If you have expertise that can help an entire community, how you approach that community is critical to getting maximum recognition for your personal brand.
Last week, in the post “Participation Breeds Recognition”, I told you about the personal brand I was aiming to build at work, and the first outward-facing brand-building steps my team and I took via open-source software communities. However, the real personal branding success came later.
As a reminder: my team’s main software platform was purchased from a software company just before I started my job, and the team’s first objective was to learn the new system and take full control of it. This was harder than usual because we were one of the first European companies to buy this software so in many ways it felt like we were on our own. There actually were other companies using the software but we weren’t organized together in any way, so my boss and I pushed for the software company to hold a user conference for all the European companies that had bought their software.
User or industry conferences
Not only did we push for the software company to have a user conference, we made sure to have an on-stage presentation at the one-day event, which my boss gave. Our presentation – I helped him create it and he credited me in kind – was about the success we had in reaching our first objective mentioned above of expertise running the new system.
Giving a presentation about our achievements at this first-ever industry user conference immediately catapulted us to the forefront of the community by default, since, like us, the other user companies weren’t previously aware of who was having success with the software.
However – as we had planned with our contact from the software company but unknown to the crowd – after my boss’s presentation, I stood up in the audience. Expanding a little on what my boss had said, I explained how we wanted to create a community around the software like the open-source communities we were already active in, and then listed all the benefits for everyone involved while adding that not only were we ready to get started NOW, but we even had some resources at disposal for the community.
I couldn’t have hoped for a better reaction. We had clearly touched a raw nerve.
Business communities
Before I was even done speaking, heads were nodding around the room and people had begun yelling out suggestions. And when I was done, representatives from almost every company in the room came over to our table, and this was right smack in the middle of the session while the conference was still going on and not at the end of the day. They were that excited to join the initiative.
After all, it was a no-brainer for them- someone was offering to make their lives easier for free, and after seeing how much thought and effort we had already put into the idea, they wanted us to lead this new community, which we were prepared to do and eventually did.
As community leaders, new and potential members automatically came to us first. As demand grew, we even considered launching paid consulting services.
Leveraging your achievements to lead a popular initiative is a great way to grow your brand for an entire community.
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.
