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MODULE SEVEN : TOPIC 1

HOW TO BUILD YOUR BRAND

Transcript

Fundamentals
of Branding

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When I think of James Altucher, the talented entrepreneur and

writer who was recently on The Art of Charm podcast, a number
of associations immediately come to mind.
In no particular order, I think of the following words: blogging, risk, vulnerability,
radical honesty, curiosity, marketing, entrepreneurship, gentleness, humor, fear,
generosity, and connection. Other concepts come to mind too, but those are
the most immediate.

All of those ideas make up a big part of James Altucher’s personal brand, which
is one of the most unusual and distinct brands out there today. The fact that I
automatically associate him with those words means that he’s built a strong
reputation around those topics, themes and mindsets. James isn’t just a guy who’s
interested in those things -- in a very real way, he is those things.

That’s the power of a great personal brand: one of the most important tools
in your networking toolkit.

So in this lesson, we’ll be discussing the fundamental principles of self-branding,

by exploring the elements of a great brand and how they amplify your social
capital, with the help of some fascinating case studies.

So let’s get started!

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The first thing we need to recognize is that self-branding happens

whether or not you consciously try to do it.
Whether you spend every waking moment thinking about how people perceive
you, or you leave your brand entirely up to chance, you’re building a personal
brand, because a personal brand is really the sum total of your choices and
behaviors. Your attitudes and mindsets make up your brand. Your platforms
and communications make up your brand. How you meet people and stay in
touch with them is part of your brand. Every move you make is a contribution
to your personal brand, for better or worse. Collectively, these social capital
moves shape how people think of you.

So while we’re going to be talking explicitly in this module about how to build
your personal brand, keep in mind that we’ve actually been shaping your personal
brand since Module 1. Now we’re just going to bring it into sharper focus.

So what is a personal brand, when you really get down to it?

Ultimately, your personal brand is what people know, think and feel about you.
You can call it a reputation, an area of expertise or a sphere of influence, but
the words matter less than the idea, which is that your brand reflects who you
are, and how other people can relate to you. It’s really as simple as that.

Now, you can shape what people think and feel about you deliberately, or you
can let it happen organically. The self-branding movement, which really took
off with the advent of the internet, preaches the importance of deliberately
creating those thoughts and feelings rather than leaving them to chance. Which
is important, because with the advent of the internet, we now have more control
than ever over how people perceive us.

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Great self-branding always involves deliberate cultivation, but

there’s still something to be said for organic, spontaneous branding.
As we’ll see in a moment, if you focus on a handful of key habits and principles,
you don’t need to control every aspect of your brand, because a lot of your brand
will take care of itself. It’s the combination of organic and deliberate branding
that creates the best reputations.

What does this have to do with networking?

Well, everything. Your personal brand is really a reflection of your social capital:
the result of the people you know and connect, the knowledge you possess and
share, and the emotional support you accept and offer. Those resources, expressed
through your personal style, make up your brand.

This means that a personal brand captures a wide range of resources that coalesce
around a common area of expertise. Kanye West’s brand, for example, centers
around artistic creation. But it’s also one of the most wide-reaching: It includes
technical skills, like writing, producing and marketing; people, like the artists
on his label and his manufacturing partners; knowledge, like fashion expertise
and marketing insights; emotional investment, like cultivating new artists and
making connections across industries. The fact that all of these get expressed
through Kanye West’s overall “vibe” -- which is the personal style you know all
too well, and maybe even dislike at times -- makes this one of the most powerful
brands in the world.

So how you network determines your personal brand.

Your collection of people, knowledge and emotional connections
is the raw material of your reputation.
At the same time, your brand determines your social capital. Your reputation

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directly affects the people, knowledge and emotional support you’ll develop
for the rest of your life.

The greatest networkers in the world have an insanely clear and compelling
personal brand. That’s no accident: It’s because they acquire and share social
capital in such a way that their personal brands essentially build themselves.
They are known, among other things, as people who share their people, knowledge
and emotional support generously and meaningfully. Their reputations develop
as a result.

