Monthly Archives: August 2018

Personal Brand Behind the Mask

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Do Beats Say

93/% of personal communication takes place without speech.  Your gestures, tone of voice body language and tone are more powerful than your words.

Say What?

Some people think that means that if you can’t see them, they can make you believe anything. They go on-line and represent themselves as an expert, a guru, a talent or a tempest because they think you won’t be able to view their reality.

Seeing Is Believing.

Unfortunately, sooner or later in their quest for fame or familiarity they will provide a visual be it still or video that will give the reader/viewer pause. They may not be able to tell you why saying, “It just doesn’t feel right” or “Something here just doesn’t match up.” Instead of the vision of wealth the masquer has been striving to project, a middle-class home or yard or neighborhood will be revealed.

All the protestations directed at making a persona impress and excite will begin to ring untrue. When the words and the pictures are at odds, the poseur has reached the end of their run. Each of us will feel that bull-shit alarm rousing the neighborhood.

Behind the Mask

The internet does not provide a mask. It puts a cap on what we can do in person. It limits that easy believability. The online portrait you paint is never perceived as a photograph. It is seen as an over-retouched bit of fakery. You in person is at least 12 times more effective. An airbrush cannot make you perfect. It can “fix” one image but it cannot completely clean up a video. That is when the ruse crumbles. You are much better off going in “warts and all” if you want to be trusted.

Seeing the Truth

The basis of a personal brand is your personality, your real personality. All of us have what we see as blemishes. We usually have stronger beliefs about them than those that know us well. Whether you believe you have flaws of character or physique or both you need to stop fixating on them.

Suck it up. Get real. Work on those perceived faults. Compare that mask you’ve been presenting with the real you. Yes, there is a difference. Ideal is not real. Perfect is an opinion. All the folks out there will decide what and who you are. They will take into account what they see and what you are striving to be if you let them see you.

Trust Yourself

I know how tempting it is to tighten the ties of the mask and take the stage. I’ve spent enough time on the platform to have concluded that the more of yourself you reveal the more positive response you will garner. When I speak on Trust I tell audiences that in today’s world they need to trust:

  • Their Companies
  • Their Staff
  • Their Customers

And

  • Themselves

Trust yourself.

Be yourself in person and on line.

Live fully…free of the mask.

Jerry Fletcher is a sought-after International Speaker, a beBee ambassador, founder and Grand Poobah of www.BrandBrainTrust.com

His consulting practice, founded in 1990, is known for Trust-based Brand development, Positioning and business development for independent professionals on and off-line.Jerry Fletcher, Speaking in olombia

Consulting: www.JerryFletcher.com
Speaking: www.NetworkingNinja.com

 

Brand, Trust & Blockchain

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Unknown is unbranded.
Brand is, in my view, an expression of Trust. If I haven’t heard of you or your product or service, you are a commodity. Nothing separates you from the pack. But, introducing yourself to me appropriately can give you instant panache.

That won’t happen with every prospect. More frequently in today’s world they are going to look you up on-line. They will Google you and run down the items that pop up on the first page of the search. Try it on yourself. Just type in your name and look at what comes up.

You are not invisible
I have a large body of work that has been published on the internet now but there was a time that a Mel Gibson movie called Conspiracy Theory where he played a character with my name was just about everything on that first page.  That I didn’t mind.

Comments are currency
There is a tendency to review businesses, sometimes with scathing comments. That goes with the territory. It can be helpful or devastating depending on the level of acid. The problem is that you have no real control over these entries in the debit column and no way to add credits that directly connect.

You need to put solid testimonials on your web site as a partial counter. You need to correct the fault mentioned in the review. You need to find a way to assure you are trusted.

Can you find a way to get back to the one-to-one level of confidence you once enjoyed with ever customer? We are getting closer. The answer is called Blockchain Technology.

