Understanding what is important in your life is one of the fundamental parts of buliding your personal brand. Once you do, you will find it a lot easier to make decisions, set goals and create your personal brand strategy. One of the tools that I use when defining what is important to me is my personal mission statement.

The personal mission statement is not something you create once and then forget about.  Rather, it is a doctrine you can consult, review, and revise on a continuous basis. I review mine every 3-6 months, or whenever I feel the need to do it. My process is based on ideas from organizational management literature, books about creating mission statements in businesses.  I then apply these ideas to the situation of an individual within the context of personal branding theories.

As an individual I have values and virtues, just as organizations do. The difference is that while a conflict of values is not uncommon in a large, complex corporation, they seldom occur within an individual. This does not mean that there are no conflicts in personal values, but rather that the conflicts are most often in the form of prioritizing between values which are generally compatible. The problem is that this is a dynamic process, and that one value cannot always be prioritized in front of the other. For example, professional ambition cannot necessarily be placed ahead of love for one’s family.

In my personal mission statment I have grouped my core values and virtues in five areas:

1. Integrity
2. Success
3. Freedom
4. Health
5. Relations

Your core values are yours and not mine, therefore your groups most likely will differ. This is a good thing, because it is a sign of differentiation. The important thing when defining your values and virtues and then crafting your personal mission statement is to make sure that the values are yours and not something that has been imposed upon you by your friends, your parents, society or any other external party. Look deep into yourself and explore what really motivates you and what really matters to you. Only then can you define what success is for you.

Once I have defined my mission, it is time to start thinking about what specific goals and milestones I will be using to fulfill the mission. Not everything I do can be in line with the mission, as conflicts will naturally arise, but the mission statement will guide me in the quest for happiness and fulfillment of what I value most.

Next week  I will write more about goal setting for personal success.

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After polling several well-educated young professionals about their personal brand statement, I realized that there are still many individuals who don’t understand how to use personal branding.  Your statement is not a mission statement or job title, but rather your “catchphrase” if you will about your specific expertise.  If you don’t have much experience at something, then it can be about an area that you want to become an expert in so long as you don’t exaggerate.  Limit yourself to only one sentence for your personal branding statement.  Since there are still many people who are unaware of the need to create a personal brand regardless of the industry, then having a great one may just be the edge needed to win out over the competition.

Here are seven tips to write a winning personal brand statement.

1. List your attributes.  This may seem a little bit too simple, but when you are trying to find some quality or skill that only you and a few other people have it really helps a lot.  The goal here is to find the one or two things that separate you from your competition and make you unique.
2. Choose an audience.  Creating a statement that is too broad and undirected at any particular group will most likely alienate many of your potential employers.  Since the purpose of a personal brand statement is to briefly list your primary skills, it is necessary to target the industry where those skills are most useful.
3. Be honest.  It is tempting to exaggerate about your abilities, but this is not the place to do that.  Don’t say you’re “the best” or a “leader in the field of…” unless you actually are.  Keep in mind that the brand statement is only supposed to get people interested, and not say everything about your professional career.  Hopefully, with a good sentence an employer will want to know about you.
4. Make it memorable.  Even though you want it to stand out, remember that using excessively large or technical words may alienate your audience.  The statement of your brand should be something that others can remember easily since you need to be able to use it whenever a networking opportunity arises (baseball game, elevator, social function, etc).  Try telling it to a friend or significant other one time and see if he or she can easily recall the entire sentence.  If so, you’re off to a good start.
5. Make your self-impression = other’s impression.  If you have trouble brainstorming personal skills, ask close friends or co-workers what they think your strengths are.  Even after you’ve decided on a statement, it is a good idea to check with a friend to make sure that your idea of yourself matches what others think of you.
6. Market yourself.  I cannot emphasize this fact enough, when looking for a job you have to be willing to be your own advocate.  A personal brand statement will not help you much if you are not telling people what it is.  Have a personal website, or at the very least use social networking sites like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc to reach potential employers and use your professional statement.  Make sure to keep it consistent across platforms, however, because using the same sentence every time will help others remember it and associate it with you.  Having a short brand statement means that you will be able to market yourself quickly whenever a chance for networking arises (on the subway, for instance).
7. Be flexible.  Even though it’s time consuming, your personal branding statement should be revised at least once a year to reflect changes and advancements in your professional career.  In order to be effective, it needs to stay current.

Don’t procrastinate creating your statement.  Since it is such a powerful marketing tool, you are going to want to spend enough time on it to make it fantastic and ensure that it projects exactly the image of you that you want.  Eventually, personal branding statements will be as common as a resume or reference list, but for now, it’s a sure way to get you noticed as a competitive applicant who is capable of keeping up with current self-marketing trends and using them to advantage.