With that in mind, let’s dive into the building blocks of a personal
brand, starting with how to build your brand in the first place.
Most experts talk about self-branding as a deliberate choice. This makes sense:
If you’re going to take the time to work on your brand, it’s obviously going to
be deliberate.

But the hidden assumption there is that great personal branding is an outside -in
process. By “outside-in,” I mean that first you decide what you want to be known
for, and then you become that thing -- by purposely creating a brand that reflects
that identity.

When I worked as an attorney on Wall Street, I noticed something strange

happening at my firm. Right around the time the senior associates started
gunning to become partners, they had to pick a specialty within the law to
focus on, like securities or regulatory law. That specialty would become their
“brand” as partners, and they’d be responsible for networking within that
sphere, becoming an expert in that sphere, and selling work in that sphere.

Most of these lawyers were generalists up to that point, and hadn’t really thought
about where they wanted to spend their social capital. But once they had to

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choose, they basically just made a decision: I’ll specialize in regulatory law with
an emphasis on compliance, and that will be my brand. Then they got busy writing
legal articles, giving speeches and talking about regulatory law whenever they
could. Regulatory law became their world.

Whenever I talked to those attorneys, though, I always felt like I was talking
to a brand, not a person. On the surface, they had all the right elements of a
good reputation: an expertise, a network, an area of focus. But the whole thing
felt contrived, almost manufactured.

That’s because it was. Those attorneys started with a concept, then reverse
-engineered their personas to match it. It’s no surprise our exchanges felt so
transactional: The human element was missing, which meant that there was no
emotional connection to breathe life into their personal brands. Their social
capital could only go so far.

Now let me tell you a very different story.

My friend Devon was a huge travel junkie before he started his digital marketing
agency. Once he jumped into the entrepreneurial life, he basically had to give
up his love of backpacking.

Until 2011, when he realized he needed a vacation. He took a trip to Costa Rica
for some R&R, but like entrepreneurs often do, he found himself working during
the day from the hostel where he was staying. When the week was over, he
realized he had done everything he would have done back at the office, but with
a view of a sick volcano and the sound of monkeys howling in the background. He
started to wonder: Was it possible to work and travel at the same time?

He decided to try it out. With regular visits back to the office, he worked for six
months on the road, moving around every few weeks and working from cafes,
hostels and airports. Along the way, he emailed his friends with updates on his

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travels, which turned into a weekly newsletter to his network with his latest
stories and work-travel tips. He eventually started turning those emails into
blog posts, which got picked up by third-party sites, as more and more people
began devouring what Devon had to say. A year later, Devon was known as the
“nomadic entrepreneur” -- someone who cracked the code on how to run a
successful company while traveling year-round. His blog is now a side business
with a couple revenue streams, and his digital agency is thriving.

Devon’s brand is the opposite of the attorneys I mentioned. Where they

deliberately chose a brand to work with, Devon spontaneously developed his
brand by working.

We call that inside-out branding: starting with the person you already are,
exploring and developing that identity, and organically building a brand
around it. The result of inside-out branding is a natural reputation that isn’t
manufactured, but is rather an extension of who you already are.

That’s the kind of brand you want to build.

Devon’s story is a killer example of how to combine inside-out and outside-in

branding . He spontaneously discovered that he was becoming the nomadic
entrepreneur by combining his two passions, work and travel -- a classic
inside-out process.

Then, when he started sharing his tips -- in other words, turning his experience
into social capital -- he realized that this was something he could incorporate
into his personal brand.

That’s when he got outside-in: writing blog posts, syndicating those blog posts,
and promoting his nomadic lifestyle. Once he organically discovered a brand
worth building, he deliberately worked to build it.

Devon’s example captures five key principles of great branding.

