PR9 Competency Modeling: Key to Success Let’s face it: there are a lot of people on the Internet who claim to be all kinds of amazing gurus at all kinds of amazing fields. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of personal branding as a necessity for most career paths – and because so many people are very, very good at branding – the consumer pool has access to a much larger slate of potential candidates than ever before. The problem is that a lot of these self-named gurus really have no clue what they’re doing. Hark back to the thrilling days of yesteryear – no, not the Old West. Head back to any urban setting with a late Victorian or even Edwardian flavor – London, New York, Boston. Imagine a place with the proper English sensibility of improving one’s self. At that time, there was a fast-rising middle class yearning for the propriety afforded by a fine education, and a bored upper class that had in many instances taken to heart the old queen’s strictures that one must do all one can to improve the teeming masses (as long as the teeming masses knew their places!). During that time, a lot of so-called “professors” and “doctors” flooded the speaking market. Men and women with a yen for self-improvement went to lectures given by generally handsome, usually uneducated, but almost always highly persuasive men who claimed to be doctors of eugenics, professors of phrenology, ministers of spirituality, and the like. The vast majority of these self-anointed, colorfully titled speakers were magnificently unqualified to do much more than shoveling manure. If you think about Madison Avenue and some of the stuff they deliver, this poop-scooping could be equated to very, very skillful advertising. There was a market for learning, an audience for solemnly delivered lectures, and cheap printing that allowed for leaflets to flyers to be plastered on every boarded-up window and lamppost and for quarter-page ads to be inserted into local newspapers. It was a flimflam man’s paradise. The Internet provides similar access to false credibility and astonishing boasts. There are hundreds of weight loss experts, marketing geniuses, copywriters, and even personal branding professionals. Many of these have no more skill than you have – but they do have really smart personal brands. Just like the fabled false doctors and professors of yore, the timeline for success for these Internet shysters is running out. Consumers are now looking into the backgrounds and the credentials of the people they’re retaining to provide services for them. That means that a few good ideas about a subject and a winning campaign to lure customers won’t get you very far for very long. You need to actually be able to do what you say you can do. The easiest way to determine whether or not you make the grade is to pit yourself – fairly – against your competition. Look at what they have to say, look at what their experience is. How do you measure up? What are you credentials? What are theirs? You also have to determine the capabilities of your organization? What kind of services to do you deliver? What is your timeline for turnaround? Have you a mechanism
that allows you to prioritize clients, and do you do this by length of your relationship of by size of payment? In addition, you must determine how your company’s overall strategy compares to that of your competition. What are their behaviors and who do they hire? What is your public image? How does it stack up to theirs? Look at both of your Web sites. Does your site look as professional as theirs does? How does your front page content sound? One of the biggest problems with many Web sites is that their front pages sound as if they were written by people who don’t speak English terribly well, or people who don’t write English terribly well. The sentences jangle and use words incorrectly, and often, the front pages don’t say anything in particular. Read yours carefully. Does is convey any message at all, or is it simply spouting a bunch of important-sounding jargon? If your site says nothing, fix it. If you can’t do it on your own, hire someone who can. Now look at your actual capabilities. Can you actually do what you say you can? If you can’t, and you want to stay in business, find a mentor, be deferential, and learn. Take on small clients and tell them you want to grow with them. If you can figure out a way to make your abilities true, your personal brand will benefit from your reputation.