Growth Hacking your Personal Brand

We are flooded with information from the internet these days. Everyone is vying for three seconds of your attention – product marketers, friends, cousins, grandmothers, and every imaginable individual you might encounter. When you add it all up, there isn’t much time left to digest and manage all the information with which you are deluged.

When you are happily on your journey toward managing your personal brand – a post here, a tweet there, a blog here, a comment there – you’ll see that you are vying for the same three seconds of attention that your competition desires. In this case, the competition includes more than fellow job seekers, or those seeking to court your coveted clients. In fact, the competition is everyone who seeks to take away your three second claim to fame and its corresponding audience.

A personal web page on RockON (http://rockon.me) and including all your social networks through its Social Power channel will get you off to a good start.

Follow this, the usual strategy to grow your personal brand is either of the two:

Strategy #1: Keep digging away slowly at your social media activity, and hope that the hole does not fill up faster than you can dig. (i.e., Keep pushing out those little messages, posts, tweets, and other communications, hoping they will get noticed a wee bit more than the competition’s.)

Strategy #2: Bring in the earthmovers. Bulldoze your competition by burying your audience with innumerable messages, tweets, and posts, and hoping they won’t feel bad about your spamming tactic – but of course they will feel bad!

This is why I suggest a third strategy that offers the best of both worlds; really, a hack that will get you what you want and let you go off on your merry way.

Strategy #3: Continue using strategy #1 which employs slow and consistent digging. Digging serves to remind your audience that you still exist. Do so, however, in a tiny, unobtrusive way that will allow you to build a foundation of brand value through recognition. When the time is right and there is a specific need, increase your level of brand building activity. There is a thin line between polite intrusion and being spammy. Go lean to the spammy side just a little bit. Do it like you mean business though, by following my seven step method:

Identify your purpose: Why do you want to make more noise all of a sudden? Do you want to switch jobs, attract a new customer, or market your new book?
Identify your audience: If you know your purpose, you should know your audience.
Learn what will get your audience’s attention: There may be different tools, different media, and the size of the message that will be just right—discover this!
Build a program: Plan it like a marketing blitz. If you plan to tweet, decide what time of the day you will tweet. How many times? (If you think once is good enough….it is not!) Do you plan to post pictures to your Instagram account? Try to have the pictures ready, think of good captions, and post more than one picture please….and so on…you get the idea!
Set an end date: Once you start building growth, set an end-date. The end-date should be such that you have either achieved your purpose, or reached the point when continuing might cause an annoyance. Avoid crossing this line. Persistence is good, annoyance is not.
Measure your success: The key to any good marketing plan is measurement. Try to measure your success by the responses you receive. How quickly have your activities gotten you closer to your goal? If the numbers don’t sound good, go back to step 2 and reassess your audience. Measurement tools like RockON’s Brand Score can help you at this stage.
Thank your audience: Once you have achieved your goal, a simple, public, “Thank you for your patience with me!” message can do wonders—especially if you plan to address this audience again in a few weeks.
Resourceful branders discover hacks! They create useful solutions to grow their visibility while tackling the competition. The google-able term “growth hacker,” was coined to describe ways to improve marketing reach and grow a business quickly using unconventional tactics. However, it applies to all the same concepts that are useful to personal brand builders.

While you are growing your social media presence and your brand, remember that you might have to walk a thin line; that is, you will have to be persistent without causing negatives. Keep an eye on your audience’s response. If your messages start getting marked as spam, or you stop getting as many retweets, or likes, or comments, then you know it’s time to back off. If you have not achieved your goal, then the possibility that your plan was initially not all that great, is a real one. That’s just fine. Go back to step 2 and work again on defining your audience. Some of the best hacks are born out of trial and error – thats what growth hacking is all about.

We built RockON such that our users would be able to not only leverage social media to the maximum, but also measure their success and know when it is time to change strategies. A simple brand score (with a lot of complex number crunching behind it) tells you how well your personal brand is growing.

Go on – hack your way to a great personal branding strategy.