With the huge amount of talk about building your personal brand throughout the blogosphere (see Brogan and Schwabel, among others), the question that’s popped into my mind is:

How do you measure the value of your personal brand?

In a stock market scenario, you can multiply number of shares outstanding by the value of share to get market cap.

But a personal brand?

I’m sure there’s someone who has looked at such metrics as:

• Extent of your network
  (e.g. Number of LinkedIn contacts + Twitter followers + Facebook friends, etc.,)
  
• Ability to start a conversation
  (number of blog comments, facebook status update comments,  or the subscriber conversion ratio)
  
• Growth of your network
  (number of additions/followers, etc. per week/month)

All and any of these are valid, but here are some that I look at.

1. How often does someone say to you “There’s someone you should meet.”
   As Jeff Pulver says, an introduction is an endorsement, so it’s kind of like a Net Promoter Score (NPS) for your brand.
   
2. How often do you forge relationships with people who have no mutual friends with you?
   This is how you break into new networks and extend your brand reach farther.
   
3. What is your Time-to-pass-along rate?
   How quickly do your new network connections (see #1), then turn around and say “there’s someone you should meet"?”

Truthfully, these are probably more of a KPI than a measurement of brand value.

How do you know if your personal brand is increasing in value?

 

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