Personal Branding on a Cruise Ship

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Hey everyone!  As some of you may know, I’m currently on vacation onboard the Liberty of the Seas, a cruise ship in the Royal Caribbean fleet.  We set sail on Saturday and have already embarked on Puerto Rico and St. Maartin.  Today, in St. Maartin, I went sailing aboard “Stars and Stripes,” which is an old American Cup racing boat.  We came in second place out of 3 other boats(another American boat and a Canada one).  Our boat had 12 crew members and my job was to help steer the ship.  Tonight there is going to be a party on deck, along with a midnight buffet.  Tomorrow we will be at sea and enjoy some of the onboard activities such as surfing, rock climbing, swimming and more.  Thursday, I’ll be in Labadee, Haiti, which is the private island Royal Caribbean owns.  I hope everyone is having a great week without me and I’ll be back home in Boston on Saturday.

I’ve noticed something very interesting on the cruise that connects with personal branding.  I was watching RCTV (the cruises TV station where they promote internally to get people to purchase products or get involved in onboard activities) and saw something I had never seen before.  The cruise director created a video of “a day in the life of a cruise director.”  I’ve been going on ships since I was 8 years old because my father is a cruise/travel agent and have never seen a video diary like this one.  While watching, I saw him planning each activity, drafting marketing content and meeting with his staff, so that the passengers would have a spectacular voyage.  By watching the video I got to know the cruise director without ever meeting him, just like we see with blogging.  When I actually met him yesterday, it felt like I was speaking to someone I already knew.  That is personal branding at it’s finest.  It shows you that if you can reveal your more human attributes, along with typical work or hobbies, you can connect with people you’ve never even met.  Video is quintessential to showing others exactly who you are by capturing your personality.  Images and text just don’t have that kind of effect.

Picture of Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. He is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin’s Press) and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan Publishing), which combined have been translated into 15 languages.

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