BookYol

Concept

Personal Brand

A personal brand is the reputation the right people hold about your work: what colleagues, clients and employers say about you when you are not present, and what they find when they search your name.

A personal brand is not a logo, a slogan or a large following. It is the impression your work leaves, and it exists whether you shape it or not: anyone who has worked with you, or searched for you before a meeting, already holds one. The only choice is whether it is accurate and specific. Mark W. Schaefer builds his book Known on that choice. His argument is that being known in a field, once reserved for people with a publisher, a broadcaster or a large company behind them, is now a professional asset that anyone with a skill and the patience to share it can build. He frames it as a sequence: an interest you can sustain for years, a space where you can be heard, a steady way of publishing, and finally an audience that acts. The aim is not fame. It is that when a hiring manager, a client or a conference organiser needs someone for one particular thing, your name comes to mind and what they find confirms it. That is also why vanity numbers miss the point: a few hundred of the right people outweigh thousands of passing followers.

A real-life example

Kerem, a quality engineer at an automotive supplier in Kocaeli, was shortlisted for a plant manager role and wondered what the panel would find. He searched his own name: an empty LinkedIn profile, a forum question from university and a namesake's wedding photos. Nothing showed the supplier audit method he had built and taught to three teams. That evening he wrote a short post explaining the method, with one anonymised before-and-after result, and pinned it to the top of his profile.

How to use it

  1. 1Search your name in a private browser window and note what a stranger would conclude in thirty seconds.
  2. 2Ask three people you have worked with what they would recommend you for; the overlap in their answers is your current brand.
  3. 3Write one sentence about what you want to be known for, and publish one piece of work that proves it.