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First, that the best personal brands are the ones that grow out of your natural
identity. That’s how you naturally develop an area of expertise without having
to manufacture a brand or invent a reputation.

Second, that great branding requires a combination of organic discovery and

deliberate work. Inside-out first, then outside-in. Organic branding tells you
why and when to build, and deliberate branding tells you where and how to
build it.

Third, that the “glue” of your brand is your social capital. Notice that Devon
wouldn’t have discovered his nomadic brand if he hadn’t sent those email
updates to his friends, who basically told him that he had an audience. Once
he chose to deliberately cultivate his brand, it was social capital that fueled it:
publishing his knowledge, connecting with other nomadic entrepreneurs, and
building relationships around the world.

Fourth, that branding is not a substitute for hard work, but a product and an
accelerator of hard work. Devon wouldn’t have such a strong brand as a nomadic
entrepreneur if he weren’t actually a great nomadic entrepreneur -- which
depends on how well he shared his social capital as well as how effective of an
entrepreneur he really is.

And finally, that a personal brand doesn’t need to be something “big,” impressive
or even even widely known. Not all personal brands need to be ambitious or
famous -- in fact, ambition and fame shouldn’t be your short-term goals. Being
known as a Microsoft Excel ninja on your team, or as the guy who knows how
to handle client crises really well, or as the gal who mentors other colleagues
within the department -- these are all elements of a great personal brand. As
we’ll see in the next lesson, any well-crafted brand, no matter how modest, is
extremely valuable.

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With that in mind, let’s start thinking about what your brand might
be, with the help of a three-step approach we use here at AOC.
(As a side note: If you already know what your brand is, or what it could be, then
use this section as a guide to assess your current brand, or to imagine what your
secondary brands might be. For the purposes of the lesson, we’ll be starting
from square one.)

First, adopting that inside-out approach, ask yourself:

- Who am I right now?

- What do I really enjoy doing?
- What am I passionate and excited about?
- What do I want to do?

In your responses, you’ll want to get extremely specific.

Why? Because the more niche your areas of focus are, the more valuable they
will be to the world, the more easily you can master them, and the more quickly
you can build a brand around them.

For example, if you are generally passionate about social media marketing, then
you’re competing with the entire online marketing and social media community,
and there’s a LOT of social capital to master within that world. Even if you
became a social media guru, you’d still be in a very crowded room.

But if you push yourself to answer the above questions more specifically, then
you might realize, for instance, that you’re actually passionate about marketing
food and beverage products on Snapchat. Now that’s a real niche, which you can
master much more quickly with far less competition.

So be specific -- even more specific than you think you need to be. Do you

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tinker with old American muscle cars on the weekends? Do you spend your
evenings updating Wikipedia articles on World War I? Do you geek out about
1970s spy movie trivia? Do you obsessively edit your friends’ cover letters?
Whatever it is, articulate it in detail.

You’ll notice that this exercise is similar to the one we did in Module 1, where
we took an inventory of our skills, expertise and knowledge. Many of the
items on that list might end up here, too. If they do, great! That means your
knowledge and passion line up, which is a natural place to build a brand. But
while we were casting a wide net in Module 1, here we’re pushing ourselves to
be crazy specific about the handful of areas we truly care about.

The other reason to focus on a niche early on is that great brands tend to
develop around specific areas of expertise, and then broaden out down the
road. Dorie Clark, a regular self-branding expert on The Art of Charm Podcast,
talks about this in great detail. If you become an expert in marketing food and
beverage products on Snapchat, then you’re building a brand around a very
narrow sphere. But you will know a ton about a number of key things: how to
market online, how to push food and beverage products, how to speak to young
users on Snapchat, and so on. Down the road -- months or even years from
now -- you’ll be in a nice position to broaden out into a number of adjacent
areas: marketing to Gen Z users, helping food and beverage companies reach
new customers, or marketing on social media in general.

