I’m known for creating little catch phrases. I’m known for them because I tend to say them a lot. People at Reach call them Willisms. One Willism I use (some might say overuse!) is “Be lazy, it’s good for your brand.” What I mean is that you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel (or the message) in brand communications. The best way to reinforce your message is to repurpose the content you already have or content that’s available to you. Here are a few ideas:
1. Curate. You don’t need to constantly create in order to give your brand a voice. Look to content that others create. Find the Blogs, magazines, news sites and forums with content that really resonates with you. Then comment on it, tweet, share and link to it, reference it in your status updates, etc. Tumblr and Pinterest are excellent tools for curation, and they have huge audiences.
2. Collect. Gather and reassemble content related to your brand. Then organize your collection and make it visible to your target audience. I currently have a Twitter series of quotes about being yourself. I didn’t write “Be yourself because everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde did. But his quip helps me express an important personal branding message about authenticity. Although I of course attribute the quotes in my Twitter series to their authors, the unique composition of witty sayings I assembled helps me build my brand as I convey the message about the importance of authenticity. By culling words of wisdom, I’m providing a service that mirrors my brand identity.
3. Cross Promote. Take what you’re doing in the real world and make it visible in the virtual world, and vice-versa. This expands the visibility of your brand and increases the value of each of your communications.
For example, if you deliver a presentation to 60 members of your local professional association, make it visible to 60 million people. Stream the presentation live. Tweet about the presentation before and after you deliver it, post the slides you use to SlideShare, have your presentation videotaped and upload it to your YouTube channel. Poll the audience when you present and publish the results on your blog. Turn your slides into an article and publish it online. You can turn one brand-building activity into several, increasing your audience exponentially.
4. Consolidate. Look at all your brand communications and find a way to group the content to create something new. For example, do you have a series of tweets on one topic? Those tweets can quickly become an article or a presentation.
Multiple Blog posts can become a whitepaper – or even a book! Put “Blog a book” into Google and it yields almost a million results. So this is not a new idea – but it’s an extremely valuable one. It’s a way to maximize the value you get from your brand communications.
5. Collaborate. When you co-author an article, whitepaper or book, both you and your co-author reap the rewards of the same brand value. You spend less effort, but the output is often better than when you go it alone. You each work half as hard, but your brands get double the oomph. How? You can each promote the publication to your communities – greatly expanding the number of people who see it. For both my books, I chose to work with a co-author. I cannot imagine writing my next book alone.
Incorporate these ‘being lazy’ strategies into your personal branding plan and watch your visibility grow.
Follow me on Twitter and check out my latest book, Ditch. Dare. Do! 3D Personal Branding for Executives.
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