It started with cryptocurrency.
The Cyberpunk reaction to Wall Street’s control of banking and subsequent disastrous consequences on world finances was to continuously search for a way to take the control of the double entry accounts out of the bank’s hands and put them on a digital platform.  Bitcoin, although it did not meet the developer’s criteria did introduce the idea of Blockchain.

Technology for trusting strangers.
Like a lot of brilliant ideas the concept is simple. Implementation ain’t so easy. Those ledgers that keep track of who owns what have been around in principle since the Medici Bank was set up in 1397. Blockchain removes them from a central location and puts them in shared distributed digital files. The files are shared on a worldwide peer-to-peer network so there is no central authority. Once a record is updated, the change cannot be reversed, falsified or erased. It is permanent. Every person in the network has their own copy of the shared ledger and those copies remain the same.

Why is that important?  For the first time in history it may be possible to create a public record of who owns what that is not managed by a third party and cannot be changed by a single individual or organization. In other words, you could sell your intellectual property or a product to someone you’ve never met with complete trust on both sides of the deal. You could write a contract that executes based on an outcome you and that stranger had endorsed before the fact.

There’s an app for that
An underlying program called Ethereum has become the darling of the Blockchain enthusiasts. Essentially it allows blockchain developers to decentralized applications on top of it. Current offerings are being developed in three areas I know of : Asset transfer, Supply chain proof and smart contracts.

Yes, it is early days. Yes, it is a huge promise. Yes, the digital world is never as direct and obvious as we expect. But consider these simple facts:

  • 1969 The first message was sent and received over Arpanet the predecessor to the Internet.
  • 1978 marked the first test of Cell phones in Chicago.
  • 1985 The Well, a dialup chat and networking site, was established. This is the grand-daddy of all social networking sites.
  • 1988 Eudora, the first user-friendly e-mail program was released.
  • Google was founded in 1998
  • Linked In (now owned by Microsoft) launched in 2003
  • YouTube launched in 2005 (Google paid $1.65 Billion for it in 2006.)
  • In the last 30 years we have gone from zero to more than a half of the world’s population being on the internet

Are you ready for the next 30 years?

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Jerry Fletcher ThinkinigJerry Fletcher is a sought-after International Speaker, a beBee ambassador, founder and Grand Poobah of www.BrandBrainTrust.com 

His consulting practice, founded in 1990, is known for Trust-based Brand development, Positioning and business development for independent professionals on and off-line.

Consulting: www.JerryFletcher.com
Speaking: www.NetworkingNinja.com

Brand is Building Trust With Strangers

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Brand is an expression of Trust (video).

Think about how many profiles you have on line. If you are like most business people you have one on Linked In. Most of us average six that we can remember! Profiles sum up who you are, your education your experience and may include some references from satisfied customers.

What you do

All those profiles have one thing in common. They are about what you do. They give your title and your position and what the company is all about. They answer the question, “What do you do?” in all kinds of ways to make you look credible, honest and trustworthy.

Times have changed

When we lived in villages you and your product or service would be well known in the local community. A very few managed to build a reputation that reached the next village. Usually that was because of the excellence of the product. The smith made superior knives. The weaver had patterns not seen elsewhere. Seldom, if ever did those reputable products get sold in other countries.

Trade needs governance and finance

The further afield people went to trade goods the more risk all of them took on. Think of the ships of Venice sailing off laden with goods purchased by the merchant princes to sell in other ports hoping to fill their ships for the return voyage with the wares available there. They were still practicing business one to one. But the folks that stocked their ship on both ends needed a way to be sure they got a fair price for their goods.

Banks became the middlemen. They loaned money to the merchant traders to buy the goods on the promise of being repaid. They evaluated each loan much as they do today…on the basis of trust.

What is your credit score?

The single most important evaluation for getting a loan in today’s world is your credit score. This is data captured by three different services reflects your behavior over time in terms of repayment of debt. It includes auto payments, credit cards, mortgages, etc. The assumption is that you will treat new debt as you have treated it in the past.

