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Why the Focus/Obsession with Personal Branding? Richard Cardona
54 Plays4 years ago
Personal branding is red-hot.
Seemingly, everyone you turn, someone is offering personal branding advice and consulting.
Is the focus/obsession with personal branding due to the gig economy, the ubiquity of social marketing, or the reality that people will work for multiple employers so a personal brand is important, if not necessary?
On this episode of Marketing Spark, Rich Cardona and I dive into personal branding, why it matters, and how to build a personal brand.
We also discuss the importance of content marketing and why, like many people, his time on Clubhouse has gone way down.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
I'm Mark Evans and welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less.
The Rise of Personal Branding
00:00:14
Speaker
Personal branding is red hot. Everyone's looking to stand up from the crowd. Challenge, of course, is there's a lot of competition for the spotlight. Rich Cardona is not only a personal branding and LinkedIn coach, but someone who talks the talk and walks the walk.
00:00:30
Speaker
On LinkedIn, a key part of Rich's brand is his personal life and family. It's what makes Rich authentic, real, and trustworthy. Before inviting Rich to appear on the podcast, I felt like I knew him. I guess that's the power of personal branding. Happy to be here, Mark. I'm very excited to give any value I possibly can to your audience.
Impact of Personal Branding on Companies
00:00:53
Speaker
Personal branding, as I said off the top, is something that is red hot these days. Everybody's talking about it on LinkedIn. You see post after post and video after video talking about the importance of personal branding, why you have to do it, how you have to do it. And the question I have for you as somebody who runs a personal branding agency,
00:01:11
Speaker
is why the focus on personal branding, where did it come from? Is it from the gig economy? Is it due to COVID? Is it the fact that everybody wants to be an entrepreneur these days? Or even when you work for a company, you want to be an internal entrepreneur. What's driving this fascination with personal branding?
00:01:28
Speaker
Actually, I'm going to work a little bit backwards on that since you mentioned working at a company. I am such an enormous believer in that a company who's trying to attract talent and who's trying to attract a little bit more attention
00:01:45
Speaker
are the ones that allow the people in and on their teams to have a personal brand and rather than being fearful of them cultivating this personal brand and leaving. If Mark Jr. is working at Rich Cardona Media and he's fantastic and he's got a great personal brand, that's going to raise a couple eyebrows and be like, wow, what's going on over there? Or I really like the culture. I really like the way they make content.
00:02:10
Speaker
And I could tell, like, this wasn't passed down from above, like, hey, please share this corporatey post of the company. So that's one aspect. The personal brand goes with you. If you're not going to be at a company forever, which a lot of us are not, and you don't choose to be a business owner, that's what's going to go with you. If you are a business owner and you've been a business owner for 13 years, or at least run that company for 13 years, and you have to pivot, your personal brand goes with you. It doesn't mean you failed. It means that you've probably amassed some sort of
00:02:38
Speaker
loyalty and audience and community that is going to go with you because they have faith
The Pandemic's Influence on Personal Branding
00:02:42
Speaker
in you. Now, fully, I certainly believe that the pandemic has certainly played a large role in it because of the missed interactions that we have. There are those moments that are when you're walking out of a meeting and you're already talking about what was just discussed in the meeting with someone and you're going to walk to the lunchroom and talk about it. And you're going to have that kind of feeling with them and that trust because you're going to have those kind of mini interactions between the meetings. Now it's just meetings.
00:03:08
Speaker
Okay, now it's just meetings online, they're very scheduled, it's one to two, and we're going to cover this and that. So all those kind of mini interactions actually matter. So how do you build that trust? It's probably by making content and being a little bit more visible. And without the lack of that kind of personal brand, it's going to really extend the timeline for people to really know what you're about, which is why during the pandemic,
00:03:34
Speaker
all the people who flourish in those kind of social environments realize well now i have to get on link dinner now i have to try out instagram now gonna dance and do something stupid on tiktok because i have to be able to get out there and they probably realize what a lot of us did you are able to reach a lot more people you and i met on linkedin and you know i would venture to say that we know each other to an extent but a virtual connection was certainly formed and that's not something that people should kind of uh...
00:04:03
Speaker
You know you look at as something that's unusual it's very usual and i think personal branding has a large part in that.
Effective Approaches to Personal Branding
00:04:12
Speaker
There's a lot of people who build a personal brand without thinking about it right a lot of content base. Speak at conferences they do videos they naturally meet people in different situations and they're building their brand intentionally on the other hand there are people who have a plan of attack they recognize that.
00:04:31
Speaker
a key to success personally professionally is establishing a strong personal brand so they will put together all the pieces and have almost a program by which they'll follow to build that personal brand and what i'm wondering about is whether one path.
