Your boss may fear it, your colleagues might mock it, everybody’s doing it.
Obviously as a freelance/self employed SEO this is a no-brainer. If however you work in an agency (or inhouse) there still seems to be a fear of personal brand building.
So can you, and should you be this notorious?
Are you notorious enough?
The Personal Brand Building Battle
The SEO industry is not unique in being invaded by celebrity, however it is different from some others in the value of becoming an ‘industry figure. There are many ways to build your own brand which I won’t go into here.
The question I want to address is should you do it, or should you work solidly on your agency/company brand.
Personally I think all SEO agencies fall into one of two categories (increasingly so as the industry grows):
1. Well Known Agency, Little Know Staff
Well known agency brand supports unknown/little known staff members
This agency uses it’s reputation to strengthen that of it’s staff members, passing the value downwards. The staff may build their reputation but only under the umbrella of the agency brand.
2. Well Known Agency, Well Known Staff
Well known agency brand supported by well known staff.
This agency has a strong reputation because of it’s staff; while it passes the reputation of the agency down to them, they also pass it back up. The ‘individual brands’ all contribute to the overall strength of the agency brand.
I believe proposition 2. is the stronger; in allowing your staff to build their own brands within the SEO community they not only train themselves for free (whilst indulging in their passion for SEO), but strengthen your agency proposition when you meet with clients.
I know there are worries from MDs and colleagues about dedication, freelance work or headhunting but this can only be a good thing; it means that as a notorious SEO staff member you will be fully appreciated!
Rand touched on this in his Whiteboard Friday post about differentiating services, but I’d be very interested to hear the thoughts of MDs, staff and everyone in between on this subject.
Have at you!
As you know Stu we have discussed this, I am all for well known staff but prefer it if they build their ‘notoriety’ (definately the most appropriate term in your case
from within the agency. i.e. blogging on the Bloom site, attending networking events as a member of Bloom first, notorious individual second.
What we sell are our people and in the same way a business wants to promote its product, our people are our product and so naturally we should promote them and allow them to self promote. However, an agency is greater than the sum of its parts and individual staff members need to make sure they remember they are part of a team and promoting the common cuase comes first. To forget this is to risk being seen as arrogant and self serving, and resentment builds from other less extrovert team members which ultimately risks undermining the team spirit that is so important in an agency.
it isnt just bosses that want to make sure self promotion benefits the agency first and foremost, it is just as important to peers!
I thought you’d like that
It’s true that common goals are key – if you end up with people constantly trying to further purely their own ends then you don’t have a team to begin with. When everyone is united by their love of SEO (or design, or development) however, it can only be a good thing to have a mix of both.
At the end of the day, getting new business is the end goal. If you are writing or talking about work and the theories behind it, it is challenging to not reference whom you are working for. If you are writing about SEO, design or dev you will need to reference working examples (aka your place of employment), which will hopefully result in new sales for your services via your place of employment.
When I used to work for a company, I worked on my personal brand but would still reference Acro Media and use their link on my social media profiles. Having their link on my profiles drove traffic to their site.
The thing is, now that I have my own work-in-progress site, I would probably use that as my link instead of Acro’s if I still worked for them. They paid me as an internet marketer, but they didn’t provide me with hourly tasks to promote them via social media (although I suggested it time and again).
Ultimately it is something that should be discussed at the beginning of the working relationship. If a employer would like to pay an employee to promote themselves via their company and social media then they should do so. If an employee offers their services this way and they are turned down, than there should be nothing stopping the employee from continuing their self promotion (on their own time of course).
Good point Steph!
The issue of whether you should or should not promote your company/agency and who ‘owns’ your content/connections is becoming a big one, there are a couple of interesting posts on this subject:
Bruce Clay – Who Owns What on the Web?
Duct Tape Marketing on Social Media Non-Complete
Ultimately (one would hope) your company will come to realise the value of any work you’ve done off your own bat and recognise that networking online is just as valuable as offline.