2019/yourbrand

From IndieWeb

Defining Your Personal Brand

Defining Your Personal Brand was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2019.

Watch: ▢️40:20s

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/yourbrand


IndieWeb Summit 2019
Session: Defining Your Personal Brand
When: 2019-06-20 14:20

Participants

Notes

  • personal branding guidelines created by us all

created a list of things to consider

  • what are your personal branding goals?
  • branding is more than just a visual thing
  • what are things you love to do and people you associate with
  • may take experimentation and realizing you don't like something
  • it's a growth process
  • should try a lot of things in order to filter out what you like and don't like
  • not to worry about people falling off
  • who are you?
  • what is your specialty?
  • Your audience most of the time will be you. What are you passionate about and where is the market at the same time.
  • you get to define who you are and if you don't people will just guess. You can do this with content marketing, blogs, taking pictures.

do meetup groups

  • attend or create
  • anything you put out into the world is apart of your brand
  • Costs involved $20/month
  • Sometimes they can be heavily white/cis gender without actively pushing them to be balanced (especially when using meetup.com)
  • the level of quality needs to be high (and that's part of your brand)

Used adventure.bike as an example case.

  • tomas wants it to be a blog sharing bikepacking adventures. site shows off some good photography
  • suggestion to add a call-to-action to read about the adventures. also, maybe add a suggestions section under each adventure blog post to keep people reading.
  • kudos on having an About page, important to have a "who am i"/"who are we" page to build trust

using seperate accounts for your content/ideas

  • have a clear focus
  • talk about what you care about
  • might want to partition accounts on silos if you cover topics with very different audiences.

q: how much "personality" to show in what you post?

  • as you gain an audience they respect you more (so you have more freedom)

your branding is not always just sharing what you do. can/should also be a resource

  • things you are learning / takeaways, even if brief.
  • things you want to teach

q: re: about pages. on a personal website, should it be first-person "welcome to my website i wrote this"? some advice says third-person is more authoritative

  • can be a mix. andi's example is third-person so she can copy-paste it into speaker bios
  • example: chris coyier's expanding bio with radio buttons for first- and third-person, options for length, etc.

another way to help build your brand is to help other people and sharing experiences with other people

logo design:

  • what kind of asthetic do you like?
  • so you can be clear and descirbe to a designer what you want and so you are aware of things you like

use pinterest (or similar) to help with inspiration

  • gather up examples of things that you love.

speak in a clear and concise way

  • write carefully, clearly. edit. edit. edit. test it out with people.

multiple streams of content

  • video
  • photos
  • audio (make a podcast; make a video version of the podcast!)

Introductions

  • christopher - sees the possiblity for new software tools to be built
  • marty-interested in the space of how other people demonstare branding. systems of branding of showing off what you do and and what you are into
  • jordan- who is jordan and how do I make that work. balancing when to be non gendered and when to actually be able to tell people things

figuring out what I am showing

  • Jared- trying to get into video/podcast. how to control what putting out and drive traffic to site
  • Thomas- focusing on cycling blog. how to aim persona to other people
  • katie- wants more clarity on what she wants to be doing in the world and connecting to those who would be excited about that
  • kitt- how one starts with the branding. what processes are
  • Malcom- my branding sould encompass documentation
  • Flaki- curious about how to make branding sustaiable and how to maintain off the clock work and building a personal brand through contributions in the community.
  • Tiara- not sure how to rebrand myself. Was a student and identified as that and now feel I need a rebranding and not sure where to start or even what to do.
  • Chris - how can I own all my data on my site and create/reflect my well-rounded identity online while still doing "branding" and being authentic
  • Andi - started on cascadesf; works with designers mostly in the Bay Area and help them do presentations, talks, etc. Started as a meetup group. http://cascadesf.com and meetup.com/cascadesf

See Also