Through Personal Branding, I’ve gotten to meet some amazing young stars. One of the most prominent and resourceful is Tiffany Monhollon, who writes the Personal PR column and has just started a blog on that very topic. Today, I interviewed her concerning this topic to give you a better view of how important it is. Tiffany is a corporate communications supervisor at one of the world’s largest staffing and human resource services companies. Currently, she finishing her master’s degree in journalism.
She’s worked and written for a Fortune 500 company, an international missions organization, volunteer groups, university organizations, newspapers and start-up businesses. She is passionate about defining the lines of professionalism, integrity and authenticity in our new media world. She writes about this and other career and new media-related topics at her blog, Personal PR.
Me: Tiffany, how did you transition from writing a blog entitled “Little Red Suit” to “Personal PR”?
Tiffany Monhollon: It’s been an interesting process, to be sure. Little Red Suit was organized around a metaphor that worked for me at the time, because I had been planning to launch a women-oriented business. But my plans changed, as plans often do, and I chose to stick with the blog anyway, instead of a blog hosted at my personal name website. That’s because when I first chose to launch a professional blog, I had a lot of uncertainty about whether or not to even publish my full name publicly, because there was at that time a lot of discussion around the subject – think Kathy Sierra and Creating Passionate Users. In the first few months, I blogged about this topic and issues of authenticity and transparency in blogging, and that conversation is where a lot of readers started showing their support and joining in the conversation with me, and a few high profile bloggers at the time encouraged me to use my full name to blog by. And eventually, I did. After that, my blog really took off, and it was great, but I quickly found that I wanted to blog at a place where the URL didn’t appear to be exclusively woman-oriented in content, because it never was that type of content.
Around the same time I started thinking about launching a new blog (or re-launching at a new URL), I chose to shift the research for my master’s thesis away from corporate culture and towards the phenomenon of professional topic blogging and personal branding. And my research led me to a pocket of study into Personal PR. Imagine my surprise when you e-mailed me to propose new columns for the magazine, and “Personal PR” was on the list! All the pieces started falling together at the right time, and I realized that this was the direction I’d been searching for in a new blog. And it also worked naturally into something that’s at the heart of what I most enjoy writing about.
Me: Can you explain more about building powerful relationships in the digital age and the discussions you have had and will have on your blog around this topic?
Tiffany Monhollon: From early in my career, and even throughout my life in general, relationships have played an integral part in my success, in various ways. When I started blogging professionally, I realized very quickly that the same could be true of my virtual relationships as well. As most people in our generation, I was an early adopter of most technologies, and perhaps even more so because my dad has been into computers since I was a baby, and the Internet was just one of many things I learned about quickly. I remember when there was just one person in my high school I could e-mail because they had dial up and a hotmail account, too! So of course, in college, when things like Xanga appeared, I signed up quickly, and the same for MySpace, Facebook, etc. But those were more of a time zapper for me, because I never got anything of true value out of it, other than some fleeting interaction with people I hadn’t seen since high school, etc.
Blogging at Little Red Suit was different than any of my other new media experiences, and that was for three reasons. The first was, I was positioning myself within a thoughtful community of professional bloggers. Even though I didn’t really realize it at the time, this made a powerful impact in my blogging. The second was, I was creating relevant content. It was relevant because my readers showed up, read it, and participated with it. This is something that as a lifelong writer I had always dreamed up but never really imagined possible. And it’s also powerful, because it challenges you to continually create better and better content. The third was, I was interacting with the right people. And by right, I mean people who would interact with me, encourage me, promote me, and build a relationship with me, both other bloggers and readers.
These relationships are empowering – personally, the encourage you and make you continually improve. And professionally, they open doors and lead to opportunities you wouldn’t get a shot at any other way. And the really interesting thing about these relationships is, they’re not just empowering in the digital realm. In other words, they don’t just help you become a better, more popular blogger. They can help you in your career. For me, as my expertise and authority in the blogging world grew, so did my confidence, expertise and authority in my job and career.
Me: As the Personal PR columnist for Personal Branding Magazine, how do you differentiate your blog content from your column?
Tiffany Monhollon: Well, the form for blog content and magazine content are inherently different. Columns for a magazine have to be able to stand alone and are less interactive, so they tend to revolve around one specific topic or element, and they have to be concise and require a lot of time, research, and finesse. But the blog is different because it’s more interactive, and it can be very strategic, like the column, or I can write for it more spare of the moment. It also serves as more of an ongoing conversation and interaction about the subject. I can offer tips, personal insights, and extensions of other posts or article’s I’ve read by linking to them. There is also a larger range for me to explore and expound upon at the blog.
So that’s the basic difference, but for me, it’s not really a goal to differentiate content – anywhere I write – because it’s important to me to be consistent wherever I am – in real life and in the digital. So both serve as a great venue to share my ideas, but they are very different in form, purpose and audience.
