What The Irish Can Teach You About Personal Branding
Today is St. Patrick’s Day – a day I’m sure you identify with Ireland. It’s green. There are shamrocks. It’s Lá Fhéile Pádraig in Celtic! Besides drinking Guinness and wearing green, what can we learn from the Irish when it comes to building both our website and our personal brands? A lot, it seems!
Use Your Network Like The Irish Do!
Irish – would be the ancestry that you would hear from almost every 10th American. More than 33.3 million Americans, which is 10% of the total population of the USA, reported Irish ancestry in the 2013 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
That’s more people than there are in Ireland. With a population of 6.4 million, Ireland has one of the world’s largest diaspora – in this case ‘networks’. Networks matter, such as in the case of a little event that became a global summit: Web Summit, one of the world’s largest technology conferences – whose origin is, as of its founder’s – based in Ireland.
Started as a local tech conference for the growing Irish technology scene, made up of not only giants that we mentioned such as Google, but an ever increasing number of startups, Web Summit has grown to tens of thousands of people, expecting more than 50,000 participants in 2016.
But it wasn’t easy.
Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit’s founder, knew that a lot of Europeans didn’t attend US-based tech conferences because they couldn’t either afford the flight or it wasn’t convenient enough. Having a closer, European conference, would make sense. At the time, conferences such as the French LeWeb ruled the tech scene in Europe. How could Paddy get better speakers, to attract both attendees and sponsors?
The Irish.
Paddy used his network as an entrepreneur to first get to those members of the global technology scene that had Irish anchestry, convincing them to come to the home of their parents or grandparents and give a bit back to Ireland.
But bringing in the likes of Tesla founder Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was just the start. It took a whole other type of network to grew the conference to, for example, 2014’s 614 speakers and 2,160 exhibitors, with stages spread across two sections of the Royal Dublin Society’s fairgrounds.
As VentureBeat’s Chris O’Brien pointed out, Web Summit’s attendees have always praised the quality of networking and connections that they made at both the conference and Web Summit’s pub crawls.
Cosgrave and his team developed software to sort people into pub crawl groups at the very first Web Summit, and continued developing it as their event grew. As Cosgrave points out on the official Web Summit blog, they ended up “engineering serendipity”. In the end, Web Summit has invested in hiring data scientists, physicists, and statisticians as part of the 100-person team that works full-time on producing the conference.
People value networks, which is why you need to use yours just like Paddy did!
Your Mentors Don’t Need To Be Like You…
We all need mentors. Most engineers will get a senior engineer or CTO as a mentor. Most entrepreneurs will try to get a CEO or serial entrepreneur. You get the point. We attempt to find people like ourselves to be our mentors and that’s understandable. They have the knowledge, skills and network that we’d like to have – so by learning from them – we can try to replicate their success.
If you want to succeed, though, don’t just try to replicate. You need to combine existing with new knowledge to find your success. Which is why you need to find mentors that have skill levels that will complement what you already think you need to know.
After all, St. Patrick wasn’t even Irish. He was Roman!
Symbols (And Shamrocks) Make You More Recognizable
Almost everyone knows the symbols that scream ‘Ireland’, more than someone that has had too much Guinness in a local pub. The harp, of course, as the one true national symbol of Ireland. But let’s also not forget the shamrock and the Celtic cross, both symbols that are commonly associated with the Irish.
While the harp is the official symbol of Ireland, those who admire the people of this country will gladly show they care by having shamrocks on their outfits, such as sketches on t-shirts.
While you might have one official logo for your company, business, project or even your personal brand, don’t forget those aren’t the only ‘symbols’ that your users and fans will associate with you.
Some symbols, such as one of the most popular YouTube channels in Ireland Epic Meal Time’s fondness for bacon, become specific because fans love them. Looking at them today, we can say they were user-approved, maybe even user-generated.
Irish businesses today know that they can invoke compassion by using some of the symbols that people associate with a fondness for their nation. When creating your website or even just marketing material, think of what you can use either from your company or your heritage to invoke the right emotion with your target audience.
There’s Always Time To Pivot To An The Irish ‘Tiger’
For a long time, Ireland wasn’t the economic powerhouse it is today. Looking at Irish history, especially since the nation gained independence in the early 20th century, nobody expected for this European island to be the centre of some of the world’s most innovative companies in the 21st century.
Both global giants like Google and Facebook as well as locally grown, fast-growing startups such as Intercom, call Dublin and other Irish cities their home. Thanks to a state that understood they needed it to make it easier for tech companies to operate there if they wanted to attract them, Ireland is today well known as a tech-friendly location.
Even while other countries that thought of themselves as the centres of European technology, such as Germany and the UK, rested more on their history than on the future, Ireland grabbed its opportunity. As KPMG’s Anna Scally explains:
“Ireland has a long-standing reputation for success in building and breeding technology companies. Established players like IBM and HP have had a strong Irish presence for decades, while more recently internet age players like Google and Facebook, and third wave companies like Uber, AirBnB, Slack, Dropbox and Stripe, have all chosen Ireland as the place to grow their businesses. In fact, nine of the top ten global tech companies have a presence here in Ireland as well as ten of the top ten “born on the Internet companies”.”
This shift attracted thousands of international technological companies to Dublin and created hundreds of thousands of jobs. It was never too late. That’s exactly what you have to have in mind when thinking about your plans for the future. While everyone in Silicon Valley says that you need to learn from your failures, continued hardships sometimes make us pessimistic.
However, Ireland’s example shows that we don’t have to be. There’s always going to be a new opportunity. You just need to keep your eyes open and grab it when it comes. Be a tiger, just like Ireland has become.
A specific example is the already mentioned Web Summit. It grabbed its opportunity while conferences like LeWeb in Paris and The Next Web in Amsterdam were still trying to grow slowly from a 1000 to 2000 to 10,000 people. Cosgrave’s Web Summit used data science as well as a great marketing strategy to not only grow from a couple of hundred participants to tens of thousands of guests from the entire world but also launched a slew of new events across the globe: India, the US…
What Do You Think We Can Learn From The Irish?
These are just some of the things that come to mind when thinking of what the Irish can teach us about doing (digital) business in 2016 while using our personal branding to extend our reach. What do you think we should learn from Ireland, its companies and its entrepreneurs?
