Online Personal Brand by Ryan Frischmann

Author:Ryan Frischmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CREATESPACE

Promotion Versus Prevention

As professionals think about personal branding, they think of self-promotion. In a survey I conducted (and discuss in a later chapter), some of the open-ended responses on promotion include: “Everyone is a stalker these days…It’s CREEPY… I don’t need personal promotion.”

I would like to clarify that personal branding is about promotion AND prevention. Professionals sometimes have to balance both or, depending on their target audience, might favor one over the other. A prevention-focused audience wants to hear you are vigilant and competent so they avoid a loss. A promotion-focused audience wants to hear you are creative and insightful so they achieve a gain (Halerson & Higgins, 2013). So depending on your audience, you want to serve prevention- and/or promotion-focused content.

Tom Peters summarizes this concept of promotion and prevention effectively. He says the way you communicate your brand is not only about what you do but also what you do not do (Peters, 1997). So part of what you do not do is preventing miscommunication.

Here are some examples of prevention-focused content:

Provide references who can testify on your behalf. It is difficult to demonstrate competency and thoroughness with a sample of work, so you need references to describe what you did for them. An accountant cannot provide actual audit paperwork, so he or she uses testimonial from a client, for example.

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