Tweet
Here's example #1 of 'What Not To Do' to your personal brand.
Maybe I am feeling ornery, but there have been a few more examples that have come up recently.
I attended a talk by a highly accomplished executive who has run and sold a few companies.
It was a good presentation and I learned a lot.
Afterwards, I spent some time crafting a specific email designed to further the conversation with him.
In return, I got an obvious cut-and-paste email that went directly to one point. Buy my Stuff!
That was it.
No acknowledgement of my individual email.
Over the next 2 weeks, I've received two more "buy my DVD!" emails and one that said "here's my blog post on topic xxx, please Digg this!"
Now, I don't know if this is a 'permission mis-step," but I do know how it made me feel.
Like I don't want anything to do with this guy.
He's a hard-core networker (or so he claims) only to pump up his numbers.
It wasn't genuine.
It wasn't authentic.
It wasn't personal.
Yes, people are busy.
You can be brief.
You can say "not now" or "not ever" but if you make your customers (and as network connections, we're all customers of each other), feel like they are just numbers in your personal database, your brand equity will suffer.
Comments
Josef Katz said on 10.19.2008 at 9:46 PM
I know that feeling it is not a good one. Big talkers and no real action to what they talked about. They forget all about the relationship part of the sales equation.
Benjamin E. said on 10.20.2008 at 4:26 AM
An insight I have recently been working on making the members of the board of an organization/community I am strongly involved in on campus realize. Especially for one that already has a reputation among those not involved of being scary, and one that works hard to draw in new members, it's pretty key to do when you get e-mails from new people or requests from marginally involved people who might be interested in more involvement. It still applies, whether you're selling companies or books or a community.