From Amsterdam to Tartu, from Tartu to Sao Paulo - by personal brand

In November 2009 I was invited at the JCI Chapter in Amsterdam to speak about personal branding. A couple of weeks earlier I had met one of the JCI members. This JCI member was introduced to me by a shared contact on Twitter. My approach to personal branding is, that it is about increasing your value and meaning to others. It is very much focused on you in relation to others. Personal branding is also about personal leaderschip and personal development. Your reward of working according the personal branding philosophy will be that you are asked for the things you want to be asked for. In this way you are able to continually improve your strengths and increase your value for others. This will bring you to the conclusion that personal branding connects closely to the JCI philosophy.

Out of enthousiasm I mentioned my performence at the Amsterdam Chapter on my Twitter page inviting my followers to join me there. Within 24 hours I received a response message from Estonian JCI member Liisi Toom: “Hei, could you send more information about the personal branding event in Amsterdam. JCI Estonia is also organizing 1 next year:)”. Liisi was not one of my followers but she accidentally did a Twitter search with my ‘Tweet’ as result. I sent Liisi my slides of the Asterdam performance and offered my contribution to the JCI Baltic conference in Tartu.

About 40 JCI members were in my ‘online personal branding’ training in Tartu. Afterwards they asked me to send them my sheets. Instead of sending the sheets I uploaded my presentation on Slideshare.net. The url of the presentation was sent to all the participants of the conference.

Look what happened next: six people have mentioned the presentation on their Facebook page, three people have Tweeted about it, seven people listed the presentation to their ‘favourites’ and five people ‘embedded’ the presentation in a weblog post. The result: 440 views in the first three weeks, connection invitations from several conference participants, connection invitations from JCI members in Germany and Belgium. And a request from a professor of the São Paulo University to show the presentation to her MD Marketing students. I responded positive to this request and also offered to provide a guest lecture at the São Paulo University…

Tom Scholte

Personal branding specialist