Tonight, I’m delivering my personal branding keynote to 300+ people. My signature topic is: The Ugly Truth About Your Reputation. Because this audience is so diverse in terms of careers and use of social media, I developed a simple four attribute model we all can use to measure, create and manage our personal brands.
Four attributes
I’m calling it the LICK Q model, because that is the perfect acronym to sum up the values of all the factors. Q stands for quotient – as in intelligence quotient (IQ).
So what is your LICK Q? Judge for yourself. The attributes are:
• Like-ability
• Intelligence
• Communication
• Kick in the Head
Let’s take one at a time.
Do we like you? We might respect you, fear you or have to share a wall with you – but that doesn’t mean we like you. People who are likeable are accessible, sunny, interested in others, have a natural generosity, make sure there’s rarely a conversation that’s a one-way street, have charisma, are self-respecting, engage in work and play they find compelling, and make other people feel good.
I have hundreds of FB friends. I really like 7 of them. You know who you are. Others are okay or just plain boring. Some whine. One is so self-congratulatory as to be insufferable. Before their appearances on FB, I kinda liked them all. Now, as our personal brands play out by our own hands, we’re finding out whom we would throw out of the lifeboat first.
INTELLIGENCE: Do we think you are smart? Intelligence in social media plays out as your ability share an original thought. At least find a new quotation source and stop beating us over the head with what Zig Ziglar said in 1955. My apologies, once again, to the Ziglar family.
It’s not only your ability to pundit in your area of expertise. How often do you go to a different tribe and bring new perspective to the curly-haired or women over 40 looking for romance? Think about it. Do you apply what you know in a way that engages us in novel thinking?
Is it easy for us to understand what you have to say? Do you use word pictures, metaphors, analogies, alliteration, and reasonably good grammar? Can you spell? Do you write with a degree of appreciation for the space and forum? Crisply making your case is not just for Twitter or any other limiting media. We all adore the people who let a photo and a caption speak for them.
Are you over-communicating? One quarter of the people I know from social media, I know a little bit too well. No one needs to know what your baby came up with that landed on your shirt before you left for work.
That’s personal branding at work. Have you created a persona so clear, crisp, consistent, and compelling – and done it relentlessly as you move from social media to phone calls, emails, meetings, conversations and presentations – that the moment I seek an answer, consultant, employee or supplier that’s anything close to what you do: I feel a kick in my head that has your name ramming into it?
Everyone needs a kick in the head once in a while. It means we are shaking up the old solutions and searching for the new. That’s your opportunity in so many instances, if you’ve been all about personal branding.
The ugly truth about your reputation is that you are now the architect of it. There is no one else to blame. If you are not demonstrating all four attributes, get on track and stay on track. The beauty of social media is with every post, blog, tweet, update, and comment you can restructure our opinion of you.
Personal Brands, succinctly put: do we want to lick, growl, howl or bite you?
