Personal Branding with Social Media
by
Michael Reynolds
Copyright 2011 Michael Reynolds,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0256-7
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Introduction
You may be familiar with branding as it relates to companies and organizations. A company’s brand is the essence that affects everything it does. How often, though, do we pay attention to our personal brands?
Yes, a person has a brand. Anyone who works, communicates, or participates in society at any level has a personal brand. Your personal brand is made up of a number of different factors and it influences how you are perceived by others.
Job-seekers should pay especially close attention to their personal branding as it can have significant impact on how successful they are.
Traditionally, personal branding was affected by communication style and appearance. Today, however, social media and online communication has made it possible to strengthen personal branding to a greater extent. The way someone presents himself or herself online can make a big difference in how that person is perceived before any personal contact is made. For this reason, it’s important to manage your personal brand online. What are some ways to do this?
The purpose of this short book is to explain how these new online tools can be used to strengthen your personal brand. Whether you are a job seeker, sales professional, or consultant, numerous opportunities exist for you to leverage social media to create a competitive edge for yourself.
1. An Overview of Personal Branding
What makes up a brand? Typically, we think of branding as it relates to a business. A business has a logo, standard colors, philosophies, policies, communication styles, and other elements that influence the company's brand. Ultimately, however, the brand is how others perceive that company. Some companies have a strong and positive brand, while others suffer from tarnished brands as a result of certain factors.
The same rules apply to people. Everyone has a brand. Your personal brand is how others perceive you. It is constantly being influenced by numerous factors, such as how you communicate, what type of work you produce, and who you associate with.
Prior to the age of social media, your personal brand was influenced by just a few things. How you dressed, how you spoke, and what your resume looked like might be all it took to make up a personal brand for a job seeker. Sales professionals relied on sharp suits, expensive lunches, and influential friends in order to strengthen their personal brands. The flow of information was limited and it was difficult to find much background material on someone.
Today, we are living in an age of unprecedented transparency. LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter allow us to distribute, communicate, self-publish, and produce on a level never seen before. A quick Google search of someone's name and location can turn up a long list of profiles on various social networking sites, giving the researcher all sorts of information about that person.
Numerous stories can be found of people who have gotten fired from jobs, lost sales, and damaged their careers over activity on Facebook. This being the case, some might suggest that it's safer to simply avoid social media altogether to keep your personal brand untarnished. While tempting, I would argue that this would lead to missing a huge opportunity to build your personal brand on your own terms. Ultimately, conversation, research, and exchange of information is happening in social media whether you are participating or not. Doesn't it make sense to use it to your advantage?
Employers make frequent use of LinkedIn for researching job candidates. If you have no LinkedIn profile and the other candidate has a richly-populated profile full of recommendations, presentations, and content, who looks better? If you're going for the big sale and the prospect researches you and your competition online, what do you want him to find? If you have no presence and your competitor has written blog articles on the problem being solved, who looks like the expert?
People want to do business with people they like and trust. All the business branding in the world will not close a sale if the prospect does not like and trust the person with whom he is doing business. A long, shiny resume will not get someone a job if his or her potential employer cannot find evidence of prior performance and recommendations from others.
Social media allows us to deliver these trust factors. These tools allow us to shape a personal brand like never before.
2. What Affects Your Brand?
Your personal brand is influenced by many things, including how you dress and speak. Your brand is especially affected by how you communicate. Before the age of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, communication was more limited. It was more difficult to get content in front of lots of people. Now, we are able to self-publish all sorts of information in real time and reach a much wider audience. This can be both good and bad.
Let's start with the bad. We already know about the stories of people losing their jobs over something posted on Facebook. Since we are in an age of much greater transparency, we must remember to be careful about what we do online. Your personal brand is affected by the things you say online, the photos you post, the comments you make, and anything else that you contribute on a social network. Negative comments, edgy photos, and heated public debates can all negatively affect your personal brand.
On the flip side, just the opposite is also true. Your personal brand is positively affected when you contribute to the community by answering questions. Writing valuable content and posting it on your blog helps others and positions you as an expert. How you communicate with others on networks like Twitter also influences how others perceive you.
This is not new. We have always made judgments about others based how how they treat others and how they communicate. Social media simply allows us to enhance the scope of that judgment by opening the box and publishing it for the world to see. Sounds scary? It can be, but it can also be an incredibly powerful way to gain a competitive advantage in business.
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