Perfect Your Personal Brand – Without Coming Across Like a Narcissist

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times – you need to work on your “personal brand.” You need to be sure you are broadcasting the real you – your authentic self and the professional skills that you want to be famous for – in a way that gets you noticed, networked, and needed.

But that’s not all. Somewhere along the line, the concept of personal branding – introduced in the early ’80s and then made popular by Inc. Magazine writer Tom Peters in 1997 – began to include the internet. The rise of social networking in the past decade means you can’t just brand yourself in the office, amongst your colleagues and clients. Personal branding means putting yourself out there in the digital space for all the world to see and search. And networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now Google+ make it easy to set down the stakes in your personal brand – empowering you to make sure the world knows why your commitments, your best skills, and your passions make you indispensable.

That’s the good news. The bad news, though, is what many of us already know about social networking: it can be a slippery slope to narcissism. The very ease of publishing photos of ourselves, links about our interests, and questions about our curiosities means we do. And we do it a lot. Rather than being a platform to sell our strengths and abilities, social networking can be simply become a showcase for them.

Here’s how to make sure your efforts toward personal branding are actionable, effective, and authentic – rather than narcissistic, solipsistic, or gratingly, unabashedly self-absorbed.

Relevance: Selling The Sizzle

One of the first rules of advertising is that it’s not about you, it’s about what you can do for the customer. As Peters wrote in his Inc. Magazine piece, you need to distinguish between your features and your benefits. He writes:

“So what is the ‘feature-benefit model’ that the brand called You offers? Do you deliver your work on time, every time? Your internal or external customer gets dependable, reliable service that meets its strategic needs. Do you anticipate and solve problems before they become crises? Your client saves money and headaches just by having you on the team. Do you always complete your projects within the allotted budget? I can’t name a single client of a professional services firm who doesn’t go ballistic at cost overruns.”

Make sure the things you put on the internet are relevant and useful for the people you’re connected to.

Sure, publishing photos online of your latest, greatest adventure or your astonishingly adorable kids once in a while is fine. They show that you’re a well-rounded, caring, interested, whole person. But that doesn’t mean you should spew a constant stream of you-you-you, without acknowledging your audience. If you post a article, ask what your friends think about it. If you tweet a link, do it because you think others might benefit from it. If you publish a poll, do it because you are really curious about what your colleagues know and what you can learn from them.

If you’re doing it right, social networking is not about you – it’s about everyone else. PwC’s recent article, “Articulate Your Personal Brand Through Your Social Network” [PDF] sums it up.

“…be sure to follow the people in your network on various social media sites…This way you can keep up with people’s news and occasionally send a hello or forward an article that might be of interest. Small gestures on social media demonstrate to others that your personal brand includes generosity and a true interest in the careers and lives of the people you know.”

What you post online is a reflection of yourself as a friend, a colleague, and a client – that means you need to actively reach out, rather than expecting them to be drawn in.

Why Personal Branding Isn’t Narcissism

In this month’s Psychology Today cover story on narcissism, writer Scott Barry Kaufman explains that everyone has a little bit of narcissism. He writes:

“Odious as these qualities may be, we’ve all got a narcissistic streak within. Narcissism is a stable trait that varies in degree from person to person. Some aspects, including confidence and self-sufficiency, are healthy and adaptive. It is only at the extreme end of the spectrum that narcissism becomes a disorder, often because toxic levels of vanity, entitlement, and exploitativeness are on display.”

So if you happen to spend more time looking at your own social networking profile than anyone else’s, don’t worry – this is healthy and normal. It’s only when you begin to harm your relationships with others that you may have a problem.

He continues:

“Narcissists’ language and demeanor is often geared toward one objective: to maintain power in an interaction. Psychologist Anita Vangelisti of the University of Texas at Austin found that tactics in the narcissists’ toolbox include bragging, refocusing the topic of conversation, making exaggerated hand movements, talking loudly, and showing disinterest by “glazing over” when others speak.”

Translated to the web, narcissistic behavior could mean ignoring your friends’ and colleagues’ activity only to promote your own. Building a personal brand means communicating your skills and passions in a way that matters to others, and sharing their passions as well. It means having a conversation, rather than shouting through a loud speaker.