Why you Need the Internet to Promote ‘Brand You’

In 1999, business management guru Tom Peters in his book ‘The Brand You 50′, said that the job security of individuals was beginning to revert back to the way it was hundreds of years ago.

In this period, shortly after America was founded, job security was based on three core elements:

Craft

Distinction

Networking Skills

Craft meant that you had a skill that was marketable. To have distinction meant that what you did was memorable. To have networking skills relied on ‘word of mouth collegial support’.

What Tom Peters argued was that we live in an age now where personal branding and networking is everything, even for those working for someone else’s payroll. It is these core elements that are now important once more for job security, where so called white collar jobs (knowledge workers) are expected to almost entirely fizzle out (at least in the recognized ‘western world’) as Peters claimed in the late 90s ‘in around 10 years from now’.

The age of ‘Brand You‘ was already in motion when Peters spoke about it back then, and has never been more evident than it is today.

This reconfiguration of the way people are doing work coupled with the economic downturn, means that more and more people are becoming independent and freelance workers. Inevitably, many of these freelancers are using the Internet to get work (as are more prospects looking for workers and creatives). The influx of cheaper freelance labour from places like India, means that more choice, at lower costs are available to clients on the web.

Because of all this, freelancers, and particularly creative freelancers, need to create and promote a personal brand more than they ever have in the past if they are to succeed in the long-term. It is possible to succeed as a freelancer and overcome these obstacles. It doesn’t need to be frightening or complicated. It simply requires a strategy.

It requires that you can demonstrate you have a niche skill that is marketable, that you stand out as best as you can and that you build up a solid and relevant network of friends, fans, clients, colleagues and people that share your interests.

The single most effective way of building and marketing your personal brand in this way is through the Internet. The Internet is not only hugely powerful in terms of gaining exposure for your work, and I will be writing much more on this as the blog progresses, and will demonstrate that you are ‘with it’ and up to date (what clients are looking for), but it is now almost a necessity to get online as a freelancer, with so many others doing the same.

If your competition is online, you’ve got to join them to succeed!

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