with Google Plus and Google Hangouts for building one’s own personal brand.
Chris Brogan: Whoever writes off Google+ as dead has absolutely no understanding of the wiring of the web. If you think the #1 search engine in the world isn’t heavily weighing that platform in its search results, you haven’t done a simple search to test it.
Beyond search, private communities are powerful (I’m doing a lot of business that involves private community functions). The hangouts are a way to make business for yourself. Imagine you’re a music coach or a personal trainer or a company that sells a product that needs some instruction and demo work to happen. The opportunities are endless.
Didit: Online reputation management is a big thing, both for brands and for individuals. Share with us your top steps for maintaining a healthy online reputation, and tactics for dealing with crisis.
Chris Brogan: To me, the simplest and easiest test of reputation management is this: are you showing up on Google positively or negatively, and if you search a site like Twitter or Facebook, do you see more plus than minus in the sentiment department? Reputation management is a challenge these days as more and more communities are fragmented, plus there are few tools that do enough to weigh the value of a comment. If a twelve year old boy hates my YouTube video, it doesn’t affect my sales. If you run a Fortune 100 company and you hate what I had to say, I might care a bit more.
Didit: Share with us which Superbowl ad from this year was your favorite, in terms of both the ad itself and in how they handled and made use of the ad in social.
Chris Brogan: My thoughts on the commercials is that they are so far afield from being especially valuable or not for a brand. We like them now as adjunct entertainment, tapas again (see USAToday). But which one did I like? The story I heard most around the way was a local lawyer guy who had a real kickass add that wasn’t seen nationally and that got a lot of online attention. I also really appreciate how Sodastream got a whole lot of spin-up because of their “banned” ad. If I had to guess which company made some sales based on their ad, that’s who I’d pick.
This, in a way sums up my take on personal branding: if it’s not building and growing your business (and we “grow” by making more money or serving more people), then who cares? A lot of what people focus on when they think of “social” as a “thing” are the wrong indicators. Who cares how many people follow me on Twitter? Am I serving the community what they need?
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