Personal Branding for Public Speakers – Affiliation

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Seven Part Personal Branding Series:

1. The Importance of Branding
2. Personal Brand Building: Niche
3. Personal Brand Building: Differentiation
4. Personal Brand Building: Branding
5. Personal Brand Building: Affiliation
6. Personal Branding Case Study: Garr Reynolds
7. Personal Branding Litmus Test

You’ve probably heard of ‘coat-tail marketing’. In the blogging world, it’s the idea of associating your small blog with a more established blog, in order to share a portion of their success. In fact, all brands do it – think of cosmetic companies associating themselves with the celebrity du jour, or the way big brands leap at the chance to associate themselves with World Cup, Olympics and even Christmas celebrations.

In personal branding, associating yourself with a bigger brand name helps by providing you with more business opportunities, giving you more things to speak about in your niche and raising your profile and respectability.

But your affiliation doesn’t have to be commercial. Think about the alliances you can make which will give your proposals or pitches more weight, show you’re somebody to listen to, or raise your profile by association. Here are three ideas.

Professional contacts

Align your ideas and recommendations with key figures in your industry. If you can justify an idea by relating it to somebody your audience trusts and respects, you will be more persuasive. Equally, if you can tell a story in which a respected authority praised your idea, message or plan, it will gain more weight.

Departments

When you’re preparing for an important presentation, the worst thing you can do is try to hog the limelight. Consider how teaming up with other departments could add value to your presentation and help you all to create something truly interesting and useful. And remember, the more people in the company who you have singing from your song sheet, the more inclined everybody else will be to listen to you.

Academic research

We all love evidence. But we hate presenters who reel off huge lists of abstract facts and figures which have to relevance to us. Even so, interesting findings, applied in the right way, can make mundane presentations interesting and powerful. All the more so if none of your audience has heard of what you’re referencing before.

If you can consistently apply interesting academic research to your presentations in helpful and thought-provoking ways, you will raise your profile as an expert on your subject and leave your audiences feeling inspired. What a great brand.

Seven Part Personal Branding Series:

1. The Importance of Branding
2. Personal Brand Building: Niche
3. Personal Brand Building: Differentiation
4. Personal Brand Building: Branding
5. Personal Brand Building: Affiliation
6. Personal Branding Case Study: Garr Reynolds
7. Personal Branding Litmus Test