That Fine Line between being Lame and building your own Brand Name- an Interaction with Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni

 

So, 3^rd week of Business communication and we were addressed by Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni, a NITIE aluminous and the founder of Darwin Travel Tech.  I am not going to go through the personal accomplishments of Mr, Kulkarni but rather discuss the details of the message he conveyed based on his experience after spending years in consultancy and corporate sector.

 

So, his entire speech/message revolves around 2 basic themes

•         The importance of effective communication in the current Business world.
•         The value of building your own “Personal Brand” (think Narendra Modi, Oprah Winfrey, etc)

 

 

Importance of Effective Communication

 

The crux of his speech revolves around the so-called Pyramid principle of communication. He laid particular stress on “Say less, Mean More” rule, that is, to put maximum content in a message in as few words as possible. 

The pyramid principle shown in the above diagram gives a hierarchical structure on how to organize one’s thoughts and communicate. This follows further 2 rules of effective communication

 

IDFL:  Idea, data, facts, logic- here the main idea is presented first, followed by evidence in support of the idea in the form of data, logic, and facts.

 

MECE: Mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive rule- we should present our idea in such a way that it covers all possible scenarios (mutually exclusive and exhaustive) and must avoid recurrence of the same fact or redundancy of same set of information. He further laid stress that for delivering the right message one must know his/her objective, the target audience and the context in which the message will be delivered.

 

 

Using the above 3 rules he urged the audience to work on their communication skills and build a solid foundation upon which a successful career can be built upon

 

 

Building Personal Brand

 

A personal brand is a perception that one builds for himself which accentuates the aura surrounding him/her. It can be of many forms

1.   Perception of effectiveness or reliability about a person without even meeting him/her personally.
2.     A deemed quality or strength about a person, ex skills, expertise, managerial capacity without actual proof.
3.       A projected Unique Selling Proposition about him/her which gives an edge over the competitors
4. .       A kind of familiarity, likeability, fondness about the person in people who might have never met him

 

Many celebrities have an entire PR team to build a personal brand and better public perception. Some have such a personal brand that their endorsement enhances the brand value of a product/place. Ex. Amitabh Bachchan was roped in by Cadbury to rebuild their image.

                               You reap what you sow- Some popular personal Brand names in India

 

According to Mr. Kulkarni, we can build our own personal brand by extensively utilizing the digital media space in our own favor, he suggested the following ways:

 

• Write a blog, on relevant topics, to get readers a peek into the thought process and communication skills of the person.
•  Extensively use social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram to increase reach and propagate your own persona.
• Make videos, vlogs, podcasts on YouTube.

 

Thus by building your personal brand a user is building a strong foundation towards success in the digitized corporate world. His reputation precedes him and that increases his chances of success in the corporate/business world.

 

 

Author’s Note: A word of caution

 

There is this thin line between trying to promote yourself by building a personal brand and lampooning yourself on a social platform. Some people while trying to be cool or following the latest fad tend to overdo things and come out as needy, lame, and insecure. All they could manage is some paltry 100 followers for 100+ videos and some meager, generic one-word comments. This stint at building a name might very well backfire and hence treading with caution is of paramount importance while exploring any such daredevilry. 

So, I will try to add some guidelines towards building this “Personal Brand” thing over social media platforms:

 

•       Try to play to your strength, do not try your hands at something you are not good at. That looks forced, unnatural, and works against you.
•      Don’t do something just because everyone else is doing it. You want to build your own “Unique” selling proposition, not a GSP (Generic selling proposition).
•      Make/write/build what you want to do based upon a path you want to walk on and not under any person’s influence. Not because your boss or father told you so. Write what you want to write, make a video on something you want to make a video on.
•     Writing/Video making is not for everyone, there are tonnes of success stories of people who have succeeded without using social media and you can do that too.
•      Be more expressive and use better communication skills in your blogs. Writing blogs doesn’t improvise your communication skills it is the other way round.
•      Share useful content, stop sharing futile and pointless stuff, that gets you nowhere. No one is interested in what you are doing in your college or at your home, structure your content around something people want to see/read, or what adds value to the readers.

Follow these and you will be good to go. Always remember social media platforms are a good slave but a bad master, you have to control your social media presence and not be controlled by it.

 

That’s all for today Folks.

Hope you all make a good personal brand.

May the force be with you…….