Mind Share- by Hajj E. Flemings, originally uploaded by Hajj Flemings.

Market share versus mind share is a question for the ages. Is market share for personal brands important? Can personal brands grow market share? How do you determine if your personal brand is stronger than someone elses? For most people it would be hard to calculate market share and would be meaningless if identified?

Market Share

Market share is the percentage or proportion of the total available market or market segment that is being serviced by a company or by a brand.

o Coke has 43.1% of $65.9 billion soft drink beverage industry.

This makes it very easy to define how much of the soft drink beverage industry that Coke-Cola owns.

Mind Share

Mind Share is owning a slice of mental real estate in the mind of your customers or potential customers. Personal branding has a lot to do with creating a top of the mind experience and making your name synonymous with the industry or space that you want to occupy.

For Example
o Tiger Woods = Golf
o Seth Godin = Marketing
o Anderson Cooper = News

Capturing Mind Share

How does a personal brand capture mind share? That is a great question and I am glad that you asked. Mind share is captured through conversational capital. There are many touch points of a brand that create brand impressions that simulates awareness.

Brand Impressions

o Social Network (SN) Connections: Adding Friends, Connections,
Contacts.
o Twitter Conversation: Humanize your brand and connect.
o Post Video Content
o RSS Subscription
o Email Distribution
o Blogs: Blogging, commenting on others blogs, number site of visits
o Sales: Products/services that connect people to your thoughts.
o Downloads/Views: Podcast (Video/Audio) and video content
o Face-to-Face Interaction: Speaking engagements, networking events, meetings, and presentations.
o Write a book: Traditional book, eBook, and/or audio book
o Web 2.0 Cards: Social media cards by www.BrandCardz.com, my personal favorite.

Results of Capturing Mind Share

Mind share is not about numbers, one can easily artificially inflate the number of social network connections, downloads, or view.

o Fame
o Notoriety
o Trust/Creditability
o Brand Awareness
o Inflated Ego
o Opportunity
o Influence
o Followers
o Stalkers

Converting Mind Share into Personal Brand Value

One of the challenges of personal branding is to convert mind share into value or basically creating a business model to monetize your new found brand awareness. Let me know your thoughts on you how you convert your personal brand into value!!!!