Talking about personal branding and content curation means going beyond the patterns that we often set ourselves and follow to gain visibility. The basic idea is this: to get noticed you have to communicate, you have to be there in the best possible way. And personal branding becomes an obligation for those who work online.
This is true to the extent that you can get better results in terms of turnover thanks to the spread of your name. But above all – and this is where the main hub is hidden – when your figure is associated with virtuous values. Your presence must be linked to quality and efficiency.
You don’t just have to communicate, you have to do it well and continuously. Not just today or tomorrow, you don’t just have to make a good shot – you have to be consistent in producing useful signals to influence your audience. Often the basic idea is to work on the production of content, which can happen in a different way. For example on the blog which is the main tool of the inbound marketing universe, but also with videos or podcasts.
What is personal branding: a definition
The concept of personal branding has been used and abused. We tend to put everything under this umbrella term a little, even if a key passage in Seth Godin’s methodology can be recognized as the leitmotif of this concept. I’m talking about positioning in the mind by doing something useful and meaningful, without asking for something in return. And without being paid.
You can listen to your customers, give a meaningful ebook, carry out a timely and precise customer care satisfaction campaign. The definition of personal branding is quite obvious: bring out what makes you unique and differentiate yourself from competitors by highlighting your strengths and communicating your skills in order to make you choose. But how does all this happen?
Permission marketing can be one way
The concept, forged by Seth Godin, concerns precisely the possibility of intercepting the user trying to understand what he wants and offering something useful to achieve the goal. Unlike the “old way” of promoting, there are no interruptions here, just good rules for cultivating an interested audience that can turn into customers. It is obvious to think that in this balance personal branding feeds itself automatically thanks to the creation of useful content.
But perhaps you are shifting the focus to something different, losing sight of what matters. The relationship between personal branding and content curation is not just about the pace of publication, but how useful you can be to people with what you do every day. We deepen the topic?
Personal branding and content curation
The idea is not to launch something new every day. It can be an interesting solution and a goal to pursue. Also because this is the basis of content marketing. There has always been great attention to those who create and those who give birth to new ideas. It’s fascinating, I know.
On the other hand, there are a number of limits imposed by the concept of the network itself, by the web as we know it today. Without forgetting the practical obstacles related to one’s daily activity. I’ll give you some concrete examples starting from questions you asked yourself during your career:
- Has this content already been created and addressed by someone?
- Do I have the time to always create something new and interesting?
- How can I feed my channels so that I am always useful and on the piece?
- Do people need new versions of what they find?
As you can see, the doubts are many. If you want to improve your personal branding, publishing is not enough, or at least this is not always the right key. Sometimes someone has already posted an exhaustive post on the web, and perhaps the answer to customer questions is not about the need to go online.
It’s not enough to churn out a new post. Sometimes this is not needed but the possibility of enclosing what has already been done in a place gives more satisfaction. Here is the novelty that I propose to you: giving visibility to others to be useful to your audience, can this be the way to follow? Yes, if you can find the right technique.
How to do content curation seriously
This is the real problem in my opinion. The relationship between personal branding and content curation is overshadowed because there is a lack of good culture on this issue. And content curation is limited to being a simple search and share posts that are more or less interesting for your audience. A job, the latter, which has its dignity but which needs much more to reach a higher passage.
A passage that concerns the care of the contents. As you can see from this graphic, there is a mass that creates various versions of the same theme. These different contents are often not useful to your recipient. The brand (i.e. you) takes care of filtering these updates through a process that goes from contextualization to updating.
Without forgetting the enrichment which is one of the central phases, also guaranteed by the different platforms that you can use to complete this work. Thanks to these realities (such as Scoop.it, Pinterest, ZEEF and more) you can publish themed collections and propose them to an audience interested in the work done. Here is the keystone of the relationship between content curation and brand.
What’s your point of view?
Personal branding and content curation: as you can see, the relationship is profound. You have to communicate perseverance, consistency and competence to your potential customers (who are in the target audience) but the best way is not always to create content. Often you need to be able to:
- Locate.
- To collect.
- To organize.
- Enrich.
- Republish.