Using The FLOW Framework to Build an Authentic Personal Brand

In this conversation, Alyssa Olerud outlines the Fearlyss FLOW Framework which is her personal appraoch to building a strong and authentic personal brand on social media.

Takeaways

-Building your foundation is like a personal development exercise. 

-Your personal brand goes beyond your resume and job title.

-Relating to your audience is key

-Your offer needs to be clear (not cute)!

-You are full of wisdom regardless of where you are within your career

The Fearlyss FLOW Framework is a downloadable guide that takes you from A to Z when it comes to building your personal brand and creating an effective content strategy on social media.

Download the workbook here: Fearlyss FLOW Framework - FEARLYSS MEDIA

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Transcript

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If I were to ask you to give me three words that best describe you, what words would you use? This is a question that I ask all of my social media clients because what I've found is that it is hard for someone to give me three words outside of their role. So business owner doesn't count, mom doesn't count, chief marketing officer doesn't count. Those are all titles and they tell me what you do, but they don't tell me who you are. I realized early on in working with my clients that this is something that many people struggle with. And with this, I also realized that I was getting a little bit beyond just being a social media manager because I would be in situations where a client would tell me something after a year of knowing them. And it would be something like, I lived in Europe for five years, or I wrote a book 10 years ago, but I don't really talk about it because I don't use it as a sales tool. And these would all be things where I would I would think to myself, hey, that would be really important information for me to know when I'm building your content. And it's not that people were leaving it out or not telling me to hide something. They just didn't think that it was relevant. They didn't think that there was a purpose in sharing that story on social media. And in having these conversations time and time again, I realized that we needed to focus the conversation more on building your personal brand rather than just building your social media content. And through this, the fearless flow framework was born. This is the framework that I use for my own content that I use when I build out my client strategies and that I teach through my strategy guide that I will link in the show notes for you. As I mentioned, I had been having these client conversations. And for a couple months, I was thinking about how do I package this? How do I teach this? What is the way that I can best serve this idea that we need to talk about personal branding first? And I was in the shower one day and the idea of the flow framework came to me. And I always say that I am most at peace when I'm in the water, looking at the water. If I'm around water, I am a happy person, right? So it is kind of funny that this idea came to me while I was in the shower and I was thinking about being in flow. So if you're familiar with the phrase of being in flow, it's something we hear in a yoga practice pretty frequently. It is the idea that you are kind of in your zone. You're in your vibe, you're in your flow, is another way to say it. And it anchored really well with what I just mentioned, believing that your personal brand needs to flow into your social media content. And the idea that I came up with was using flow as an acronym. And that's what I'm going to teach you today. Now, I want to give the disclaimer that these aren't just content pillars, these are things that you can use in social media, are also in the conversations that you have when you're in in-person events. This is how I categorize the stories that I tell to build client brand awareness, client content rosters, and anything that will help them increase their know, like, and trust factor. So flow is an acronym. F-L-O-W. F stands for foundation. This is what your entire brand is built upon. Pull up your resume on your computer, look through all of your job titles because these are the things that people typically will ask you about in conversation when they say, like, hey, so what do you do? Or if you're in an interview, you talk about roles that you previously held. That is all information. That is the what. It's not the who or the how. So I challenge my clients to look at their resume, take the job titles out of it, and start thinking about what experiences they had in each position. What did they accomplish? What did they value? Who did they help? How did it make them feel? What parts of their job did they like? What parts of their job did they not? Why did they switch from one job to another? These are all the foundational stories that we can tell. So if there is anything that falls into your foundation, it might be the basics of your business. So the example I can give you is I'm a social media manager. Talking to you about flow is part of my foundation because it is the foundation of my business. But I can talk about it differently in the other sectors, which we'll get to in a second, and you'll see how it gives various angles to various stories and time frames in your life. So we'll move on to L. This is your lifestyle. Flow is not only the sectors that we use in creating your personal brand and your social media content. It's almost like a linear map. So if we start with the foundation, we start with who you are as a person, how you can describe yourself, your experiences. Then we can move on to your lifestyle. Who are you outside of work? What are you passionate about? Do you have kids? Do you like to travel? Do you like to read? Do you like to cook? Do you go to the gym every morning? These are all bits and pieces of your lifestyle that help you identify with potential prospects. People will say, you need to post your lifestyle content because that's what sells. And then on the other hand, people will be like, being relatable is not a strategy. It's not a business strategy. And I think two things can be true. I believe that you need the lifestyle piece to sell yourself before you can sell your offer. But I also believe that just being relatable and selling your lifestyle isn't enough. So that's why lifestyle comes after foundation. We build your foundation, we introduce your lifestyle, and then we share your offer. The O and Flow stands for offer. This is what you sell. This is how people can work with you. And you would be so surprised the amount of clients I have talked to or just conversations I've had in general, where people can nail the foundation piece or the lifestyle piece, but