But if you had tried to brand yourself as a social media marketer from the beginning,
then your expertise would be so broad, your skills so diffuse, and your influence
so weak, that it would be almost impossible to really earn that brand. The beauty
of being insanely specific early on is that you can actually hang your brand on
real and specific social capital, which will compound over time, allowing you
to extend your brand to other spheres down the road.

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So right now, focus on your niche. You cannot to be too specific.

Keep in mind that this is an exercise you can and should sit down and do on
your own, but in reality, it might take anywhere from a few months to a couple
years to complete. Remember, we’re going for organic branding here, which
means that this step is an ongoing process, not a one-time exercise.

The key is to simply start paying attention to what it is you care deeply about.
In the beginning, Devon only cared about traveling while he worked. He wasn’t
thinking about a brand, only about living a lifestyle he was truly passionate
about.

The second step is start turning your areas of passion and expertise
into social capital.
This is the same process we talked about in Module 1 (where we defined the three
types of social capital), Module 4 (where we made the shift to seeing the world
as people), and Module 5 (where we explained how to keep your social capital
alive).

So for example, if you find yourself getting really good at PowerPoint and excited
about making presentations, then a great social capital move would be to turn
your design tips into a handy PDF for your colleagues, and see how they respond.

Similarly, if you start volunteering at an animal shelter on the weekends, and

you think of some clever ways to use Instagram to increase adoptions and raise
new funds, take a moment and share those thoughts by email with the director
of the shelter.

And while you’re doing all of that, start looking for people to introduce within
or across your spheres. Maybe the head of the animal shelter should meet your

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neighbor, who loves donating to good causes. Or maybe a design blogger you’ve
met online would be the right person to redesign the shelter’s website. You know
the drill: Start connecting up the people you know, which will continue building
social capital within the spheres you’re exploring.

Whatever your sphere of passion or expertise is -- big or small,

professional or personal -- start turning it into social capital, and
start sharing it.

That’s the first step in finding out if your area of expertise is valuable to other
people, and if you actually want to continue pursuing it.

Again, this process might take a few months or even a few years. Don’t worry
about the timeframe here. Instead, focus on the response to your social capital
and your experience of it. How other people respond to your value, and whether
you actually enjoy sharing it, will help you decide whether this is where you
want to build your personal brand.

If you decide that it is, then it’s time to take the outside-in view, and ask
yourself the following questions:
- Would committing to this sphere make me the kind of person and
professional I want to be?
- Do I want other people to know me for my expertise in this sphere?
- Would building a brand in this area help me create the kinds of
relationships I want to have?
- Do I enjoy building the social capital that this brand has to offer?

If the answer to those questions is yes, well done.

- You’ve identified your niche areas of passion and expertise.
- You’ve tested those areas of passion and expertise by turning them into
social capital and measuring the response.

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- And you’ve decided, using both an inside-out and outside-in view, that
those areas of passion and expertise are spheres you can see yourself
building a brand around.

And because you’ve already been turning those spheres into social capital along
the way, your brand is already underway -- which is one of the greatest benefits
of this approach.

Once you decide to consciously build your brand around a certain

sphere, you’re off to the races.
From here on out, building your brand is really about putting your social capital
to good use within that world. We’ve already covered the habits, techniques and
mindsets that will deepen your brand: connecting your people, sharing your
knowledge, and offering your emotional support -- especially within the sphere
you’ve chosen to focus on.

In the next topic, we’ll be talking about the actual mechanics of brand-building
in more detail. But now, let’s explore some of the most common concerns and
challenges of brand-building, and how to resolve them.

Starting with the issue of authority.

A normal roadblock in self-branding is whether you have the authority to build

a brand in the first place. Most people, especially early networkers, think: how
can I possibly brand myself as an expert in my sphere if I’m just starting out?`

That is an excellent question, and it’s one that the best networkers ask, because
they take their social capital seriously.

