Space to Think
The idea for a personal site began when a friend bought me NickKellet.com as a gift. I renewed ownership for years, but never put it to work. So why now?
To-date, I’ve avoided personal branding. By accident it become a perception experiment. I quickly learned that with no personal site, you leave it to people to decide what you are. Which can be quite random.
For example – in my home town of Kelowna, I’m thought of as the “board game guy” or the “Twitter Business Day / Social Media guy”. I let myself be branded by the projects and work that I was doing and not by my past achievements or by my own thoughts. A Google Search on Nick Kellet would return a heap of information. In the absence of a personal site, I relied very much on my LinkedIn page to tell my story. With hindsight that was naive
In reality your story moves faster. My Twitter feed sits at the other end of the spectrum. A few incidents and accidents made me wish for a personal platform – a place to speak as me. So finally I decided to act and take active control of my personal brand.
I intend to use this site to collect and share my thoughts and to connect with the world. I’m never short of an idea or an opinion and I’m never too afraid to share it. In the last 4 months I’ve been active in #usguys on Twitter and that’s been a fascinating example of how to connect with people in this hyper-social age. Just another nudge factor in tipping me to act.
I reached out to a friend and marketing/branding expert to help me with my personal branding and Richard Taylor of rt Strategy instantly did a few things that I’d never do. That’s why you should hire consultants. He got me to take a psychometric test, he asked me a whole load of uncomfortable questions about what I stood for, and where I wanted to go. He booked me on a photoshoot and ran the process of designing a logo.
I’d also like to thank Darren Hull and Kim Thomas of Hull Photographic for the photo shoot. I hate being photographed. I’m usually behind the camera. But I actually enjoyed the experience of working with them.
Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter ยท Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly
