See “intellectual dishonesty” if you think this list isn’t for you.
We’re all somewhere on this list.
And that’s not a bad thing; it means there’s still room to grow.
30 personal branding no-no’s
In no specific order:
- Lack of a chosen, designed branding plan to follow, including online and offline strategies
- Not measuring your branding activities, i.e. never knowing how well you’re following that plan
- Intellectual dishonesty such as misreporting numbers to make it appear as if your plan is on track
- Dishonesty in general; perhaps in making promises you can’t keep
- Too self-serving; it’s always about you and your projects
- Appearing too self-serving, which is just as bad
- Feeling entitled to success and acting like it
- Impatience with branding tactics before they can succeed
- Over-reliance on past achievements
- Overly slow execution towards new achievements
- Waiting too long to brand yourself as a mentor or expert
- Not practicing what you preach
- Not even being able to demonstrate what you preach, i.e. building an unauthentic brand
- Choosing the wrong niche to brand yourself in
- Taking too long to realize you’re in the wrong niche
- Branding yourself in unrelated niches
- Branding yourself with your job title
- Adopting a copycat or generic brand
- Lacking personality possibly due to fear of exposure or vulnerability
- Caught publicly doing something inappropriate, especially if you have role model status or aspire to
- Having an unfocused, seemingly random web presence
- Failing to check the quality of your content
- Not owning your personal domain name
- Asking too much of your contact network
- Not giving enough back to your contact network
- Not having profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and any other social websites critical to your niche
- Poor social media management, such as having too many social profiles to manage or not keeping those profiles updated
- Poor personal management, resulting in e.g. being late
- Poor network management, such as spending too much time with people who only take and not enough time with people who can give
- Poor brand management, such as not recognizing any of the other errors in this list and then taking corrective action
Want some more?
- Are You Making These 5 Personal Branding Mistakes?
- 4 Biggest Personal Branding Mistakes People Make
- 5 Personal Branding Mistakes That Could Ruin Your Brand
If you have any other suggestions for this list, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Or, share a story about how you recognized an error and fixed it.
Author:
Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.