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Faking it till you make it might help you go through the motions of building
a brand, but it always creates feelings of fraudulence, deception and inauthenticity.
It also runs the risk of creating a reputation you can’t live up to, which is a mistake
that many ambitious self-branders make.

For all those reasons, we take a very different approach to the issue
of authority. That approach is a combination of authenticity,
patience and good old-fashioned hard work.

The truth about authority -- I mean true authority, not manufactured authority
-- is that it doesn’t get magically conferred or given to you. No one can come
along and say, “You’re an expert now -- go build your brand.” Authority is something
you develop, not something you acquire or assume.

Think about Devon: He became an authority in the process of doing the very
thing he preached. It’s not like some old nomadic entrepreneur came along and
gave him permission to be a nomadic entrepreneur too. He worked his way
toward that lifestyle and earned his brand. At every step in his journey, he was
authentically being himself.

So the real question is: How do I build my brand without

compromising my authenticity?

The answer to that is actually very simple.

Instead of branding yourself as an expert before you’re actually an expert --

which a lot of people in the digital age are tempted to do -- start instead by
branding yourself as the person who’s learning to become an expert.

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What that means in practice is that you don’t need to write blog posts as “the
Snapchat guru” in the beginning. You can simply write as the guy who’s fascinated
by Snapchat and what does and doesn’t work in social marketing. Similarly,
Devon didn’t need to posture as a nomadic entrepreneur when he first started
out. He just wrote his emails and blog posts as a guy experimenting with a new
lifestyle.

In other words, don’t be afraid to embrace the role of student early on. Being
a student is one of the best ways to develop authority, because your only goal
as a student is to learn and grow. That frees you up to just be yourself -- the
newbie, the geek, the novice self-brander -- because you’re not pretending to
be anything else. Eventually, all good students go on to become experts. That’s
how it works.

Over time, as you develop expertise in your community, you’ll

organically develop an authority that builds your brand.

You’ll start getting syndicated on Snapchat and social marketing blogs, just as
Devon was featured in travel and start-up magazines. You’ll apply the insights
you’re learning to your own company and to your friends’ companies. Slowly
but surely, you’ll grow into the personal brand you want to have. That is how
authority gets developed in practice -- not by assuming it at the outset, as way
too many people do these days, but by patiently and diligently working
toward it.

So as you build your brand, embrace your status and expertise every step of the
way. That means being transparent about who you are and what you know, and
maybe even celebrating it. Some of the greatest experts are brutally honest about
their own limitations. Sometimes just asking the right question -- like “Is it
possible to travel and run a company at the same time?”, or “How in the world do
you sell a beverage on Snapchat?” -- is more important than actually solving it.

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In fact, that’s exactly what what some of the best social capitalists do. As the
physicist Richard Feynman once said, “... it’s much more interesting to live not
knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” That’s a good reminder
that honest ignorance never damages a personal brand, while bad social capital
does. When Feynman, who’s a straight-up genius, says things like, “I’m smart
enough to know that I’m dumb,” we don’t think: Welp, I guess Richard Feynman is a total
fraud. On the contrary, we think: Wow, even Feynman knows what he doesn’t know.
Now I’m even more interested to hear what he has to say.

The best personal brands are built around extreme authenticity. Once again,
James Altucher is a brilliant example. Part of the reason his brand is so compelling
is that he’s never trying to be anything other than what he is. He doesn’t pretend,
and he doesn’t posture. In fact, he’s willing to look pretty bad in most his writing
-- which is why people find him so empathetic and trustworthy. Like we teach
at AOC, authenticity is really the subtraction of everything that isn’t authentic.

So you can see now how the three-step branding process we outlined earlier
gets around the problem of authenticity, right? It’s impossible to be fraudulent
when you brand yourself organically, because you’re just sharing your social
capital freely and openly, without trying to create a brand that’s bigger than you.
Once you realize that your social capital has value in your sphere, then you can
get deliberate about your brand -- at which point you’re already on your way
to developing the authority to earn it.

