White Paper Pundit

According to Wikipedia, “Personal Branding” is defined as the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about “self-improvement“, the personal branding concept suggests instead that success comes from “self-packaging”.

According to blogsite, “The Chief Brand Officer”, to be effective, an individual’s personal brand needs to be everywhere in order to be successful. It needs to appeal to all the senses, through all the channels and yet continue to deliver the same messages. According to their statistics, the chance of ever getting your point across or influencing the perception of others is difficult using conventional means of communication. For example:

While printed material may not be as effective as spoken words, white papers provide an excellent means of communicating your personal brand more widely in order to increase your chances of influencing your prospects. What makes white papers an excellent medium for this purpose? Here’s my short list:

1. Distribution - if frequency is a key part of personal branding, there is no singularly superior medium to distribute on a frequent basis than white papers. With a single paper, you can distribute it as a website download, an email attachment, a printed leave-behind, and via direct or snail mail.

2. Repetition - a key part of any successful marketing campaign is frequency, or repeating key advantage messages over and over again. White papers provide a valuable way not only to provide repetition of critical marketing messages that might be found on other mediums such as websites, webinars, wikis, and blogs.

3. Reinforcement – reinforcement of a key marketing message is as important as repetition. Reinforcement enhances an existing message by applying additional components to that message. Concept graphics, business charts, comparative tables, or statistics reinforce existing advantage messages and are best applied when leveraging the white paper medium.

4. Influence - More than any other medium, the aura conveyed with the white paper medium provides greater influence with key executive decision makers than other “mainstream” vehicles such as brochures or websites.

So if you have the goal of enhancing your “personal brand”, then look to white papers. Other than making lots of speeches, they provide an excellent way of getting your message across to your target audience.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under WP Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.