Lawyers are obsessed with their personal brands, and for good reason. A valuable personal brand can lead to professional satisfaction, industry recognition, and lucrative GoDaddy licensing deals. But how do you value or appraise your brand? What’s it worth on Craigslist or eBay? While many marketing experts recommend that you hire a personal brand appraiser to find out, you can actually get a reasonably accurate appraisal using a simple slide rule and some numbers.
Despite its appearance, a slide rule can calculate complex algorithmic equations, though that may be overkill for calculating the value of your personal brand. For a quick calculation, without adding social media influencers, use this equation:
f(z) = b1 log(a1z + a2) + b2
Solve for z, where b is your Avvo rating and a is how many mobile devices you own and use on a regular basis. Multiply a by 43 (e.g., log(43a1z + 43a2)) if one of the mobile devices is an iPad. Unfortunately, in this example, the resulting value is your personal brand as valued in Kopeks. But a quick 4,578.34 multiplier conversion will get you the right ultimate dollar value.
A more complicated equation for your slide rule can include social media influences, giving you a more precise and accurate personal brand value:
Solve for x, with Klout as K, mobile devices as M (remember the iPad multiplier), and y being the inverse length of your domain name plus the number of non-spam Twitter followers (mathematicians call this comtwit, symbolized by cT). Easy peasy, especially with an Aristo Electro 915E or a Faber Castell 2-83N. We don’t recommend using a Fuller calculator rule or any of the helical varieties. If you don’t know your Klout or you are not sure what it is, just pull a large number out of your ass. That works just as well.
Valuing your personal brand may seem a bit more complicated than you first thought, but as you use the slide rule, you’ll quickly catch on to how it works and will be able to calculate your personal brand easily. We recommend valuing your brand each morning during breakfast and to chart your branding goals and benchmarks so that you can determine what trends have influenced your brand and whether any speaking engagements or recent flawging has paid off. If it’s still too complicated, though, you can also use a Curta calculator, Napier’s bones, or even lottery mathematics. If you are still confused, contact our brand evangelist and we can do it for you for a ridiculously large fee. Good luck.
I used an electronic calculator
AWARENESS x REPUTATION = BRAND