Me: There are various ways to communicate your brand online, in both traditional and new media channels. Which do you see as having more impact on the end user?
Tiffany Monhollon: Really, it depends on the individual user. A more traditional media format is different in form, function, audience and even purpose than a blog, for example. Most traditional channels are a great way to generate a lot of attention, traffic and buzz around your brand, but a new media outlet such as a blog lets you actually create relationships with readers, bloggers, even reporters. These relationships can offer more than simply attention, traffic and buzz. Because there are people who know and care about you on the other end, as opposed to just a bunch of people briefly interacting with your brand, which is more typically what happens with a traditional type outlet. Both can be really important tools in promoting your brand, so it’s not a matter of one or the other but more of finding the right balance for you.
Me: How do you think personal pr intersects personal branding?
Tiffany Monhollon: This is a really interesting question, and there are a lot of ways to answer it. You can look at it as a pretty seamless intersection if you simply realize that theoretically, personal branding is born out of marketing theory and personal PR is, of course, based in PR theory. And with the rise of MPR, it’s easy to see how they work together for your image and your career.
Personal PR is in some ways a whole life/career philosophy that encompasses many things. It’s a very dynamic concept, much like the discipline and definition of public relations is. But people have a certain perception of PR that it’s all about media and promotions and attention. It’s not: that’s really just one element. Concepts like corporate social responsibility, relationship management, communication, media realtions, issues management – and many more – that stem from PR flow so smoothly into the career realm. So it’s simply one umbrella that covers a lot of different aspects of your image and your career, which makes it similar to personal branding in many ways, and there is some intersection regarding what’s under each umbrella, but they’re essentially two different disciplines that work together seamlessly for one overarching purpose – to enhance your career.
Me: Will “Little Red Suit” die now that “Personal PR” has surfaced? Will the branding be consistent? (Picture of you in the suit vs a regular headshot)
Tiffany Monhollon: This is a really interesting question, mostly because I’ve gone back and forth on this. To be honest, just maintaining one blog is difficult enough with a full time job, grad school and the volunteering I do. So my intent with launching Personal PR was to sort of move blogging territory there. Most prominent bloggers who advised me in the process said to focus on one blog, and that would be more than enough, and that my loyal readership would follow me there. But I still have so much traffic at Little Red Suit it’s a hard question to answer, because there are a lot of things I could do with the site, and there are many people who successfully blog at more than one site. So it’s possible that I will continue blogging there, just more infrequently.
As far as branding, goes, I’d already switched to a professional headshot mostly because it looks more like me than the things I had launched Little Red Suit with, but I am sticking with the color red to keep some consistency.
Me: Finally, what have you learned from blogging relationships (like ours) and what are three pieces of advice you would like to give my readership?
Tiffany Monhollon: I’ve learned that blogging relationships are really no different than other relationships. They take time and consideration to cultivate, and they must be maintained, but they can really make a difference in your life and career. If you’re a blogger, they’re invaluable, because they are ultimately your most powerful tool in your initial phases of promoting your content as well as your personal brand. They help connect you to opportunities and people who can help you succeed. That’s what I love about blogging relationships so much – it really seems like there is such a culture of mutual peer cultivation. There’s not a ton of competition because there’s room for everyone in the blogosphere. And what’s amazing about blogging is, you very literally have to have other people (links, comments, traffic) which can be intimidating, but if you just take the time to cultivate the relationship – with each reader or blogger you want to, you can have them (relationships, links, comments, traffic).
1) Be your most excellent, every day. If you blog, this means write the best, most interesting, value-added content you can, each time you write. On the job, display a solid work ethic, do your best, learn continually, and push yourself every day. Your personal brand is worth nothing if there’s nothing to back it up. Your personal PR is pointless if there’s nothing excellent going on to talk about. Be worth talking about first. The rest will be much easier if you never stop pursuing excellence.
2) Build real relationships. At work, your community, at home, at the grocery store, on your blog, on other people’s blogs, wherever you are, wherever you spend your time, build relationships there. You never know where the next career-making relationship will come from. And make them real relationships by making them 2-way, and by putting other people first. Realize that, as Zig Ziglar said, you can have anything you want in life if you help other people achieve what they want. This doesn’t mean you help people get what they want just so you can get your way too; on the contrary, selflessly helping other people succeed naturally lends itself to them helping you in their own ways sometimes.
3) Don’t forget about life. To the career-oriented individual, it’s easy to put so much of yourself into the next big thing that you somehow lose sight of the rest of life. But it’s critical for your career that you prioritize to be a whole person. This means taking time to give back to the community and others around you. It also means taking time for the rest of your life goals, be that dating or family or just taking a vacation. Your career, your brand, and your relationships will benefit if you keep this in sight.
