You may have reached a point in your career where you have a defined and consistent personal brand. And that’s awesome.

But, it isn’t enough to build the brand – you have to manage the brand.

You need to be a steward of the brand.

A brand manager is someone who consistently works to generate awareness, influence, and affinity all in an effort to continually build brand equity.

So, how can you start applying some of those principles to your personal brand? How do you become your own personal brand manager?

While this sounds like a full time endeavor, it isn’t, it simply takes thought and planning and before you know it, it is second nature.

Create Awareness

Creating awareness means putting your personal brand out there and publishing your information for people to see and experience you and your expertise.                Of course, your LinkedIn profile is all dialed and detailed.

But be sure you look at other tools that you can use to build your personal brand.

Check out You should be actively participating in LinkedIn Groups, Twitter Chats, and reaching out to influencers in your industry. This outreach should be personal and on brand. Your interactions within groups and chats should add value to the conversation and be uniquely you.

When you focus on adding value to the conversation you will see that there is an increased awareness of your personal brand and you will begin to build your own influence.

You should try to spend about an hour every week doing this.

Develop Influence

As your influence builds, look for opportunities to partner to create content for people you admire.

You can either blog for others, or create your own blog and promote it through your social channels. Having a voice in your industry conversation is an important component of building influence and managing your brand.

If you do not enjoy writing, go to a networking event. Maybe you are more visual, so you use Tumblr. The point here, is to begin creating content that is uniquely you and relevant to your industry. Be sure that you review whatever you’ve created and answer comments and questions. For this activity, spend about an hour a week.

Build Affinity

Building affinity means that you are creating a personal brand that people experience “a spontaneous and natural liking to you.” This might be the easiest to do, but also can take the most time.

It is simple. Help people and add value to their days. When someone needs a favor from you, you do it and ask nothing in return.

• You mentor people.
• You share your experience and knowledge. You can do this by simply sharing really interesting content with people or by connecting two people with one another who might have mutual interest.

You want people to like you and your personal brand; you add value to their days.

Earn Personal Brand Equity

Brand equity can be something that you build, but the best brand equity is earned. To be sure you are earning and maintaining your brand equity, spend time each quarter adding to your profiles.

• Add new information to your LinkedIn profile.
• Update your resume all the time.
• Store your best work in a special folder on your computer in the cloud (via CredHive, Box or DropBox).
• Curate your best work somewhere so that you can continue to hone in on your brand. When you are curating your best work, you are maintaining your brand so that it isn’t stale. Doing this takes about an hour per quarter.

We at Pathfinders love to hear your ideas on building and maintaining your personal brand. Tell me your ideas and if you want, how much time you spend maintaining your personal brand. Share with a group of like-minded at Pathfinders.
Suresh Shah, M.D., Pathfinders Enterprise