How the device in your hand can be used to build your personal brand.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is Jim James, and this is the podcast for you if you've got value locked up in your organization, just trying to find some low-cost and effective ways to distribute that information. I wanted to talk today about the device in your hand being really the way that you can build your personal brand. I say every conversation with a businesswoman An entrepreneur who works in property, and she said that public relations had just seemed altogether too difficult. She tried a few courses and tried buying, for example, a course on Facebook advertising, but it really was all just getting too much and really wasn't getting her noticed. So I wanted to share on this episode just how an individual, an entrepreneur, can use the device in their hand to. To build their own personal brand. And I'm going to do that just by talking you through the content workflow and some of the apps that you can use. And almost all of these are free apps, and you can upgrade them if you like, but most of them have got a free offer. So first of all, I'd just like to think about your story. And a large part of the work that all of us entrepreneurs do really every day is to be pursuing a vision of what we thought we could do, how we felt we could serve our customers and our community with our business. So I'd like to start there really with the vision that we've all got for the business and the audience groups that we've got, what we call the avatars. Let's just keep it simple. Let's just call it the people that we want to talk to. So we've got obviously on our phone the contacts that are probably the most important people to us, right? Our customers, our partners, our suppliers, and our teams. So the phone already has the database. That's assuming you've been entering your contacts in there. But even if you use WhatsApp or WeChat or any of the— or Yahoo Messenger or Facebook Messenger, you actually already have your community and you carry them around with you. Now, if we next look at the content creation part, content creation on a mobile phone is really simple. With the mobile phone these days, of course, we've all got the camera front and back, but we've also got voice memo recording, and we've got all the apps, for example, like taking notes. And if you use an iPad and the new software for the Scribble that you can use with the iPad Pencil, You can actually take notes in handwriting as well. But also the iOS apps on the App Store, and I imagine they're the same on the Google Play, have got a vast number of apps all to do with, with making your content more engaging. And we, we know this because the kids use it. Everything from JibJab to make little memes I've got one called PhotoFunia, which enables me to put a picture into a building as a backdrop and also to put it within, for example, an artist's easel. So there are a number of tools like this that will work with your static content or your video content as well. Okay, now I could put a list of a couple of these in the and show notes. There's also, for example, VideoAsk, which enables you to film a video on your mobile phone and send it to a person that's in your address book. And you can do that if you want to ask them a question, for example, did you get my proposal? So the mobile phone has got these tools that can help us to create content, which could be a photograph that we, if you like, turbocharge by using JibJab or Canva, which also runs on the mobile phone, or we can use it to create extra video content. We can also use it to create audio. So we can create audio using the voice memo, or you can use a platform like Rev or Otter. All of these, basically, you just download to your phone And there you go. You can record a piece of audio which you could then, for example, send to someone as an audio file, or you could upload that to your Otter. In fact, if you use otter.ai, you can speak into the phone and it'll automatically transcribe that for you and enable you to then email that to somebody. You can also use a tool called loom.com. Loom has a download for your phone, and Loom enables you to film whatever is on your phone screen. It also works on the desktop, works on the tablet, and as you know already, in fact, in the iOS on Apple, you have a built-in screen recorder. The problem with the Apple one is that you record something to your screen You have to upload that to your Apple Photos or iCloud, and it's just not as easy to share. With Loom, you get a clickable link that you can share, and you can also trim the video very easily, and you can leave notes underneath the video. So we use that a lot for sharing, for example, with clients an example of this is what we're doing for them on WeChat in China, but the people in the UK— so I can film that using my mobile phone And I can send that to the client. So I've got my photographs, I've got my text, I've got my audio, and I've got my video. All of them can be created and modified and shared from the mobile phone. So then if we want to, we can look at how we could share these things just using the mobile phone. And there are a number of ones that you could use. If you are hosting an event, for example, you could use the Meetup or the Eventbrite apps, and you can upload the content that you've taken or made on your phone, the photographs and the text, and just upload it through their app and create an event. Or you could use a platform like Buffer. Where you can connect your social media platforms— your Facebook and your LinkedIn, your Instagram, your Twitter, your Pinterest. You can link all of those directly from your mobile phone app, for example Buffer. And once you've uploaded the picture that you took and made in JibJab, or the Loom video that you made, or the text file that you made you can just use, for example, Buffer to distribute automatically to all of those platforms. I use one called Zoho Social, which is very good, and there's a free app for that. But also there is Hootsuite, which is very powerful. There's Socialbakers. There's a large number of these that now have apps that sit on your phone. When you create the content, you can distribute the content around the world, actually, just from your phone. So I did one today, for example, where I took my 13-year-old daughter and her friends go-karting, and I filmed a little section of them doing a Mexican wave, and I was able then to trim that and upload that to my LinkedIn just from the race circuit, and I use that as a slice of life just to show that one of my priorities is to spend time with my family and to make sure that they understand how much they mean to me. And I'm still in touch with the people that I'm working with, but I'm not always in the office. So we've got content then that can come from our phone as a creation device. And it's so easy now to take photographs with the front or the back camera, to record text, to record audio, or to sing, and to convert that audio into text and to share it all directly using your 4G or your Wi-Fi never even having to do a long-form edit. Now, for entrepreneurs, this is really a bonus, really a great boon, because a lot of the content now, as we've discussed, doesn't last for that long. So we've seen a Twitter might only last for about 90 minutes, Facebook post about 2 hours depending on your frequency. So Actually, the lifespan of the content we create is so short that what we have to start thinking about is continuous content creation. The only way to do that is to create