00:04:49
Speaker
unintentional or the other path, intentional, are the way to go. Are they mutually exclusive? How do you view the different ways that you can build a personal brand? Some people think about it and some people not so much.
00:05:03
Speaker
Here's what I really, really feel and it is if you are intentional about it, it usually makes you veer off the path, the kind of spirit of having a good cohesive sought after personal brand or persona.
00:05:22
Speaker
And the reason is, you start to tailor what you put out and it doesn't need to be video and it doesn't need to be a podcast and it doesn't need to be a book could just be literally the way you show up, you know, the entire fake until you make it mentality. If something's getting you some of this visibility that you like, and it's feeling good, then you might kind of go off to the you know, in another direction a little bit while you're still being intentional about it. And
00:05:49
Speaker
I think it deviates. So at the same time, and this is such a good question for this, because if you're unintentional about it, then maybe you're gonna put, you know, I make posts about my family on Sunday. But maybe I would just be like, instead of a podcast post today on Wednesday or Thursday, I'm gonna go ahead and put out a family post and then I'm gonna be a little bit sporadic. So now there's no method to the madness. So while it's unintentional, and while it was a creative outlet, I actually might confuse people
00:06:18
Speaker
especially if I'm a business owner, if you confuse, you lose. So if you are confusing your potential audience, then you're probably losing some of the people that would want to work with you the most. And I'm not even going to really probably fully answer that because it's so hard. You should be intentional, but not to the point where you are trying to exaggerate.
00:06:39
Speaker
anything about you. You want to show up exactly as you are.
Balancing Personal and Professional Life on LinkedIn
00:06:43
Speaker
If you and I ever meet in person, I will be superbly disappointed if you're anything different than you are right now. And that's the risk. That's the risk when you go to all in and you have that plan of attack. I agree that authenticity is
00:06:57
Speaker
a key element of personal branding, you know, it's almost like what you see is what you get. And I think that's the best way to approach personal branding. The question that I have for you, given that you show your wife and your daughter in your LinkedIn videos is balancing personal and professional
00:07:15
Speaker
when you're doing personal branding, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, which is supposed to be professional as opposed to personal. I feel like I'm chasing my tail when I asked this question, but what's your approach and how do people marry their personal life and who they are and what they're passionate about with what they do for a living?
00:07:34
Speaker
I use this very simple phrase, one of my superiors in the Marine Corps once told me, and he used to say, if you have to look left and right before you do it, you probably shouldn't do it. Well, I think the same thing kind of goes when it comes to content. And again, like this is any medium of your choice. If you're not sure that that's something you want to put out there, then you probably shouldn't. Okay, I'm talking about in terms of too much information, kind of too personal. However, if you had a victory,
00:08:00
Speaker
in a personal victory or you had an amazing family moment and you are able to tie that into business, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, then that is fascinating to people.
00:08:12
Speaker
But more importantly, I think what you really have to examine is you said and you said, you know, you're supposed to be like people think we're supposed to be a certain something on a platform or at a certain event or at a networking event or whatever it is that we think we're supposed to be something. I'm not going to say you should be anything you want. I'm not I'm not that up there. There are guardrails, so to speak. However. Supposed to be anything on LinkedIn is
00:08:41
Speaker
It's limiting because our whole selves matter when it comes to a personal brand Okay, like it's important for me to put out LinkedIn stories or videos of time to time of My wife and I how much we've run together because that's like mental health
00:08:57
Speaker
Why does that matter? Because I really believe that that helps give me the clarity and energy to wake up and do this every day. And you as a business owner know better than anyone, if you wake up on those days where you're like, I don't feel like playing today, then it's probably a bad, bad sign. So that's how I keep it related to business. If my daughter is on a pull up bar and trying to do this flip, and she's four years old, and she's trying over and over and over, and I put music to it, and there's a business lesson attached to that, then that's pretty good content. So to answer your question fully is,
00:09:27
Speaker
is we are all whole people and I think you can pick and choose and I think instinctually you're going to understand like does this make a point or is this kind of something I would expect to see on another platform? Like am I going to give an update on my grandmother's health on LinkedIn? Maybe, maybe not but I would say probably not. So the balance is delicate and you could always test things out. You could always test things out. There's nothing that says you can't delete a post and be like you know what that's not really in my lane.
