Protecting Your Online Story—Building, Protecting, and Healing Your Personal Brand Online
Protecting Your Online Story—Building, Protecting, and Healing Your Personal Brand Online
Your story is as much of your identity as your profile picture, your business storefront, your webpage, etc. Anything and everything that happens to and in your story is a reflection of you and your brand, which is why learning how to build, protect, and heal your personal brand online is a must-do. At some point, you will likely do all of these things as you strive to achieve success and to maintain a connection with your audience.
Building Your Online Story
The axiom that you never get a second chance to make a first impression exists for a reason—because it’s true. The first impression people get of you heavily informs their perception (possibly forever) of your online brand identity, which means when you are building your personal brand online, you need to consider your audience’s reception. How do you go about this?
First, know who you are. Understand that you cannot and will not be for everyone. You don’t exist to please every person. Even brands that seemingly attract the majority of people (such as Wal-Mart) have a clear target audience. Wal-Mart appeals to hard-working, budget-conscious shoppers. While audiences who do not fit this category might also shop at Wal-Mart, they aren’t going to be as loyal nor as consistent as those who Wal-Mart has targeted since its inception.
While you don’t have to do what one brazenly bawdy online brand does, which is send a welcome e-mail that mocks un-subscriber comments in a clear and open “we may not be for you” storytelling approach, it’s not strictly necessary to be that direct (but that is their brand identity, so it does work…for them).
So, though there’s no need for you to scream from the homepage who you are / are not for, in building your brand story, you do need to know:
· Who you are—what do you do? What makes you unique? Use a mind map or storyboard to flesh this out. You want to have a clearly-defined sense of your brand, which will enable you to tell the stories that will attract your target audience.
· How you want to be perceived—what do you want your audience to see you as their hero of? What are you doing for them that no one else can? Even if it’s making the city’s most authentic French crepes and that’s it, that is a worthy focus / goal. You don’t want to be seen as too much. For example, to its shoppers, Wal-Mart is the place its loyal audience knows they can get a good price on a reliable product (or products ranging from baby carrots to fabric softener to a new Buick).
· Who you want to work with—what resources does your audience need? What capabilities does your audience need to \ work with you? Sketch out your perfect audience member (kind of like a soul mate) and create a detailed profile. Then, target that person like you want to marry them.
Protecting Your Online Story
Once you’ve established your identity and built a killer online brand story, you have to protect it with virtual vigilance. Specifically, you need to protect your presence, your perception, and your brand reputation to your audience (and to others) because in the vast ocean that is the world wide web, there are predators aplenty and you look delicious.
· Protecting your presence: Just telling your story once isn’t enough. You need to constantly contribute content to remain present and to keep your story unfolding (a great way to do that is with a content calendar). Consider whatever show you’re marathoning on Netflix. You keep watching the next episode because the story evolves. Your presence online needs to be a persistent one with a consistently evolving narrative.
· Protecting your brand reputation: One great thing about the web is that your audience gets to voice their opinions through reviews, questions, comments, etc. This is great until you get negative feedback (and it will happen, deserved or not). How you handle these situations impacts your audience’s perception of your brand, so do so professionally, diplomatically, and in a voice that’s true to your brand story / persona. This will show that you are exactly who you say you are (so you are protecting the fundamental integrity of your identity and your story) while also showing you as a reasonable, responsible, and reliable entity to work with.
One thing you don’t want to do when protecting your online story is to get defensive. Your best protection for your online story is to be proactive. Consistently produce great content (use our free content calendar) and employ outreach methods that (1) reach your target audience and (2) are manageable.
Healing Your Online Story
Lastly, despite all of your brilliant planning and hard work, there may come a time where your online story has suffered a blow. If the Coronavirus and the multiple business closures have taught us nothing else, it’s that life is unpredictable, and when you find yourself at its mercy, your brand suffers along with you.
Here are a few ways your online story might take hits:
· You get sick or injured and cannot maintain your usual narrative flow / online / social media presence.
· You experience a major shift in your family (i.e., death or birth) that takes up a substantial amount of time.
· Your super-reliable social media manager quits.
· A disgruntled employee starts to dish dirt (the truth of which is immaterial).
· You change gears for the focus of your brand (consider that Tiffany’s (you know, blue box, diamonds galore, Audrey Hepburn Tiffany’s) once started as a stationary store, so you’ll agree a little change can do some good, but transformation definitely involves some rebranding and subsequent recovery).
These are just a few things that affect your online brand story that you often have no control over. How do you heal?
Heal your online story by telling the truth. Did that death in the family force you to take your business offline for a year? Send an e-mail to your customers and tell the truth. Be vulnerable. Share your story in a way that reveals your humanity. You’re not apologizing. You’re not groveling. You’re just telling them what happened and where you were and why their emails weren’t answered or their services weren’t provided or were canceled all together.
You may have lost customers, but to some, your healing journey endear you to them. As you dust off and start telling your constantly ongoing and evolving story, you’ll regrow some of your old audience and building a new audience while healing your online story.
Building, protecting, and healing your online story are truly ongoing activities. We don’t operate in vacuums where nothing changes, which means our stories are in a constant state of flux. We are always building or re-building, protecting through proactive engagement, or healing through vulnerable truth-telling, and that is actually a wonderful thing.
No matter where you are in telling your brand story—building, protecting, or healing, The Storyteller Agency can help you ensure you are accomplishing your goals through assessment, evaluation, planning, and even content creation…whatever you need. Click here to contact us and to find out more about what we can do for you and your online brand story.
Amy Delcambre
Amy is a creative nonfiction writer and editor with over a decade of professional writing and editing experience in technical writing, content marketing, travel writing, memoir and creative nonfiction essay writing, and contemporary fiction. She has worked for multiple companies including The Storyteller Agency, Vertical Measures, Compass Media, and Madden Media to name a few. Amy’s writing has been published on countless websites and in various collections.
Amy serves as co-president for the Mobile Writers Guild and as a member-at-large for the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA). Amy is also a member of the Authors Guild, the ACES: The Society for Editing, and the Alabama Writers’ Conclave. In addition to her writing activities Amy is a part-time professor of English for the University of South Alabama and for the University of Phoenix Online. She routinely teaches courses in literature, composition, writing for social media, fiction writing, and creative nonfiction. Amy holds a Master’s in creative writing from the University of South Alabama and in publishing from George Washington University.
Amy is a work-at-home widowed mom of three young daughters and one angel son. Much of Amy’s writing revolves around the chaos, confusion, and crocodile tears of navigating work and child-rearing as a solo act; however, Amy remains eternally optimistic about life and the beauty of this world as she processes her grief and helps her daughters navigate theirs.
When she isn’t writing, Amy is an avid outdoor fitness enthusiast. She loves running, biking, swimming, and kayaking and engages in at least one of those activities every day. Amy is also a passionate home cook and culinary gardener. Like most writers, Amy is a reader who gets her literary fix on the fly through audiobooks, which she listens to while cooking, cleaning, exercising, folding endless piles of laundry...whatever it takes. Like most work-at-home moms, Amy is trying to strike the right balance between slowing down and taking it easy, and “having it all”. The results are entertaining if nothing else.
Read more of Amy’s writing at:
Her personal website, www.amydelcambre.ink
Her website dedicated to processing losing her son: www.letterstojude.com
Her editing website, www.creativeeditingservices.com
Follow Amy on Facebook @amysdwriter and @creativeeditingservices and @travelingwithstories.
Follow Amy on Instagram @amy.s.d_writer and @travelingwithstories and @creativeeditingservices
