The Journey to a Personal Brand

Douglas Commaille

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351358071
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business General

Transitions in life are now a reality for everyone. This book takes you through the journey to create your own Personal Brand and take ownership of and address these transitions based on your values, career, skills, knowledge and aims.

A Personal Brand is a positive in the reader's life – professionally, personally and psychologically. It builds people's confidence and is founded on who they are, their achievements and successes, as well as their technical and person-to-person skills. Drawing upon well-known Personal Brands, including Walt Disney, Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs, The Journey to a Personal Brand forces readers to reevaluate themselves critically and honestly. Readers are guided through creating a distinctive brand from scratch through to launching it on digital media.

This intensely practical guide is essential reading for the professional, the return-to-worker, the student and early retiree alike or those wishing to improve their life and bring added value to their careers, personal profile or reputation.

Chapter 1
An ever-changing world

The need for self-representation online

It may seem an extraordinary thought to realise, yet it is relatively recently that we as a civilisation have had access to the Internet – about 15 years or so. Reference libraries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries and a host of other useful volumes were the mainstay of every information search. Today we tap a question into a search engine and a plethora of results are delivered in a few short seconds.

There is almost no aspect of our modern life that is not now impacted by the depth and breadth of what is available online. Indeed our own language has also changed; an entire vocabulary, or rather entire and new set of meanings has been spawned that we readily accept everyday: blog, spam, application, spell-check, flaming and to hack, to name a few.

As language evolves, entirely new terms are emerging: emoji, hacking, ransomware, twitterrati, chatbot, troll and, of course, the selfie. The speed of this is stunning – no one can predict what our vocabulary will be in even five years. From medical diagnosis to banking and the meteoric rise of Internet dating, our world is changing at a rate that many find hard to fully comprehend. The Internet gives access to everyone, anywhere and is hugely appealing.

It is thrilling and breaches a distance that not so many years ago was inconceivable. All this is obvious to us now, and it has also allowed us to embrace the exciting opportunities presented by social media, networking sites, blogs and vlogs, podcasts, YouTube, equally not forgetting the many (and easily created) new channels and platforms with interesting and innovative levels of creativity displayed in their execution and delivery.

An offshoot of all this is that anyone can freely express themselves, about whatever they like and in some instances how they like with total freedom. There are few barriers to saying, showing or presenting a point of view – self-expression is ubiquitous in a way it has never been before.

It is an important point to appreciate – what you say, what you do, how you say it, to whom, the tone and language is open to the world for judgement. Everything can be public, global and pretty much instantaneous.

This ubiquity and speed has created a ‘space’, which like the Doctor’s TARDIS is infinitely bigger inside than it appears to be. Even those who work in tech for a living struggle to master it fully so big is it becoming, so fast is it changing and so wide is its scope.

The challenges arising from the business ecosystem

This wonderland of digital opportunity, driven by innovative technology, is moving so fast that it is now known as the ‘digital ecosystem’. The amazing connectivity of the digital ecosystem means it is constantly expanding, and it will continue to do so exponentially as the technology improves and speeds up. Online analytics permit in-depth insights into the behaviours of human beings and are even now driving businesses to push ‘pre-liked’ preferences to customers based on buying history.

To prove this, type in ‘diagram of the digital ecosystem’ into any search engine, and you will be presented with hundreds of diagrammatic interpretations. No two are similar because the scope is so infinitely broad. We are in a maelstrom of digital opportunity that moves at a pace that most people who do anything prosaic on the Internet are ignorant of, confused by and, in many instances, a little scared by.

The digital ecosystem is also and inevitably driven by content, that is to say what is being presented through all these different media and channels. Content, it is said, needs to be constantly evolving; it is ‘king’; it must be accessible, informative, entertaining and on occasion ‘edgy’ and it needs to be endlessly changing, updated, innovative and focused. Now all this is true; content is akin to a monster that needs to be constantly fed.

A secondary consequence is not hard for you to work out: with all this evolving content, accessibility and two-way communication there has arisen a phenomenon that previously simply did not exist. It is that anything online may be commented upon by anyone, and they may choose to display approval, disapproval, visceral loathing, ill-thought-out criticism, or uninformed prejudice. The reality is that the author, whether a large company or an individual, has little or no control over those reactions.

The impact of this instantaneous judgement, be it unfair, uninformed or unwise, is that it may gain exponential growth – one comment on Twitter can turn into a ‘twitterstorm’ of trolling in a few minutes. The key point is that reversing these observations is hard if not impossible to stop, other than by removing the offending tweet or waiting for the storm to pass, which in most instances it will. Whether it is forgotten is another question, because as we all by now are only too aware, the Internet – like the elephant – never forgets!

New career segments defined by lifestyles and psychographics

Most people nowadays understand fairly well the implications of all this accessibility. Yet on a daily basis we see in the global media that the authors of blogs, podcasts, tweets and so on have precious little, if any, control over what the consequences may be to themselves, their families, their businesses, their careers and even their parties and governments.

Our world is changing for reasons other than technology. Among these are social and political trends towards more openness in government, the availability of personal data held in large, privately owned databases and ever-growing public ones, and the selling of personal data by governments to the commercial sector. In addition, the progressive march forward of diversity, anti-discrimination, recruitment and openness in hiring procedures, liberalisation of work practices and finally the increasing pensionable ages are opening the world of work to new groups of people. None of these opportunities simply existed or were available to the previous generations.