Digital vs. Face-to-Face Personal Branding
00:09:57
Speaker
Over the last year, a lot of us have spent a lot of time building personal brands on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok and our own blogs for that matter and podcasts. But how do you see the balance between digital personal branding and in-person personal branding when we're allowed to do that again? What I mean by that is a lot of personal branding in the past has been done through networking, getting on stage, going to meetups, having dinners with people,
00:10:25
Speaker
Meeting up with people for coffee and that's been very physical time consuming work and you can't scale that kind of activity. But now we've got this completely other medium that we're all leveraging and we're all seeing, I think we're seeing tremendous ROI in it because it's just so efficient as we move forward. How do you marry them together? How do you make them work while still driving efficiencies, which I think is an important element of it.
00:10:52
Speaker
You got a voice message from me recently letting you know that I was coming out with a newsletter and it is completely...
00:11:01
Speaker
And unbelievably inefficient for me to do that two hours a day to people who've engaged with my content. However, the people who have enthusiastically said, yes, Rich, your upcoming newsletter, I'm in, has been probably 99%. So I believe the value is in the inefficiencies. But how do you balance something that kind of customized? I think you have to have kind of a goal. And that goal has to be very meticulous in terms of how you're going to divide your time.
00:11:27
Speaker
So how do you divide your time when it comes to us being able to interact with each other face to face when we both know and admit that it's not entirely scalable you scale it by having what i like to call a high do say ratio if there's consistency in what i'm posting.
00:11:45
Speaker
how I'm posting about it, if I'm educating people, if I start all of a sudden posting very clickbaity things, you're gonna, excuse me, you're gonna lose trust. Same thing goes for in-person meetups or in-person conversations.
00:12:00
Speaker
Do you say ratio do you say where you're gonna say you're gonna do are you gonna be on time i mean that's one right there like that's the simplest thing but the higher the do say ratio is. The better it's gonna be because when your name starts travel around because that interaction you had whether it's digital or whether it's in person.
00:12:17
Speaker
that's going to be something that is part of your brand and you want it you always I always like to imagine as if someone's like watching what I'm doing not to influence my behavior in a in a fabricated way but to ensure I'm thinking of doing the right things for the right reasons.
00:12:34
Speaker
Quick question about LinkedIn because it's been a clear obsession of mine, probably more than an obsession over the last year. To get your thoughts on how the platform has evolved and how your own personal use of LinkedIn has changed over the last 12 months, and as important, how do you see it moving forward? Because a lot of us are going to get back
00:12:54
Speaker
to work where many of us are going to go back to the office where we won't have two or three hours a day to spend scrolling through LinkedIn and creating content. So provide some perspective on where you've come from and where do you think you're going? LinkedIn is so interesting from the time I started really using it when I was just connecting with people at my company, which I never recommend. I mean, you have to reach out to to now it has evolved in so many ways, obviously in
00:13:23
Speaker
in large part due to the kind of increase in activity with other social media platforms, right? When you have TikTok, when you have Clubhouse, all of a sudden everyone, every social media platform is kind of scrambling to get a kind of audio version or how are we going to, I mean, LinkedIn just came out with the creator profile, the creator moniker, whatever you want to call it.
00:13:42
Speaker
Because maybe they're gonna pay creators at some point. So anyway, so the point is this, it's evolving rapidly. And it's actually distasteful for a lot of people. It's like, wait a second, I thought it was this, but now you're this like make up your mind LinkedIn. And then all of a sudden, you see all kinds of different content that you're not used to seeing. And you and I are going to see very different content in two months and six months. And if we talk a year from now, we're gonna be like, wow, half things changed. So how do you how do you become adaptable?
00:14:08
Speaker
to it, especially when you are invested in your personal brand. There's nothing different that you should do except you can look at some of the other features of a platform like LinkedIn, like LinkedIn Stories, and just continue on. I really do believe consistency is what's most attractive. If all of a sudden there's new features on LinkedIn or new ways to use it or new ways to just really kind of hack engagement, and that's a low-hanging fruit you go after because you want to be a first adopter,
00:14:37
Speaker
But you're doing it for the wrong reasons. It's just never going to work. So I think consistency is going to be key. Where do I see it going? It's really, really interesting, especially you and I spend some time on Clubhouse. It's kind of like, you know, people on LinkedIn are trying to go to Clubhouse or people on Clubhouse trying to get people on the LinkedIn. And, you know, how much time can you possibly invest on social media? There has to be there has to be
00:15:02
Speaker
I would say a very defined limit as the amount of time you're gonna spend and kind of looking at the quantitative ROI or qualitative ROI that you can get from it. So my advice would simply to be this, just stay persistent and consistent with your personal brand and the type of content that you choose. And I think you're gonna outlast everyone chasing for the shiny new object because you and I both know, especially as entrepreneurs, those things always usually lead, shortcuts always lead to a longer way.
