Book Review: Introduction To Personal Branding - Mel Carson

Over the last few months, I’ve also been reading a number of branding-related books. One that caught my eye was Introduction To Personal Branding: Ten Steps Toward A New Professional You by Mel Carson.

Part of the reason I looked into it was that Mel was an evangelist at Microsoft and as most would know, I spend a lot of time dealing with Microsoft in various ways.

It was also interesting as it’s a low cost book that Mel has published using CreateSpace and I’d often wondered about using that so I thought I’d check the outcome of that as well. Finally, it’s a short book. Listening to it on Audible would probably only take an hour or two.

Mel defines personal branding as the practice of defining a professional purpose, and then being able to explain that to a target audience through digital media and social channels. He also talks about how having the profile in place is important if you want to get the most out of in-person events like conferences.

I did like the way he focused on defining how you see your role, and then honing right in on making sure that all your touch-points really support that. He’s keen to see everything else gone. That one’s a touchy subject as I often see people complaining that a well-known figure in one area, is posting comments about another area (eg: politics). The defence to that is normally “that I’m a real person and a whole person”.

While much of the content that he covers would be familiar to anyone who’s been building a brand already, there are always good solid and timely reminders, many of which I’ve taken to heart myself.

If you are just starting out with building your personal brand, you could do worse than spending an hour or two hearing what Mel has to offer.

Greg’s rating: 7 out of 10

2018-08-17