From there, your brand will only grow stronger, and more reflective of who you
are. This isn’t outside-in posturing, fake-it-till-you-make-it. It’s inside-out
exploration, do-it-till-you-become it.

Next, let’s talk about the lifecycle of a personal brand.

Is it possible to change, reinvent or abandon your personal brand along the way?

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The answer is yes. In fact, it’s a mark of great social capital if your brand
grows over time. That means you’re sharing social capital, acquiring new
social capital, and finding that your personal brand is evolving along with
you. A personal brand doesn’t have to change, of course, but for most serious
networkers, it naturally will.

Sometimes your personal brand will change organically, as your goals and
interests change, and as you share social capital across different spheres.
Staying true to the inside-out process will allow you to evolve your brand
authentically over time. Remember, when you start with a highly specific niche,
you position yourself to broaden your personal brand to adjacent fields down
the line.

In other cases, you’ll change your brand deliberately, usually when you stop
and take an outside-in view. To return to the Wall Street example once again,
an attorney might decide one day that he wants to sell legal work not just in
regulatory law but in international trade. He’ll then consciously work to develop
social capital in that broader sphere, and deliberately push his personal brand
outward. In many professional settings, that kind of brand evolution is a huge
competitive advantage.

In other cases, you’ll find that part of your brand will no longer be valuable or
meaningful to you. It’s not uncommon for people to retire, prune or kill off old
brands. Companies, musicians, and politicians do it all the time.

One of the best case studies here is the author Neil Strauss, who became a close
friend of The Art of Charm through the podcast and our travels to North Korea.
Neil very organically built a brand in the pick-up artist community by writing
one of the most compelling books about the world of dating and seduction.

(This, by the way, is another excellent example of inside-out branding: Neil

worked tirelessly as a journalist investigating that world, then found himself
becoming part of that world. He then built a deliberate brand around his

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experience by writing his bestselling book, The Game, and growing it into a
speaking career and a social dynamics company.)

As a result, social capital started flowing into his life like crazy: book deals,
relationships, speaking opportunities, self-help expertise, and so on. At a certain
point, his brand had broadened out so far beyond his original passion --
journalism and writing -- that he started to wonder what he really wanted to
be known for. After a few years of branding across multiple worlds, he realized
that he was fundamentally a writer at heart.

So he eventually decided to retire his pick-up artist brand. One warm LA

afternoon, he hosted a funeral in Hollywood for his pick-up persona, Style, and
laid him to rest. He’s now hard at work writing about everything from survival
to celebrity culture to the drug wars.

Neil is a great example of someone who’s established, broadened, narrowed,

killed off and redefined his brand several times. Most of our brand-building
won’t be that theatrical, of course, and it shouldn’t be. The Art of Charm, for
example, started out as a team of dating coaches, who later evolved into life
coaches, with a passion for relationships, entrepreneurship and self-improvement.
The Pick-Up Podcast became The Art of Charm Podcast, and our bootcamps
and writing changed to reflect our evolving interests. Nothing dramatic there:
Just solid, organic re-branding. Like AOC, Neil’s story is a great reminder that
personal brands are flexible and dynamic, and that the best brands are a
combination of organic discovery and deliberate care.

So as you develop your brand, stay in that inside-out mentality.

Keep sharing your social capital within your sphere, and your social
capital will start to tell you where your brand should go.

Then, at the right intervals, get deliberate, go outside-in, and channel your social

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capital in ways that serve the direction you want your brand to take.

Stay connected to where you authentically are in your journey, never shying
away from being an expert, but never pretending to be anything you’re not.

Along the way, stay open to the natural evolution of your brand. See where it
takes you, and decide where you want to take it. That is how you constantly
reinvent yourself as your social capital expands.

That is our formula for great personal branding.

In the next topic, we’re going to delve into some of the mechanics
of brand-building, by using social capital to establish your
authority, following and reputation.

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