Malcolm Levene and I ran our Personal Branding from the Inside Out workshop again last month in central London. It was a success and judging by the feedback it was very valuable and enjoyable for everyone in the room.

This time around we had a more corporate audience than last time, with a number of managers from City of London financial institutions, law firms and property companies.

The question 

When we started in the morning, Malcolm and I introduced ourselves and the day as per normal. Then when the turn came to the attendees to introduce themselves, I asked them all this question: How Can Personal Branding Serve You?

What I wanted to drill down to was the real purpose for everyone to think about their personal brand. It's all well and good to work on it but I say it's vital to define exactly what the end result will be. What is the purpose of all of this for you, in other words. As you can guess, this wasn't entirely straightforward for everyone but we helped each other to get to each person's main objective.

Personal branding for corporate employees

Corporate citizens tended to want to achieve career boosting effects such as gaining more gravitas internally (with colleagues) and externally (with customers). Having worked in large and small companies myself, I know the importance of office culture in big organisations and of market reputation for smaller ones. Not to mention office politics of course.

The Nordic Career Forum is taking place on the 15th of March this year and the focus is on personal branding. I am a speaker together with Mandy Lehto, Martin Falch, Per Wimmer and the guys from Wildfire. My talk will be on social media and how you can use it to manage your brand. Here's the official description of the event:

The Nordic Career Forum is an annual career fair organised for the 4th time by the four Nordic Chambers of Commerce in London [that includes Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark]. The event is primarily targeting young professionals and people who are looking to build their own personal brand.

The event will give corporate members and associates of the organising chambers a unique opportunity to gain understanding of, and access to a highly regarded work force from the Nordic countries and the UK.

The topic of the Nordic Career Forum 2012 will be “Discover and Build Your Personal Brand” with the aim of creating an understanding for what a personal brand is, and how each individual can benefit from it. By arranging a forum for professionals and companies to meet, the Nordic Chambers aim at providing an opportunity for dialog and a platform for networking. 

Hope to see you on the 15th! And if you're still not convinced, here's an ad that was run in the London daily City AM today.

In my branding workshops I sometimes get asked what a good personal brand statement  looks like. The truth is that we are of course unique and only you will ultimately know what is 'good'. Yes we can get inspiration from others and even steal a word or two, but your statement is only effective when you are comfortable with it - and your target audience understands it. I have compiled a few example statements just to get you going a bit and here goes:

Last year was a very successful year in terms of my own brand and the brands that I represent. Because I have got to a stage where the brands are known (at least to my target audience), I will shake things up a bit and change how I go about the online marketing. This includes how my blogs will run in the next 12 months.

jorgensundberg.net (that would be this blog!)

Last year, I put a lot of effort into writing useful and practical blog posts about personal branding, social media, LinkedIn and some other stuff. This paid off and I had just shy of 100,000 pageviews on this blog from Jan 2011 - Dec 2011. This blog has some 1,700 subscribers and gets a fair bit of commenters.

In terms of content for this year I will be shifting away from just social media and branding topics and write go a bit more genreal. Hang on you say, no more social media and branding content coming our way? Yes there will be, but not exclusively. Instead I will use this blog to publish more personal content, the things that I would like to read and the things that really interest me. I realise that from a marketing perspective this might just alienate some of the readers here. I hope some will find the new content of interest, and other people will find the blog through search and social media and hopefully engage with me.

After a lovely two week vacation to Sri Lanka, I am now accustomed to smiling at people completely at random. Sri Lanka is a very smile-friendly place (even the monkeys smile there as per above!) and I think it has something to do with Buddhism being the predominant religion there, very much like Thailand is also a land of smiles and Buddha.

So in Sri Lanka, whenever you speak to someone, see them on the street or just walk past them - you smile and the other person smiles back. It's a bit weird at first but when you get used to it, smiling becomes a natural state for you. And when smiling constantly you feel happier overall, it's a physiological thing researchers claim (I can only claim that it works for me).

Does smiling work in London?

As Dale Carnegie famously wrote in "How To Make Friends and Influence People" that everybody likes a smile. Everyone from Ron Gutman to the Dalai Lama talks about the power of the smile. But the big city isn't renowned for its smiling inhabitants. How does smiling work on the London tube in the morning? Well, some folks probably think I'm a yokel or still intoxicated from last night's drinks but most people actually either smile back or give me a nice little nod - very British that.