Personal Branding....

Branding a product or company is important but what about personal branding. During my experience I have observed that to succssed in IT company you not need to have a great technological knowledge but a ability to position your self.

Branding is about answering 3 Question - "Who am I?" "Why buy me?" "Why not buy someone else?"

The first question is the easy one - who am I? this is where you studied, your qualifications, your background etc. Why buy me? is a little harder and is about why you should be hired - perhaps your track-record. But the third one - "why you should buy me not someone else" is real differentiation. this is where your blogs, awards, testimonials etc come into play

The easiest marketing is when you can compare features and test the stuff before you buy. that is the case with products. the mid-level difficulty is when you can't experience before you buy, but you can definitely compare your experience after you have consumed the product. but in the case of IT services, you often can't try it before you buy, and even after you have consumed the service there are many variables which could have influenced your experience so you can;t be sure you made the right choice

So services marketing relies more on experience and trust rather than products which rely often on features comparison in addition to the experience.

So what are the Activities that can help in personal branding or enhancing a personal brand. Few things I can think of are - start a blog, post on tech/business blogs, become an active member of your college alumni association, sign up on twitter, write a white paper and get it published. you may also be active in social causes, community building ( each corporate have this, so be a part of it. In Wipro technologies we have a Wipro care for example)