Reputation is not personal branding, according to this Harvard Business Review article. Reputation is just a part of your personal brand.
Your personal branding is what you stand for, what decisions you make, what values you represent and who you are as a person.
Your personal brand differentiates you.
It makes you identifiable and recognizable.
Whereas your reputation might be on autopilot, and it might not be in your hand what people think of you, your personal brand is how you want people to see you.
To build a personal brand, you make a conscious effort to build an image that is a mix of your experience, your skills, your values, and what you deliver to people who come in contact with you.
How do you create your personal brand?
Decide what you want to be known for.
Have very clearly laid out goals.
Audit your existing brand – search yourself on the Internet and find out what people are saying about you, if at all.
This will give you an idea of how much effort you need to put in and what direction to follow.
Come up with a consistent strategy.
What branding mistakes could you be committing when creating your personal brand?
I came across this list of mistakes on this LinkedIn update and thought of creating a small blog post listing them here.
One branding mistake is pretending to be someone you are not.
What are your core values?
How do you define yourself?
Don’t deviate from your core values just to appeal to the crowd.
Stick to your personality and you will attract an appropriate audience.
The second mistake is not differentiating between marketing and personal branding.
Most of the personal branding is one-on-one engagement.
You build your personal brand by providing some sort of value to people through blogging, social media updates and videos.
Advertising and marketing don’t work in personal branding.
You can read about the remaining mistakes in the original post.