content on the move, and that means when you're on the move. So talking with this very successful female entrepreneur, she's, you know, she goes on site, for example, to a construction site where she's working and building out properties. And she said she kind of wanted to share that she's there because she has investors and would like to show them progress, but certain members of her team were more cautious. And I said, I think it's a great idea to share that content from the site, but to be clear that there will be some content that will be very formatted and, for example, might appear on your website with branding and logos and high performance and high production values. But now with the quality of the cameras and the audio on these phones, the quality of what we can create can be really just about as good using the phone. And for example, from my phone, I've connected it to the Vimeo video, and I can upload a video that I've taken using my handphone, maybe with a ring light in front of me, upload it to Vimeo, and it automatically then will appear across my social media channels. So it's all about linking these channels together using one of these aggregation apps like Buffer, like Zoho, like Hootsuite, and creating content. Now content can come across a number of different areas, and let's break those down a little bit. One of the areas can be your professional expertise, and this is the kind of serious, let me tell you about what I do for a living. Another dimension, though, to everybody is of course their human side, their personal side. So this is what I do when I'm not working. It could be me and myself, for example, writing. Could be a, uh, an example of me taking the dog for a walk, something personal, something that I'm doing that's an external interest that helps to build the personality of the person. And then another dimension is that person in a professional context that's not at work. For example, at a business networking function, a conference, a trade show, a seminar. How can we share that? And we can share that by, for example, recording our own Zoom participation and using that on a platform, for example, like Otter to get a transcript, or simply just taking the video And reposting it to our YouTube account. And then the other dimension is you as a family or a person with or without a family, big or small. We all have families somewhere. What are we like as family members? And certainly in Asia, being a member of a family is extremely important. So can you introduce— do you want to introduce any members of your family, your spouse, your children, your parents? To show context, because ultimately people do business with people that they trust. And they may like what you say professionally, they may resonate with what you're doing with your free time, they may also, for example, like triathlons or, or travel or reading or cooking. But the extra dimension then is who you are within the broader family and social cultural context. So we can post these 3 different areas of our lives at different times and using the different channels. So I noticed, for example, on LinkedIn recently, a lot of personal comments are getting a lot of traction. I posted, for example, about taking my children go-karting on my LinkedIn account. I didn't put on the Facebook because I'm not really trying to promote and share about my children, and I think that what I'm trying to do here is to build part of this view that I have a balanced work life. And so what I'm trying to do is to look at the different parts of my content. Some is personal, some is professional, and some is me as a personality as a member of my family and my social life. Now, my social life I don't share on LinkedIn. For example, if I'm going out with friends or going on vacation, I don't share those activities on my LinkedIn. I'd share that, for example, on my Facebook or on my Instagram or my Pinterest. And if I was looking at doing something which is, for example, a piece of business with other people, I might share that through my LinkedIn and through my professional Twitter. And when I find things that I think are interesting— thought leadership pieces, for example, maybe determining something that may be an industry trend— that could be an article. I could put that on my Twitter. So different platforms fulfill different functions, but using the mobile phone over the 12-18 hours that we are awake, we can actually show, if you like, our everyday journey as the owner of a business or the person building a brand. And we can share that with the people that are also spending their days out working. And what we're looking for, of course, are the intersections. We're looking for the times when someone else may find what we're doing of interest, and ultimately they want to have a collaboration of some kind. They may want to become a customer, they may want to become a partner, they may want to become a member of staff. So I found now that by posting, for example, on my LinkedIn from my phone more frequently and with different kinds of content, it jolts the memory of people who see me sometimes through their feed because they may have a related interest. But if I was only talking about my own work all the time, it would be too dull and they wouldn't get in touch. So this episode of Speak PR is really for all those people that are thinking, how can I build a personal brand without necessarily sitting down and writing press releases? The answer is it's possible. For most companies, the mainstream media is not interested because we're not big enough. So our own channels, our owned media channels are the ways that we need to communicate. And the hero device for us all is the phone, is the device in your hand that you can use to build your brand. So I think I'll dig into this in more detail because I was talking to this entrepreneur and she was saying that she found some of the content of Speak PR too academic and too theoretical. And what she'd really like to know is, you know, how to share her story. So I want to come down into the depths and really into the trenches there and talk about how you can do that. I'll put in the notes some of these apps that I've mentioned. These have all got free offers, and you can upgrade depending on, for example, how much storage you want to use or how frequently or whether you want to use some of the value-added features. But so I leave you with this idea really that your journey, your everyday life as an entrepreneur is dedicated to providing service to others. You could share what you do on that journey with integrity and with honesty and also with a little bit of humor. And then you might be surprised at who else wants to come with you on that journey because ultimately people want to be part of journeys that they feel are in alignment with their own journeys or at some intersection with where they want to solve their own problems. And the device in your hand is a great way to build your brand because it's always on and it's an amazing communication platform, but it already has within it the connections that matter to you. So that part of the work is already done. So with that, I'm going to sign off and wish you the best of health, a profitable business, but also that you have fun With your brand. Have fun communicating what you do and share and benefit from what is a wonderful device and really why being an entrepreneur now means that you can be out with your family and still even just a little bit sneakily doing a little bit of work and getting away with it. All right. Have a great day.