For more articles about personal branding and personal brand statements check out these posts:

1. Personal Branding Worksheet
2. Top 7 Must-Read Personal Branding Books
3. My personal brand
4. the elevator pitch – you have 6 seconds for your personal branding statement

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Bethany Stringer is a graduate of Texas A&M University (class of ‘08) and has her B.A. in English Literature with minors in History and Psychology.  Writing her first story at the age of 5 (with help from Mom), Bethany still enjoys writing and researching about everything from business and history to travel and fiction.  Enamored with languages, she plans to teach English in Russia in 2010 as a CELTA certified teacher.  She owned her own business working horses when she was 17, and still loves riding her horse Romeo.  Always appreciating a challenge, she loves sea kayaking and prefers Rachmaninov to Bach.

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A really great resume – one that captures attention, gets interviews, and lands jobs faster – has always been all about differentiating that job seeker and their promise of value from others competing for the same jobs.

Personal branding is the best career marketing tool today to get you there. And branding generates the kind of chemistry that helps hiring decision makers pre-qualify you as a good fit and sound hiring investment.

If you need help uncovering and building your personal brand, see my post The Personal Branding Worksheet.

Resumes these days often take the form of an online profile or part of an online career portfolio. Whether online or on “paper”, follow these 7 tactics to brand and power up your executive resume:

1. Lead with a personal brand statement.

Forget about an anemic “objective statement” outlining what you want in a job. Nobody cares what you want. They want to know what you will do for them. Use this prime real estate, the first thing people will see, to tell them about the unique value you offer that no one else does.

Placing a stand-alone brand statement at the top of your resume, in itself, is a powerful differentiating feature. Few job seekers are doing it. A dramatic element like this that links your personal brand with your value proposition and ROI will immediately draw in the reader.

Craft a statement of 3-5 lines that comes from your own voice, gives a feel for who you are, and lays out your brand attributes, pivotal strengths, and vitality. If a stand-alone brand statement on your resume doesn’t feel right for you, instead it can easily become part of your career bio and the foundation for your 30-second elevator pitch.

2. Format your resume with the readers’ needs in mind.

More and more hiring decision makers are reviewing resumes on the go – on PDAs, netbooks, or other small screens. Brief, brand-driven statements of value surrounded by enough white space to make them stand out will have the greatest impact. Long, dense paragraphs make it hard for the reader to quickly access and digest important make-or-break information about you.

3. Tell your story above the fold.

People reviewing your resume may have to look at hundreds or more resumes for any given position, so they don’t have much time to spend on each one. In fact, they may only give your resume 10-15 SECONDS to capture their attention. If you don’t draw them in immediately and hold them, they may move on to the next resume and forget about you.

► Showcase your most important and compelling information at the top of page one, since this is the first, and possibly only, section that will be read. Consider this: if you tear off the top of the first page, it should stand on its own as your career branding communication.

► Include 2 or 3 achievement statements or standout contributions you’ve made to companies, leading each with the quantified WOW! results. Show them the numbers! These provide evidence to back up your personal brand.

► It’s okay to move certain information from the second page to above the fold on page one, such as special training, hot certifications, or career milestones – especially if they’re relevant to your job target. If you have an MBA, don’t hide it at the bottom of the last page. They may never get there!

4. Keep your resume to 2 pages.

It may be difficult and painful, but you can do this. The purpose of your resume is to generate interest in you, compelling decision makers to want to talk with you. A resume is not a comprehensive career history covering every job you’ve ever held. It’s a career marketing document that needs to say just enough about you to do its job. So precision-writing is the key. And in most cases, there’s no need to go back further than 10 to 15 years.

To keep it brief, pare down and consolidate your value proposition and all your great achievements to just the essentials.

You can put together deeper slices of contributions, “success stories”, and your softer side in collateral 1-2 page documents (Leadership Initiatives Profile, Achievement Summary, Career Biography, Reference Dossier with Accolades, etc.).

5. Highlight your key areas of expertise just once.

Instead of taking up precious space repeating obvious lists of responsibilities under each position, consolidate them in the form of relevant key word phrases at the top of the first page. For best impact, position them in nicely formatted columns or a shaded graphic box, titled something like “Key Areas of Expertise”. Or, depending upon space, sprinkle these relevant key words throughout your achievement statements.

For the header “Professional Experience” or “Work History”, consider using a relevant keyword phrase, such as “Senior-level Management Experience” or “IT Management Experience”. Fill out the section with short statements of key contributions to each company and achievements that provide evidence of the value you will bring to your next employer.

6. Transform your executive resume into an on-brand LinkedIn profile.

This is a great way to extend the value of your resume while building your online presence and brand reputation. I’m sure you know that recruiters and hiring decision makers are searching online to source candidates and to pre-qualify those they’re considering. If you’re invisible online, you don’t exist to them. And of course, LinkedIn offers endless networking benefits.