they can't simply and clearly tell me what their offer is and who it is for. Again, flow is like a linear map. All four sectors need to work in tandem, need to work together in order for you to build a holistic brand. After the O, we move on to the final piece of the acronym, and that is wisdom. This is what you often hear referred to as thought leadership. And what I love about FLOW is that you can apply this to anybody in any role at any level of experience. So if you're a college student, for example, you are just now starting to send out resumes and look for your first job, you still have wisdom that you can apply to your conversations. Maybe you were involved in a nonprofit or extracurricular activities. You undoubtedly learned something there. And that is pieces of wisdom that you can share in your content. Now, if you are at an executive level and you are looking to move from one business to another and create an established executive presence, you have a ton of wisdom that you can draw on. That was a very high-level overview of the flow framework. The strategy guide that I wrote is 63 pages long and it takes you through every question, so many prompts, how you can pull these stories out. Once you pull them out of your head, how do you turn them into content? It takes you through the whole process. It is basically like I put my brain, I put my entire process on paper. And it has proved to be invaluable for my clients who want to build their social media presence, but maybe aren't ready to hire a social media manager. This is like your entry level. Let's make sure your messaging is on lock. But I want to give you a tactical piece that you can institute now. So let's go back through the four flow pillars. F is your foundation. Start at the root of who you are and what you do. Come up with those three words. It took me a lot of time to come up with the three words I wanted people to associate me with. Because for so long, I would lead with, I'm a mom, I own a business. I would find something that I could relate to people with. So another example would be like, oh, I used to live in Florida. I would pull out all of these pieces, but none of them were, they were all facts. They weren't me. They weren't what I valued. The it I always say that building your foundation is like a personal development exercise because you really do have to go deep. I'll tell you, the words that I landed on were fearless. My company is called Fearless Media. So it'd be kind of silly if I didn't want to identify with the idea of being fearless, right? Creative. My second word is genuine. Because I am in an online digital business space, I am surrounded by all of these things at all times. And if I can do or be anything to someone in their journey, I want it to be authentic. I don't want people to feel like I am just spit firing at them. I don't want people to feel like I'm just selling to them. I am here to help people tell their story and do so in a way that it builds their business. And my gut check with myself always is is this authentic? And the final word is passionate. There are so many things that I care about, so many things that I am passionate about. And with these three words, use those once you define them as the gut check for every piece of content. So for me, again, fearless, authentic, passionate. With every piece of content I post, yes, it should serve a business purpose. But am I showing that I am fearless or authentic or passionate? I should always be able to answer yes. That's the gut check you can have with yourself. For lifestyle, I want you to just do a quick audit of your daily routine. What is something that you do every day? Write it out. You're gonna come up with more than one thing, right? Come up with a list of five to ten things. Those are lifestyle pieces that you can build content around. Those are your connection pieces. So maybe it is your morning workout routine or your afterwork walk with your family. Those are all different stories that you can weave into your content. Next, your offer. I want you to ensure that you can tell whoever asks what you offer, who it's for, in three sentences max. This comes in handy because it helps you get clear. I always say when it comes to your messaging around your offer, you need to be clear, not cute. There was a trend where people would put fun hashtags and things in their social media bios, and that does not do you any good if your purpose for being on social media is to build a brand for your business or for yourself. The two or three sentences that you come up with for your offer, when you are posting offer style content, again, we use this as a gut check. Does it clearly, does my content clearly show that this is what I offer and this is who it's for? And finally, wisdom. Think about the best piece of advice you ever got. Write it down. How would you share that with somebody else? That's your next piece of content. So do you see how just with those four simple thoughts for each sector, foundation, lifestyle, offer, and wisdom, you can start to formulate different content ideas and how they would serve you and your business. Again, this is just the basics of how we implement the flow framework into all of our client strategies. If you have questions, drop them below. Send me an email. I would love to chat with you about the stories that you can tell. It is my favorite thing to do is to help people just pull stories and pull their expertise out of their brain and turn it into a piece of content that helps sell their vision or sell their offer. Every guest interview that I do on this show is going to follow the flow framework. I talk all the time about how the I talk all the time about how this podcast isn't going to just be strategy. It's not going to just be like, here's how I did this. We're going to talk about the messy pieces. We're going to talk about the foundational pieces that got people from A to Z. We're going to talk about their lifestyle because we want to know them as a person. Heck yeah, I'm going to let them talk about their offer too, because I think that it will help everyone realize the different ways that they can present things. And there will be learning opportunities in people talking about their offer. And then same with their wisdom. That's the best part, right? Learning from people who have been where we want to be. As I start to build out this podcast, the shares, the subscribes, the reviews on the different podcast platforms are going to be the most important thing in helping me get this message out to as many people as possible and serve as many people as possible. So I already appreciate you listening this through to the end. Again, if you find value in it, I would love if you shared it. Until the next episode, stay fearless.