Reading: Personal Branding 101 with Joanne Tombrakos

A personal brand is how we sell ourselves – if you’re not clear about what yours is, you can’t move forward. So says personal branding expert Joanne Tombrakos, who teaches branding at NYU and runs her own branding agency. She talks to Lesley about how she has reinvented herself several times, and how you can use her downloadable workbook, Getting Your Personal Brand Story Straight, to do the same.

Joanne’s Top Tips for Finding Your Brand

1. Get your personal story straight.
In order to present yourself in a way that is authentic to you – online and offline – the first thing you need to do is get your story straight. It requires soul searching, introspection, and hard work, but the payoff is huge! And that can be a short or a long process depending on how clear you are.

2. Get your online profile in order.
Start with LinkedIn. Even if people hate social networking, if you want to stay in business and you want a career, you have to be on LinkedIn. I think that a lot of people think that LinkedIn is just for posting your resume. But the research shows that people are there to share industry information and to network – that’s their primary reason to be there and that’s why you should be there too.

3. Expand your networks.
One of the things that I found when I left Time Warner was that I had gotten really lazy, and my network was very much within the industry, and  even just within the company. Everyone there knew who I was, but beyond that, it was like, ‘Who’s Joanne?’ So before you start to think about reinvent, you want to expand beyond your comfort zone. Because those are going to be your people. Your people are not necessarily going to be the ones that still want to stay wherever it was that you were coming from.

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