The problem is that there are other factors that go into a loan’s risk assessment. They also look at your income stream. Independent professionals get clobbered here. A consultant friend with credit scores at the high end of the scale has income that fluctuates. Even though he owns 6 rental homes and has never been late on any of those mortgages, the bank won’t loan him money to purchase another rental.

What is your Trust Score?

There is no widely accepted service for this but have you looked at what people have to say about you or your product or service on-line? You are reviewed and rated by the services you use. Your product or service is rated whether you like it or not.

Trooly, acquired by Airbnb in 2017 could provide a staggering array of information from on-line sources to rate your trustworthiness. All they needed was your first and last name to mine the rich wealth of digital data available on just about anyone.

Trusting a perfect stranger

Today, we need to trust strangers because we do business on-line. We assume a trusting nature but need to look hard at the reviews and ratings before we digitally plunk down our money. There are apps becoming available to help us.

Tala, developed as an app for smartphones allows this new idea of micro-banking to work in developing countries by evaluating the loan requestor based on the data on their phone. Items like:

  • Current spending
  • Consistency in income
  • Size of their network
  • Length of calls (over 4 minutes indicates stronger relationships)
  • Regular connections to more than 58 contacts
  • First and last names in contact list (more than 40 suggests the person is 16 times more reliable)

The net effect is that they don’t need a credit score to determine if someone is trustworthy.

Then there is the promise of Blockchain Technology.

That is on tap for next week.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Jerry Fletcher is a sought-after International Speaker, a beBee ambassador, founder and Grand Poobah of www.BrandBrainTrust.com

His consulting practice, founded in 1990, is known for Trust-based Brand development, Positioning and business development for independent professionals on and off-line.

Consulting: www.JerryFletcher.com
Speaking: www.NetworkingNinja.com

Personal Brand: To Be Remembered

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We are tribal.

Family. Extended family. Clan. Others who have married in.

Each of us, at our core, wants one thing: To Be Remembered.

Whether we get there via fame or infamy, we care not. For some is it is good enough just to be recognized by the clan. Others need the affirmation and admiration of a larger group. I suspect it is in their genes.

No matter the reason, we now have the techno gee-whiz abilities of the internet to boost our “personal brand.”

But that technology comes at a cost. To be truly, deeply remembered you still must engage in person with other human beings.

  • Your blog won’t get you there.
  • Your attempts to go viral on YouTube won’t get you there.
  • All the picture posts and notes on FaceBook will not get you there.

Your fond hope of having new visitors to the mummified digital files you leave behind is probably not going to happen. As much as the internet provides quick easy access to a lot more people, there is no connection in that connection.

Connection

In 20 years of investigating and speaking on social networking I’ve found that the road to brand runs through the junction of connection to Trust. Meeting a host of people, we find just a few that we want to continue the dialogue with. They are the ones we find interesting as potential customers or referral sources and some that are just fascinating in and of themselves.

Fascination

That attraction doesn’t always go both ways. It can but it is not required. For them to find you spell-binding, you may have to work at it. You may consider gilding the lily, spiffing up your personal brand by trying to appear as something you are not.

Not a good idea.

Engagement

You are better off being yourself and letting them know you are interested by asking questions to learn more about them. Engage them in conversation instead of doing that “elevator pitch” commercial.

Ask them:

  • How did you come to be in this business?
  • If you weren’t doing this what would you do?
  • Business is only part of life, what do you do for fun?

Trust

If they return the interest you are on the highway to Trust and a real “personal brand.” But you have to stay on the high road. On line and in person you shouldn’t try to enhance your value. Be who you are. Stick with honest, consistent information. That might change a little over time with education and experience but at the core you need to stay the same.

What’s at your core?

Jerry Fletcher is a sought-after International Speaker, a beBee ambassador, founder and Grand Poobah of www.BrandBrainTrust.com

His consulting practice, founded in 1990, is known for Trust-based Brand development, Positioning and business development for independent professionals on and off-line.

Consulting: www.JerryFletcher.com
Speaking: www.NetworkingNinja.com