Measuring the influence of your personal brand is a necessary first step towards increasing the influence of your personal brand. Measurement creates a baseline against which you can track your increasing influence.
How do you measure the influence of your personal brand?
Brand measurement is more important today than ever before. There’s more competition for personal branding success. As a result, obvious expert status in our fields is harder to achieve and maintain than ever before…and more competition appears every day.
The starting point…
The starting point for measuring, or re-measuring, the influence of your personal brand is to review the best of what’s been already written on the topic. Here are three of the best posts I’ve read on the topic:
- The Quantity Vs Quality Debate Revised, by Dan Schwabel, clearly separates quantity (which opens doors) and quality (which opens wallets). The post contains 2 graphics that reinforce the two extremes.
- The Personal Branding Authority Flowchart, by Chad Levitt, also contains a helpful info graphic which also reconciles “quantity” versus “quality.”
- Personal Brand Equity, by Beverley Macy, appears in my Top 3 list because she includes some specific ways you can track your brand influence.
Quantity approaches
I have long been skeptical of “quantity” approaches, based on numbers of social media friends, followers, Retweets, Trackbacks, subscribers, pass-alongs, or blog post comments.
However, after rereading the three posts listed above, I came away with increased respect for the “quantity” approach. As Dan said, “To the majority of the world, numbers matter.”
My initial knee jerk preference for quality over quantity may have been a short-sighted.
Using action to measure quality
Regardless of where you weigh in on the quality-versus-quantity question, you still need to measure and track the influence of your personal brand, if only so you can track the direction of your influence, (is it increasing or decreasing), and to identify what’s working and what’s not working.
To do this, you need numbers; metrics that permit comparisons, even if they are only relative to a month ago, six months ago, or a year ago.
As many quality consultants and web usability experts have always said, You can’t improve what you don’t measure!
Approaches to measuring action
When it comes to measuring influence, nothing equals making an offer that requires action, and measuring how many of your followers, friends, or subscribers take you up on your offer. Options range from the easiest for you to set up, (and the least risky for followers to take), range from tracking website visits to tracking sales:
- URL visits. Your action measurement can be as simple as using Google Analyatics to monitor visits to specific articles, blog posts, or landing pages on your own website, or a marketing partner’s website. The action can also be watching a YouTube video or listening to a podcast.
- Downloads. A more accurate action measurement involves tracking registration-free downloads, such as PDF newsletters, white papers, or special reports or audio/video files. Download volume, of course, depends on the amount of commitment you ask for; downloads that are not tied to registration will be greater than downloads that require a name and e-mail address, plus a confirming e-mail.
- Free Trials. Likewise, the degree of commitment required to “try before you buy” also influences software and online services.
- Purchases. The ultimate action measurement, of course, is based on tracking sales that take place on landing pages tracked to specific social marketing media, marketing promotions, or pay-per-click campaigns.
Fast Company’s Influence Project
Those interested in a fresh approach to measuring the influence of their personal brand may want to check out Fast Company Magazine’s Influence Project.
Fast Company Magazine wants to discover 2010’s Most Influential person.
There are several interesting angles to this project:
- Emphasis on photographs. Have your photo and bio handy when you visit, in case you want to take part. Your photograph is immediately added to the website. It will also appear in Fast Company’s November, 2010, issue. The the size of your photograph depends on the number of visitors you influence, or have sent, to the project.
- Fresh perspective. Your influence is measured not relative to your subject area, or your immediate competitors. Instead, your influence is measured relative to others around the world, from all fields of endeavor. I’m intrigued, for example, that I became involved because of a Tweet from an individual living in South Africa.
- Biography. As always, when you take part, you can describe yourself in a brief bio, but there is no website link, and URLs added to the bio are not active hyperlinks. This puts a premium on defining your niche, or relevance, as concisely as possible (always a good exercise to repeat).
I’m impressed by the “democratic,” or grass-roots, feel to Fast Company’s Influence Project. Certainly, there are high-profile participants, like Guy Kawasaki, Joan Stewart (the Publicity Hound), and other familiar faces. Yet, it’s fascinating to make the acquaintance of a refreshing number of new faces.
Given the fun of participating in a very visual competition that puts all participants on a level footing, and the fact there’s no cost involved, and – so far – I haven’t received a flurry of e-mail from Fast Company, I’m glad I’m participating.
In the spirit of full disclosure, my picture gets a little bigger each time one of my referrals visits the site. (My influence also increases if you also decide to measure the influence of your personal brand.) Accordingly, here’s a link to visit if you prefer to go directly to the site.
Conclusion
As Dan Shawbel wrote in his post mentioned above:
We all need to review how we’ve been connecting and promoting ourselves online.
All of us have to guard against the tendency to get excited about new ideas and new techniques. Often, the “newness of the new” blinds us to the importance of the basics, like measuring the influence of our personal brands. Our attempts to measure our brand’s influence may never be 100% accurate, but they’re better than nothing; imperfect measurements are better than continuing to act without any measurements or tracking at all. Question: How do you measure the influence of your personal brand? Share your experiences and suggestions as comments, below.
Author:
Roger C. Parker shares ideas for planning, writing, promoting, & profiting from brand building books in his daily writing tips blog. His latest book is #BOOK TITLE Tweet: 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Compelling Article, Book, & Event Titles.
