{"id":116,"date":"2013-02-10T01:08:10","date_gmt":"2013-02-10T01:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/?p=116"},"modified":"2013-02-10T01:11:45","modified_gmt":"2013-02-10T01:11:45","slug":"building-your-personal-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/building-your-personal-brand\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Your Personal Brand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week I was honored to take part in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aaf.org\/\" title=\"AAF\" target=\"_blank\">American Advertising Foundation<\/a> \/ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.draftfcb.com\/home.aspx\" title=\"Draftfcb\" target=\"_blank\">Draftfcb <\/a> panel, &#8220;Building Your Personal Brand for Career Success&#8221;. The moderator was the lovely Carol Watson, founder of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tangerine-watson.com\/home.html\" title=\"Tangerine-Watson\" target=\"_blank\">Tangerine-Watson<\/a>, a cross cultural talent consultancy. I was joined by a handful of my amazing colleagues in a talk that generated a great deal of thoughtful questions from the audience of students and recent graduates. Here some main themes for building your personal brand:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Craft your Vision Statement<\/strong><br \/>\nI went through an exercise where I looked at my early childhood in chunks from age 1 to 6, 7 to 13 and 14 to 18. I wrote out the moments from each period where I felt the happiest and most proud. I found that I was always the happiest when I was teaching others, working as part of a supportive team, and being creative (no matter what the medium is). I decided to seek out roles and professions that would foster those types of environments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Beautiful Failures<\/strong><br \/>\nThis was a talk by Susan Dybbs of <a href=\"www.cooper.com\" title=\"Cooper\" target=\"_blank\">Cooper<\/a> at Interaction 13 last week, and this theme of failing being a great thing came up again with many of the panelists at the AAF talk. If you&#8217;re failing it means that you&#8217;re pushing yourself beyond your boundaries, and that&#8217;s a good thing. I used the example of very early in my career accepting a job that required Photoshop and not even knowing the program. I taught myself Photoshop in a week and ended up excelling at my first fully digital job, coming from a mostly print background.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Networking Naturally<\/strong><br \/>\nBeing naturally introverted, I&#8217;ve always struggled with networking. It can feel really scary. But you start by just contacting folks you feel really comfortable with, and then broaden it to folks a bit outside your circle. That&#8217;s how I landed my current position. And it helps to lend a certain &#8220;friendliness&#8221; to all of your communications. Tell the person what you&#8217;re up to, and you can even offer a link to an article you loved to offer something in exchange that is valuable to them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>By Hook or by Crook<\/strong><br \/>\nA lot of the folks in the audience were really interested in becoming Digital Strategists, but it&#8217;s a role that is very senior and seasoned. We talked about the fact that it&#8217;s O.K. to take a similar role to your &#8220;Dream Job&#8221; and just keep working towards your ideal. Find ways to start doing the job before you actually have the title. You can approach a non-profit and see if they need help, or help friends with their websites, just to get your portfolio started.<\/p>\n<p>On my walk to work every morning I feel so lucky to enjoy every minute of my job, and I wish the same for everyone reading this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week I was honored to take part in the American Advertising Foundation \/ Draftfcb panel, &#8220;Building Your Personal Brand for Career Success&#8221;. The moderator was the lovely Carol Watson, founder of Tangerine-Watson, a cross cultural talent consultancy. I was joined by a handful of my amazing colleagues in a talk that generated a great&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions\/127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenmaroney.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}