00:15:32
Speaker
quick question about Clubhouse. I jumped on like a lot of people a couple of months ago and I spent too many hours down rabbit holes listening to conversations and then gradually you get busy. You don't have the time. I certainly can't multitask. I can't listen to a Clubhouse conversation in the background and I just spent less and less time on the platform. Maybe it's a mistake given the fact that that's where the audience could be, where my audience could be. Just wondering about your own experiences.
00:15:59
Speaker
It's funny, we're aligned. I don't know. I know we used to, I used to moderate on a LinkedIn room every morning, Monday to Friday for almost two hours. And I was, I convinced myself.
00:16:11
Speaker
And I could be wrong and I will say that without issue, but I convinced myself like this is gonna be big, but I'm a personal branding agency. I'm not a LinkedIn agency. So what I was doing was offering up my time to help because I enjoy doing that. And while it might be altruistic, so to speak, that's not an income producing activity. Of course there's better things I can be doing than answering a lot of the same questions like, how do you think I should start using LinkedIn?
00:16:41
Speaker
If you want to that's actually a podcast I have to make the easy to help but when it comes to the clubhouse. Yes your audience might be there and yes they just got I believe a four billion dollar valuation and yes it's very hip and you can spend hours there but you know what if you're a business owner your professional you shouldn't look back you shouldn't look back I so I scaled back I am now no longer doing that.
00:17:06
Speaker
It's been two weeks since I've done it. And you know what? I've been tracking my time. This is kind of crazy to admit. I've been tracking my time as if they were billable hours. And I'm looking at all the time I'm spending doing marketing activities, branding activities, sales activities, all of it to see and I'm like, wow, I got a haircut yesterday in the middle of the day, Mark. And I'm like, why did I do that? That actually took an hour and a half out of my day when I could have been doing this, this and this clubhouse is the same thing.
00:17:30
Speaker
Okay, if you're not careful, you're just going to go into a room and just go listen. If you're not able to ask a question and get a real time answer without having to wait an hour or 45 minutes or whatever it may be, then you're probably wasting your time. And if you think you're going to help the world, especially as one moderator out of 12 or 30 on a stage, then you're not. So it's really a brand play that I think is going to fizzle out for a lot of people.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook will all have audio platforms and their audiences will gravitate to those platforms because you've got a following there already. Clubhouse, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Shifting gears a little bit, wanting to get your take on
00:18:11
Speaker
advice, life advice for entrepreneurs because you and I both know that running a business is a 24-7 activity when you've got young kids like you do, you've got obligations, you've got responsibilities and you need to be
Work-Life Balance in Personal Branding
00:18:24
Speaker
there. You need to be present at the important times in your daughter's life. You know, I have three kids and my wife and I are very involved in lots of different activities and I understand that it's always a balancing act. Any advice, not only as a business owner but as somebody who advises
00:18:40
Speaker
entrepreneurs on building a personal brand and probably in the process running a business about how we can make sure that the pendulum isn't all we work all the time because it's so easy, especially now, to be working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's hard to turn it off. Yeah, I think, and I'm not trying to name drop here, but the last time I interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk, we talked about this a little bit.
00:19:06
Speaker
And he says what he always says about, you know, you're worried about what other people think. There is something in our minds that influences some of the guilt that we might feel when we're very, very invested in our business. Here's how I look at it now. And the reason I brought that up is because I had a habit in the beginning of being pretty judgmental about people who were all in.
00:19:26
Speaker
All in on their business or all in on work and I'm like, when did they sleep or when did they spend time with their families? Well, you know what? That's actually none of my concern because my wife is unbelievably and authentically supportive of everything I'm trying to do and what I'm trying to do is
00:19:41
Speaker
is build something very, very special so we can be completely and utterly independently wealthy where we rely on no one except ourselves off of something I built to put my daughters through school, to go on a trip every quarter as a family and provide life experiences that they wouldn't have got otherwise.
00:19:59
Speaker
I'm not interested in an enormous crazy house or some of the material things that people think about when they think about entrepreneurship and what it'll be like to make it. But I can tell you in order for that to happen, if you are one of those people that want those things, it's going to require far more time than you could possibly imagine. And that's something that's an individual decision. If you don't go all in the way you want and the way that you are able to,
00:20:27
Speaker
then you'll regret it. But one of my most influential mentors always said to me, the time you have is the time you need. And I believe work-life harmony, I think is the way Jeff Bezos used to put it, is your work so good that your life is harmonic with it and vice versa? Yes, so if that means the two hours I get a day with my children is enough, which may sound nuts to some people, and I'm not saying that's what it is for me all the time,
00:20:56
Speaker
Then and i'm working in the kind of heads down the rest of the time then maybe that's okay if i like it to be a little bit fifty fifty and i want to go to all the soccer games and all that other stuff when it starts and that's okay but it's an individual decision and i think when i said you know i just other people i realize i was judging myself i was thinking about if i put this much time into it what does that say about me.
