How has Personal Branding Become Easy?

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

Andy Warhol

The concept of Personal Branding was introduced by Tom Peters way back in 1997,  but it was William Arruda who popularized the concept all over the world starting in 2001.  Unfortunately offline personal branding was only suitable for the upper class / richer countries. If Offline branding through TV and other mass media was too expensive, offline branding through tools like books was too time consuming.

The popularity of social media and networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Youtube and Linkedin in the past few years has brought the concept of personal branding to the developing countries and made it affordable for the middle class also to build personal brands. Let us look at some of the key features of these tools which make it easy to build personal brands.

·    User-friendliness of computers and internet has encouraged even techno phobic people to adopt internet and you can even find 75 year olds on Facebook etc.

·    Most of these tools (basic versions) are free and anyone can make a Facebook Page, a Blog or create a Linkedin or Twitter account.

·    New free online tools are coming up every day and they include sites like Profiled.com, Referral Key, Visual CV and so on.

·    Several tools are available to share your knowledge and build your brand as a domain expert including Linkedin groups, Quora, forums and so on.

·    The basic versions are free and premium versions with extra features can be utilized if you find them worth the money.

·    Newer free services are available like media monitoring from Profiled.com which monitors your online coverage besides Google alerts of course.

·    More and more niche sites are coming up, such as ecademy for networking of entrepreneurs.

·    Google+‘s idea of segregating what you share with friends, family and professional relationships is also wonderful and removes the biggest weakness of social media.

Future will be even more exciting

 In future TV will get completely integrated with internet (networked television) and those who are experts in online marketing will receive a huge benefit in this new world.

The entry of Google in social media will change the game forever. Google’s search engine powers plus blogspot.com plus Google + can make it a giant like Microsoft in the internet arena. If search engines start giving real time results from Google+, Facebook and Twitter, it will be a giant leap.  

In India, Personal Branding as a structured industry is yet to arrive though many people at senior level have started working on their personal brands, through their  personal portals and social media, taking the help of SEO and website (building) companies. There is no resistance as such to personal branding, though emergence of Personal Branding Consultants in all parts of the country is yet to happen.

So even if you are a horse who does not believe in the rat race, get ready to jump on the social and new media bandwagon and build a powerful brand for yourself in the process.