Vishen Lakhiani — Developing a Digital Image and Self-Branding
Getting Yourself out There — Self-Promotion in the Digital World.
Entrepreneur, author and personal growth teacher Vishen Lakhiani is best known for being CEO and founder of Mindvalley — a company that offers a broad range of personal development lessons including productivity, public speaking, nutrition and spirituality. Since launching the company in 2002, Vishen has written several books, two of which making the bestsellers list in The New York Times, and has gathered a significant online following for both Mindvalley and his own image.
Whilst some public figures have used online platforms for giving fans insights to their personal lives, Vishen takes a more professional, self-promotion approach — taking the opportunity to promote his projects, books, achievements and ideas to the public.
Your Digital Identity
Perhaps the best place for Vishen to introduce himself is his own website. The website contains multiple backlinks — many of which direct to Mindvalley, others linking to his books and achievements.
In an offline world, it would be hard to imagine how public figures could grow without social media followers and website traffic. You may be able to pass on a business card or email address, but anything beyond that exceeds the limits of the physical world. Now, particularly with this example, you can share an inexhaustible amount of information about yourself. Users are taken on a journey through a deep, complex pathway of interconnected pages, each leading to a different area of one’s life.
Limitations of Online Self-Promotion
Perhaps a rather unusual choice of the website is the location of the emailing subscription list option. One would imagine this feature to be within easy reach as it is one of the most commonly-used self-promotion strategies. But Vishen places this at the very bottom of the page. Many websites ‘trick’ you into signing up if you forget to untick a box. Perhaps Vishen is aware of this potentially annoying, spam-like atmosphere surrounding getting users to sign up to your weekly mailing list.
Facebook: Friend or Foe?
In his best-selling book, The Code of The Extraordinary Mind, Vishen highlights some of the implications of living in the digital world, explaining how society — notably social media — creates a set of predetermined implicit rules that many of us live by, shaping our lives in hidden ways. He quotes:
“…rules that suggest we “should” do life in a particular way because everyone else seems to be doing it, too.”
Now, his active Facebook account (with 2.7 million followers) may seem like a contradiction. But upon closer inspection, the Facebook page functions primarily as a promotional vehicle. The page is occupied with an array of interview clips, pictures with other public figures and promotional content for Mindvalley.
The key difference then is this: the page is about his achievements, not how he lives his life, the latter being criticised by Vishen for skewing people’s perceptions and expectations.
It seems social media can be a game-changing tool for the personal branding world, but only if used appropriately.
