30-Day Branding Challenge: How branding can improve your integrity

To start off this challenge, I want to address one of the biggest barriers writers have to creating a brand: Integrity.

To most of us journalists, branding will always look like Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans--artificial, utterly devoid of meaning, designed to sell, to manipulate and to lie. It's a lot more Mad Men and a lot less The Wire.

So how do you get over the hump? Should you?

Consider it differently. Branding is not only about the message you send but also the message your clients receive. In other words, you could create a brand that, say, tells your clients that you're fun, outgoing, perfectionist and well-organized. And that may be the way you'd like to be. But if what your clients actually experience is that you're juggling a million assignments, scattered when you talk to them and drop facts, forget to follow up on things, you're delivering something different than they've been led to expect. You're out of integrity.

So if you're hesitant to work on a brand, approach it from a different direction. Working on your brand can help you find ways in which what you do doesn't live up to what you strive to do.

So take these steps:

First, create a mission statement: How do you strive to be in your business? What are your key words?

Here are a few of mine: Accurate, enthusiastic, professional, collaborative, inquisitive, prompt, thorough. These are all ways I strive to be with my clients: I give them an accurate impression of what it will be like to work with me. I act professionally and enthusiastically to bring my clients prompt, surprisingly good work that's of service to them and their readers. And I do it in a collaborative way, harnessing my inquisitiveness and writing skills.

Now you try.

Next, compare your mission statement to how you actually work. You can do this by asking yourself honestly these questions about how you behave at work:

• Do you like talking to clients between appointments?
• Do you ask questions of your clients or like to figure stuff out on your own?
• How do you react to edits?
• Do you fact-check your work or double check facts all the time? Do you have a system for this?
• Do you take work that bores you to tears and that you struggle to complete?
• Do you regularly file stories over word count, past deadline, or do you regularly ask editors for extensions?
• How often do you like to update your clients on your progress?
• Do you give clients a head's up on the sources you're planning to use or would you scoff at that?
• Will you take source suggestions from your clients or does that violate a line for you?

Finally, compare the two lists: At least according to your estimation, are your goals in integrity with your behavior? If so, give yourself a gold star and move forward with your branding. If not, it's a chance to move your work in the direction of your goals. Start by identifying your weak spots and paying attention to them every day. Bring your support network into the issue, ask for help, make phone calls.

It's not about lying to convince your clients that you're better than you are. Can you imagine how much overselling yourself could kill your serenity? It's about giving your clients an accurate image of what to expect when they work with you. Branding is about the experience your clients have with you, not just the story you turn in.

How'd you do in this exercise?

Photo of Andy Warhol's soup cans by loop_oh.

Where Professionalism, Frustration and Serenity Intersect

This week, freelancer LJ Williamson admitted to both fabricating outrageous stories for her client, Examiner.com, and to feeling self-righteous about it.

She emailed FishbowlLA:

[A]ll they care about is how many hits your page gets, and they don't care about the writing. Fine — I decided to try to do things their way.

Unexpectedly, one post I wrote about the vaccine/autism debate really brought the crazies out of the woodwork, and brought my page views to a new record high. So I went with it, decided to start baiting the vaccine deniers more and more, with exaggerations and half-truths.

I also wrote a series of preposterous articles on topics like why peanuts should be banned, why panic was a totally appropriate response to the swine flu outbreak, and why schoolchildren were likely to die if they were allowed to play dangerous games such as tag.

And no one at Examiner noticed or cared what I said or did for quite some time.

Examiner.com is an online content aggregator. I almost wrote "aggravator," and that would have been approriate, too. Sites like Examiner.com, Suite101.com and more hire freelancers, but only pay them according to the number of clicks their articles receive. I've written before about the danger these sites hold for freelancers, both in terms of their bottom lines and in terms of the quality of their work. And I'm not alone. Recently, freelancer Michelle Rafter, author of the WordCount blog, explained I don't work for aggregators, but I am a Web writer.

But Williamson's example shows another danger of these sites: If you let your clients, some will encourage you to discard your ethics.

Well, let me back up: I get what Williamson is doing. She's calling content aggregators' bluffs. They say they give writers free reign to explore and that their business model rewards the best and most interesting writing. But as she showed, they don't. They reward--duh--sensationalism and bombast. She exposed such sites' lack of quality control, which is just as important as profitability if the client is really a site for journalism and not just a cynical ploy to exploit would-be writers and make a buck.

And I suppose someone had to do it. I fully expect her to come out with a first-person article crowing about how she pulled one over on Big Business.

But I care less about teaching clients lessons than professionalism. It mortifies me that anyone would flout her responsibility as a journalist just to make a point. That's gotcha journalism at its worst, and it's just as cynical as Examiner.com's business model.

Still, this is an important lesson for writers. When I was still at newspapers, a rising-star reporter was fired after a big expose revealed some reporting holes. But all of us reporters knew what was going on: The editor had been seething to get this story in the paper for years, encouraging most reporters to pursue it. We all passed because we knew it was a boondoggle--impossible to prove and seemingly a vindetta. But he found in this writer, who was young and ambitious, the one person willing to pursue it his way. When you're getting that kind of validation and encouragement from an editor who ought to know better, it can be hard to remember your ethics.

When the truth came out and the crap hit the fan, the editor predictably abandoned her. Then he fired her. The lesson here is that you can't rely on your editors to check your ethics. If you love your job and you value journalism, you have to learn to adhere to your values no matter what. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard than perhaps even your editors do. Or, and perhaps more pointedly, you have to seek out editor relationships where your editor cares as much about good work as you do. As I've said before, the editors who care about good work are also more likely to pay you well for it. Not always, but it's a not-so-surprising correlation.

And while Williamson seems to have many great publications under her belt, I'd think twice if I were an editor about hiring a reporter willing to burn her clients and make stuff up for some snarky, well, vindetta.

So was the point worth making? I'm sure it depends on who you ask. I wouldn't make that point, but I already don't like aggregators or pay-per-click arrangements, and I advice coaching clients to avoid them. Perhaps it will serve as a lesson to new or aspiring freelancers and writers--both to avoid such aggregators and to avoid such irresponsible behavior.

Photo by vsqz.