Today we talk about Outsourcing Your Personal Branding?
It might come as a surprise to you to discover that many people outsource their personal branding. How can you do this when your personal brand is supposed to be the ‘real’ you? While it can be risky to outsource branding, there are ways to do it right. You can find companies that specialize in turning your brand vision into tangible results.
The Risks of Outsourcing Your Personal Branding
Probably the biggest risk of outsourcing your branding is letting the cat out of the bag. If your audience discovers that it’s not you behind the social media profile, this can damage your credibility considerably, and credibility is the cornerstone of a good brand. Especially if you offer PR or branding services, they’ll wonder why you didn’t do it yourself.
The other risk is that you may hire a company that doesn’t deliver. There are many companies that offer branding and reputation management services and you need to make sure that you find one that’s good at what they do. Their job is two-fold:
1) To effectively communicate a brand image that’s memorable, unique and consistent.
2) To make it truly match who you are so that there’s no disconnect.
One more thing to consider before you outsource your personal branding is that it’s not cheap. Quality branding services can be quite costly.
Tips on Outsourcing
Some people outsource their personal branding without any problem whatsoever. They can do this because they don’t outsource their entire brand creation from the start. Instead, they outsource certain parts of their continued branding efforts.
You can start outsourcing your branding once your it’s established and well-defined. The vision should come from you. What the branding specialists are actually doing is continuing and expanding your branding, not creating it from scratch.
A good guideline is to ask yourself with each task, ‘Will this hurt my brand if they mess it up?’ Of course, you should do your best to find a company that won’t mess anything up; but consider the damage to your reputation if they do and don’t outsource tasks that are risky. For example, you might hire a company to design your social media profiles for you, but you should probably do the actual posting of comments yourself. If your social media design looks a little off, you can fix it. If one badly phrased comment shows all of your fans that it’s not you commenting, you’ll lose lots of trust.
Transparency is another thing that helps. If you have people helping you with content creation or updates, let your audience see that. Give them their own profiles and allow them admin access to your blog, site or social media profile. This maintains your fans’ trust while also getting you the help you need.
You can minimize potential damage by carefully overseeing everything your virtual help does. Have them send the posts to you for editing and tweaking. You can alter any language that seems funny and maintain control of everything before it goes out.
Finding the Right Help
When you’re looking for a branding company to outsource work to, check them out carefully. Check references, read their client lists, and look at their portfolios. Speak to a live person before setting up the job and make sure that you can maintain control over everything they do. They should be responsive and reply to you quickly. Your personal branding is extremely precious and you should be extra careful about who you hire.
To your success
Dennis Koray
Skype: denniskoray
email: info@denniskoray.com
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