Everything in your branded resume can be copied and pasted into appropriate sections of your LinkedIn profile. Here are a few tips:

► An abbreviated version of your personal brand statement becomes your LinkedIn professional headline – the first thing people will see, along with your photo. You can pack quite a punch with the allowed 120 characters.

► The top half of your resume, before the “Experience” section, becomes the “Summary” section for your LinkedIn profile.

► Remember to break up dense chunks of information and add plenty of white space, just as you did with your resume.

► LinkedIn may not accept some graphic bullet points that you used in your resume, but you can get visual impact with various characters that are right on your keyboard, such as: * ~ > = - <>

► Once your profile is all done, LinkedIn lets you easily convert it to a PDF file.

► Include a link to your LinkedIn profile on your resume, along with your contact information at the top.

7. Take advantage of Google Profiles’ search results power.

A few days ago, Google Profiles trumped LinkedIn and other social networking sites for building brand-solid search results, by adding a customized listing that includes your photo on page one of results for “your name”. Check it out by typing “meg guiseppi” in a browser window and scrolling down the page until you see my photo and link to my Google Profile. That’s an attention-grabber!

Google makes it very easy to set up a Google account and put your profile together. In fact, it’s much easier than LinkedIn. Cut and paste your resume into the body of the profile, add your photo and an on-brand headline under your name, and pop in links to your other online profiles, websites, blogs, etc.

Google Profiles is now a must-do online branding strategy and another great way to extend the value of your executive resume.

For more in depth strategies to brand and differentiate yourself in your resume, see my series of posts, Think Like an Executive Resume Branding Expert.

Author: Meg Guiseppi

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Reinvent Your Personal Brand

Reinventing yourself is a popular phrase for older people, but it’s just as relevant for young people. What and who you are is pretty constant through most of your career. The big change points occur when you get out of school and when you get too old to do what you’ve done for your entire career.

Implicit in reinvention is your personal brand, because you’re changing one personal brand for another. That’s why sites like brand-yourself.com are so important. Just as you evolved from a kid to a college student, you now have to evolve your identity to something appropriate for a working adult.

This won’t make a difference to your friends – they already know you, but since it is your “face” to the rest of the world, you need to give this transition careful thought. And as you undertake this transition, you should always be thinking about what the other person is seeing, and how they are reacting. All good marketing is based on that, and personal branding is really nothing more than marketing yourself.

Creation of a Personal Branding Statement

There are a slew of techniques you can use to raise your public awareness. I’ve written about this on my blog a few times, with an overview here. But before you start registering at personal branding (or reputation management) sites, you need to think about who you are and how you want to be known.

Most people define themselves by their job title, but that’s not such a good idea. Saying you’re a programmer or a product manager immediately makes you a commodity. Figuring out exactly what to say in your personal branding statement is probably the hardest thing you’ll do in your personal branding efforts, but it is also the most important. (And don’t worry, you can change this as you refine your approach. I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up.)

This tag line is called your “Professional ‘headline’” on LinkedIn. Think of it as terse form of your elevator pitch. Here’s mine (for right how): “I help people get found on the Internet.” When I’m networking, I can walk up to somebody and say quickly, completely and accurately: “Hi, I’m Walter Feigenson, and I help people get found on the Internet.” It’s another version of “Barry-the-bucket” from my last post.

While you’re thinking about this personal branding statement, you need to keep in mind:

• It has to be short! You have literally seconds to make an impression on anybody you’re meeting in person or electronically.
• Make it short enough to fit on your business card.
• Make sure it’s accurate, and completely understandable immediately. Try it on your friends – make sure it works. If anybody has to ask you what you mean, you need to keep working on your branding statement.

This is the same thing we do for positioning a product in the marketplace, so I’ll give you the same advice I give marketeers… Your tag line, personal branding statement, professional headline can’t be what you want to be, it has to be what you are. If you claim to be a rocket scientist, and you convince somebody you are, it’ll show up pretty quickly if you’re really a wannabe rocket scientist. When you’ve got a tag line candidate, and it doesn’t match who/what you are, you have two choices: 1) change your tag line, or 2) become what you claim you are.

So get working on this tag line/personal branding statement. Try it out for a while. See if it resonates with other people. Make sure you’re comfortable with it.

In my next post, I’ll start talking about some of the things you need to do once you’ve established your “personal brand” in your own mind.

For additional resources concerning personal branding statements check out the following articles

• Top 6 Posts to Craft Your Personal Branding Statement
• How to Brand Yourself
• Everything You Need to Start Building Your Personal Brand Right Now

© 2009 Walter Feigenson

Author: Walt Feigenson

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