I just got home after finishing up the first session of What’s Your Story: Personal Branding, PR and New Media for Artists — and it was an adventure!
We lost power at the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod offices in Centerville at about 4:15 pm. Poof — no lights, no computer, no projector, no phones. When it became clear after a few minutes that the power wasn’t coming back on immediately, we swung into action to find a back-up location for the class with less than an hour to go.
Fortunately, our good friends across the street at Cape Cod Community College were able to offer us a room that would fit all 35+ attendees of the sold-out class.
And what a room! Jim Hill, the branding expert who presented tonight’s class, on Personal Branding for Artists, obviously felt right at home in the “black box” theater on the first floor of Tilden Hall Performing Arts Center. And no wonder — it turns out that Jim is an alumnus of Four C’s, and has performed in several productions on that very stage.
Jim brought us through the finer points of developing and maintaining your personal brand, culminating in an exercise that allowed each participant to brainstorm some of the facets of their personalities, elements of their work, and strategic goals and ambitions.
The final step of this exercise is to boil down all that brainstorming into one brief, pithy statement that summarizes one’s own personal brand.
In the discussion that followed this exercise, we talked about what it meant to build a reputation — to eventually be known as “that guy.”
When people think about your brand as an artist, when they think about your personal brand of “that guy,” what are they thinking? What words, images, or emotions come to mind?
What can you do, today, to establish or strengthen that brand?
At least is wasn’t an elaborate April Fool’s joke! I thought I’d been had when I walked up to the darkened Arts Foundation office.
Thanks to Beth for inviting me to speak, and to everyone who attended. I hope you all came away with as much “fuel for thought” as I did. Applying a branding methodology to an individual artist opens up a tremendous number of opportunities and challenges.
Hope to see you all in the weeks ahead.
Great presentation. I have some familiarity about branding, etc. as my business owner husband is really up on all this stuff. But it’s terrific to have the focus on the business of art specifically and I particularly like the distinctions about how to understand brands and logos, how they relate and how they are not the same thing.
So, Jim and Beth, I went and got right on Twitter last night. But since I didn’t feel comfortable, I didn’t make it public to the timeline. Maybe that’s why, but I feel like the proverbial tree that fell in the forest but nobody heard me so I make no sound. ….Either that or I have no friends.
Seriously, I am not into Facebook, etc. and my yahoo email acct. is only for mail I don’t want coming to my “real” address on another domain. Is that why no one who knows me can twitter back? …..Either that or I have no friends.
Looking forward to next week.
Hey there – upcoming WYS speaker Dave Caolo has a great post on his blog that speaks the to the “that guy” effect. A good read: http://tinyurl.com/5cblhu
Where are we meeting tonight?! I guess no news means @ the Foundation? Will cookies (edible kind) be involved?
See ya!
Dan;-)
I know I’m really far away from your classes but am started to ‘join in’ anyway.
Thanks to Jim for that link – Dunkin Donuts Pizza is now going to be a cue for me to focus!