Elevator Speeches and InstaBranding

We are all familiar with the “elevator speech,” those carefully crafted sentences that organically relay important messages about our business. Sometimes we work so hard to craft them, we forget about the main message. Ourselves. Our audience is going to pay much more attention to our personal brand than the elevator speech, no matter how eloquent. Here are four simple, but often overlooked elements of personal branding that will make your elevator speech resonate.

1. How do you look? Appropriateness is the obvious guideline here. Make sure you have on the right clothes and are appropriately groomed for the occasion. Otherwise, the dissonance in your brand will kill your message.

2. How do you smell? I think that the best place to be is in the center of the spectrum, odorless. If you stink, that’s a no-duh turn off. If you are drenched in cologne, you might impress some people, but you run the risk of offending others. Why take the chance?

3. Practice the speech so that it’s completely you. Change the words to fit your personality. Actors do it all the time. The last thing you want to do is recite.

4. Engage your listeners. Don’t preach. Share. If your speech sounds too much like a commercial, fix it to sound like more like you are sharing information. Use stories or be like a journalist and get put information in a quote. (”I have a customer who wants us to train her husband in being on time…”)

Ultimately, you are the message. You are being instabranded no matter what. Do your best to make sure that your audience is building the right kind of mind space about your personal brand.

Posted by Harry Chittenden

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