00:21:17
Speaker
But I now know, and my daughter, my older one now knows, she knows what I'm trying to do. And that makes me feel completely confident in my decision and the amount of time I allot to the business and to her.
Gary Vee's Work-Life Balance Approach
00:21:31
Speaker
It's interesting that you mentioned Gary Vee because he's a very polarizing figure in this entire work-life balance conversation. The guy arguably works like a maniac because he wants to own the New York Jets at some point in time and that's an awesome life goal. But when you look at the time that he spends,
00:21:51
Speaker
versus the family that has got a lot it's easy for a lot of us to say that's crazy there's no way i'm working that that number of hours and but your point if that's what he wants to do not your socks off but that's not me and and arguably that's not you and i think
00:22:07
Speaker
Maybe that's the point of Gary V. He's unapologetic about how he wants to live his life and I guess the lesson for all of us is that we should embrace the same. Attitude is that we are who we are we live how we work we work like we work and so be it right.
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I think one last thing I want to mention on that is he's extremely diligent about making sure his family is never involved in anything that you see. So if that's all you see, it's almost hard to imagine that he even has a family like when does he go home? When does he do this? But we don't know. And that's okay. But here's one thing I will say, and I've interviewed a lot of, you know, like very
00:22:46
Speaker
of influencing CEOs is that they've all had that kind of conversation on the front end with their family or their significant other and be like, I will never stop working this hard because my goal is not to retire early and sit on a beach that I'm going to get bored of in three days.
00:23:05
Speaker
And that makes complete sense. So if you are able, you have no idea if that conversation happened or not. So that's what I would say. I just thought it was an interesting perspective because you never see him. So it's almost like, does he even have a family? But yeah.
00:23:21
Speaker
A couple of final questions. One is once you're able to travel outside of North America, where would you like to go? The second question would be a good book that you've read recently. Yes, both great questions. The first
00:23:36
Speaker
I would probably say Cefalu, which is a beach town in Sicily, and my daughter's name is Sicily because my wife and I fell in love with this place. We've never been to Sicily, but we have been to Italy numerous times.
00:23:52
Speaker
I would want to go there immediately and relax and eat some ridiculous pasta that are not American sized meals. And just enjoy the sun sign and get my olive skin back and just just go that I mean, I can just see it in my head of how amazing it would be to just have that time again, especially just the two of us because you know, it's hard. So that's one. Second, I actually I'm reading it right now.
00:24:21
Speaker
It's called The Attributes by Rich Deviney. He is a former Navy SEAL, but he works closely with Simon Sinek. I'm interviewing him, as a matter of fact, in person next week.
Book Recommendation: The Attributes
00:24:33
Speaker
It is a fantastic book about 25 drivers to optimal performance. I'm not really into scientific
00:24:43
Speaker
Things and that's not even a good explanation, but it breaks down perseverance and courage and kind of the way the brain interacts and you know the fight or flight or freeze like all of these things and how peak performance is meant for a certain peak. There is a significant drop off. So how can you perform optimally?
00:25:01
Speaker
regular on a regular basis so i was fascinated so i'm reading that right now but it's certainly engaging and i'm not like a war i'm not like a special ops you know military everything guy not not even close but he ties in the stories pretty well to kind of applied to business and both you know
Rich Cardona's Branding Services
00:25:21
Speaker
personal.
00:25:21
Speaker
One final question. Where can people learn about you and what you do? Yeah, LinkedIn for sure. Uh, Rich Cardona, you could find me there. Uh, and then rich Cardona media.com. So we are just about done revamping. So hopefully by the time this comes out, it'll be complete, but, uh, we are here for your personal branding needs. So please feel free to reach out to me with any question. And, uh, obviously I'm obsessed with it and I've had a fantastic time here on the show.
00:25:46
Speaker
Hey, we've covered a lot of ground in the last 27 minutes, so I appreciate your insight. It's great to talk to you in person after all the interactions on LinkedIn, all the comments, all the videos that we've watched of each other. And it's funny, it does feel like I already knew you before and obviously know you better now. So thanks for coming on the show.
00:26:05
Speaker
Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Rich, visit marketingspark.co. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, and coach, send an email to mark at markevans.ca. I'll talk to you next time.