Deadliest Personal Branding Mistakes

It's hard to talk about yourself. When someone asks "What do you do?" you could blurt out your job title, like this:

PERSON: What do you do?

YOU: I'm a Network Security Analyst Level III.

PERSON: Hmmm. Awesome. (Eyes glaze over; looks frantically around room for a reason to bail on the conversation.)

Unless you're a lion tamer, a jello wrestler or an astronaut, your job title is likely to be the least exciting thing about you.

You could describe your job, instead:

SOMEONE What do you do?

YOU: I work for a company called Angry Chocolates. I work in IT. I keep the network safe from hackers and other threats, like credit-card-stealing bad guys.

SOMEONE: Cool! Like Mission Impossible?

YOU: Exactly like that.

You can tell a story about your job when you're talking face-to-face or over the phone. But how do you do it in a resume or LinkedIn profile?

Here are the five personal branding mistakes we see most often, the ones that suck the juice and power out of your awesome story and make you sound like every other robot weenie in the weenie bin.

You're no weenie! You're a cool, funny and awesome person with a great story to tell. Get rid of these five branding problems, and let your human story out!

Deadly Personal Branding Mistake Number One: CORPORATE ZOMBIES UNITE

The first mistake is to write your LinkedIn profile and resume in the language called Corporatespeak Zombie Language.

You've seen it before, I'm sure: "Results-oriented professional with a bottom-line orientation." That doesn't sound like a real person. It sounds like a cardboard cut-out person with a fake smile and a bad suit.

You don't have to write that garbage in your resume and LinkedIn profile, and I hope that after you've read this column you never do it again. You can talk about yourself in writing the same way you would in person.

"I got into HR because I like to help people succeed at work. I specialize in Comp and Benefits, where I build pay and benefits plans for everyone from shop workers to the executive team."

Deadly Personal Branding Mistake Number Two: TROPHY WORSHIP

You're going to list your certifications and credentials in your profile or on your resume, of course. You've earned them. Don't make them the centerpiece of your brand, like this:

"With a Harvard MBA and advanced certification in Jedi Mind Control, I bring a diverse set of blah blah blah..."

Your degrees and certifications are important, but they don't define you. When you make your alma mater the biggest part of your brand, you're saying "I need Harvard's brand to represent me, because my own brand isn't sturdy enough." That's awful.

Harvard is a great school, and believe me, they don't want you to make your Harvard degree the focus of your personal brand any more than I do. They want to turn out graduates who go on to do much more wonderful things than simply to get a diploma.

When you say "Look who's already approved of me -- this school, this brand-name employer and this professional association!" you're saying "I am nothing by myself. Other people have to make me okay by bestowing titles and credentials on me."

Personal branding is about YOU, not the trophies on your wall.

Deadly Personal Branding Mistake Number Three: TASKS AND DUTIES

Since it's hard to know exactly what to say about ourselves, we tend to talk a lot about tasks and duties. We want to know about more important things: why did you perform those tasks? How did you make your mark on each organization you've worked for?

You can replace "I was responsible for the quarterly Sales by Region report," a boring statement that will put any normal reader to sleep, with the human observation "When I noticed our VPs weren't reading the three quarterly sales reports I created, I designed a new Sales Dashboard that put the most useful metrics on a one-page weekly summary, saving at least $100K in staff time in the process."

As readers, we want to see you in action and to know that you understood what you came to each job to do. Give us what we want!

Deadly Personal Branding Mistake Number Four: SELF-PRAISE

Your personal branding goal is to let us see past your titles and degrees to understand the person behind the resume. That's why one of the worst things you can do is to trumpet your own fabulousness with phrases like "Seasoned, savvy and strategic Marketing Director..."

Don't praise yourself in your branding, in writing or in speech. Let your story speak for you. People who praise themselves are afraid that if they don't tell you they're wonderful, you won't figure it out on your own. Self-praise is the mark of a business newbie or a person who has so little self-esteem he has to brag about himself to perfect strangers.

Replace a deadly self-praising phrase like "Skilled at leading strategic initiatives" (a fail on the self-praising and zombie-speak counts) with a mini-story about a time when you actually led an important project:

"I led the Finance team through Angry Chocolates' acquisition of Suckulent Suckers, a $8M specialty lollipop manufacturer, in 2010."

Anyone who's in the business of hiring or recommending folks for 'strategic initiative'--type Finance roles will get the whole story, right there.

Deadly Personal Branding Mistake Number Five: ABSTRACTION HELL

The last Deadly Personal Branding Mistake on our list is the branding choice that uses hundreds or thousands of words in a LinkedIn profile or a resume to say nothing.

You've seen branding like this before:

"I solve complex problems at a high level working with multiple stakeholders."

We have no idea what you've done or what you're capable of when we read a boring, abstract sentence like that.

We want the guts of the story. Don't sit back and characterize your work - tell us the details and let us decide whether the problems you solve are complex or not. Give us the story. Make it real!

"My favorite project so far at Accenture has been the re-design of a wastewater treatment plant's safety and security processes. We started with 1960s training materials and rewrote everything from the ground up, listening to and checking in with the team members at every step. The new-employee safety training time dropped from six months to four weeks and the number of safety incidents went from 40-50/month to zero."

Boom, baby!

We want the goods. We don't want your analysis of your talents at a sky-high level of abstraction. We don't want a list of boring tasks or self-congratulatory adjectives.

We want to meet a living, breathing human on the page and decide whether we're meant to take the conversation a step further. Isn't that what everyone wants - to get rid of the fog and the clutter and meet one another on a human plane?

THANKS for 200,000 Follows on LinkedIn! Our CEO Liz Ryan has been writing for LinkedIn for one year this month. Thanks for spreading the word about the Human Workplace movement to reinvent work for people!

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