‘Return to workers’, ‘pre-retirees’, ‘retirees’ and ‘second career-ers’ are segments of the working population who were effectively excluded from the workplace for social, economic, political and frankly prejudicial reasons. What these people find is that the world of work they joined, or are rejoining, has irrevocably changed in just 15 years.

It is also important to appreciate and understand that these groups are, in effect, different segments. This well-worn term simply describes people who have similar yet different needs compared to other groups.

These segments are growing as we speak, as universities increase fees and school leavers are making decisions to consider delaying higher education to avoid huge debts. Many are rejecting a higher education career for a decade to allow them to build up some earned equity, gain life experience and ideally seek present universities and colleges later in life and with the added benefit of a few years of practical work experience behind them.

As pensions diminish in choice and provision, so do those in their mid-50s seek to retrain in new careers with a view to extending their working life, often with active government encouragement and promotion, such as becoming teachers. They are leveraging 30 years plus in successful careers with the added advantage of maturity, experience and (it is hoped) self-awareness.

Women return with legislative support to be able to work part-time and not lose rights – be they employment rights or benefit rights – to work patterns more in keeping with childcare needs, and of late even men may now take up paternity leave.

Individuals have to work harder

As rights are gained, so is accountability growing. Online now means pretty much ‘in full view of everyone’, to some degree or another. Technology has allowed us to work harder than ever, and the UK works longer hours than most European competitors; technology has also forced the workforce to ‘manage technology’ which floods an unattended inbox with endless email messages, copied to all and sundry, day in and out.

You can run but you cannot hide

Employment costs are rising as rights increase; the ‘living wage’ has added a permanent worthwhile and expensive cost to the labour overhead. Employment processes are increasingly being reduced to digitalised ones, and when so many candidates can emerge from education with an armful of As and have all been on a ‘gap year’, differentiation becomes increasingly hard.

Even the liability for employers in recruiting staff has changed – new legislation over the last few years places clear liability on employers (as well as private landlords and educational establishments) to ensure that everyone is in the country legitimately and has a right to work or rent or study; the liability to check this lies not with the individual, it lies squarely with the employer, the landlord or the college/school/university concerned.

There are punitive penalties for failing to comply with all this legislation, which many do not understand, or choose not to comply with. A number of politicians around the world have been found to have engaged nannies or domestic cleaners who were to all intents and purposes ‘under the wire’ or ‘off the grid’, as far as the authorities were concerned, were violating these personal employment rights, dodging their own tax liability, or encouraging their employees to do much the same, or, of course, just simply working illegally in the country. Reputations were tarnished, ‘shock and horror’ was expressed; the damage is done and crimes have been committed.

Of course, there has been a radical change in global awareness and tolerance of behaviour that steps outside a ‘new moral order’ that has emerged in the last decade. In many ways, this has finally brought to the fore, and to the awareness of ordinary people, wrongs that have been perpetuated for centuries – such as people trafficking and child pornography or global networks of paedophilia to the peddling of counterfeit medicines and hazardous products online, to drunk and drugged driving, the persistence of drug doping in international sport and, of course, the incidence and sheer scale of illegal drug trafficking and its distribution.

Even the term money laundering, the preserve of the gangsters for generations (the US gangster Meyer Lansky’s life’s work in the 1930s and 1940s), has entered the modern consciousness as not being a ‘victimless’ crime, and is subject to enhanced levels of transparency and accountability by companies and individuals to the tax authorities.

It is no wonder that the validation of every candidate who wishes to study, rent or work has become an industry in its own right where one’s online presence is the footprint they leave, be it conscious, accidental or negligent. The spread of vetting candidates through external agencies for criminal activity now covers areas from teaching and those engaged in sensitive security work to those engaged in any activity where the day-to-day work may have proximity to terrorism, directly or indirectly.

These issues are not exclusively about breaking the law. The new moral order has values and principles that are gaining ground around the planet. An organ-isation’s involvement with ‘offshore’ tax arrangement, or pricing and invoicing practices that allow for tax to be legally evaded, is raising awareness and concern of government, ordinary citizens and the media.

A multinational company shipping waste around the world to jurisdictions that have less fastidious environmental laws is increasingly disapproved of, the hiring of low-paid staff in emerging or developing countries is no longer seen as a reason to exploit people who cannot fight back, nor is the old response to this that ‘they would not have a job’ seen as a validated answer.

The consequence for the individual is a more public reaction, usually a faster judgement, vast amounts of media space and time and even ultimately some kind of official or unofficial investigation and assessment by others. In some cases, even official honours awarded can be removed.

The Internet has been an epoch-changing phenomenon. The ‘rules of engagement’ are evolving as we speak, and they are changing many of the basic interactions that we have with technology and each other, as human beings.

There are threats without doubt, though they may be illogical, fictional or simply based on a speed of development many do not understand or cannot come to grips with. However, they are threats, and we need to find ways to cope with them, come to terms with them or, if we can, choose to simply ignore them.

We have to accept that they will change, evol...