Sep 28, 2007 | blog
A couple of questions for you.
- Has your career reached a plateau, but you believe you have more to offer?
- Have you gotten into a repetitive cycle in your career that you think it’s impossible to break out of?
- Are you just starting out in the workforce and are uncertain how to present yourself?
- Would you like to start down a path to help change all that?
Up until now you may only have thought about your reputation. Taking pride in the work you’ve done, and the ideals you follow. These are important things and core components to help you build your personal brand.
What is Personal Brand?
So you’ve heard about this "personal branding" thing while reading news and the blogs you follow. Obviously, it’s an important component to gen X or Y crowd, but how does it affect you? As much as you want it to! You are a brand, not unlike your favorite soft drink, automobile manufacturer, or candy bar. You have the same potential to create interest and buzz around yourself and what you can do.
Reputation 2.0
I like to call personal branding "reputation 2.0". We all know what our reputation is. Why not bring some social media aspects to the table and formulate a strategy? Personal branding is about reaching out to the community or industry that you are a part of. Interacting with it, and making sure that people know where and how to reach you. This simply leverages your current abilities and makes you more visible to others in your field.
Not an Ego Trip
Personal branding is not about building a "look at me" page. Rather, it is about creating a brand that is recognized for what you are. To leverage your strengths, whether that is technical, people-oriented, or whatever. Building your brand is meant to bring you further into your industry as an authority or expert in an area. It’s meant to help you reach the next level, and grow in your life, not just your career.
2nd Job
One thing to understand, as well, is the amount of work involved in creating your brand is the time commitment. You need to become your own marketer, writer, idea person, and coach. It requires that you reach out to your community and add value. Help people, talk about things that are important or relevant in your industry, come up with innovative ideas. Become a person that people look forward to interacting with. Be the go-to person that makes things happen.
Rewards
There are numerous rewards for this, from additional opportunities in your career, to a new discovery of yourself. Building your personal brand also allows you to dig into your psyche and rediscover lost ideas and dreams that you may have set aside years ago. Your brand is about more than your career, it’s about becoming the best you that you can be.
There is a growing number resources online to help you find ways to build your brand. Many of them are tried and true methods that you can get started on without spending much (if anything). Also, I invite you to contact me directly if you have questions, I’d love to help answer whatever I can on the topic. My email is found in the sidebar under "Contact Me", or leave a comment below!
Photo credit: danes96
Technorati tags: Personal Branding, Rick Mahn, Personal Branding Magazine
Sep 25, 2007 | blog
I’m frustrated with how Facebook handles relationships. Set aside for a moment that I think it’s inferior to a blog for social networking. If I was to entrust my social network to Facebook, I’d have a hard time to keep track of all the different types of interrelationships.
We all have family, friends, associates, co-workers, employers, vendors, suppliers, and so on that we deal with on a daily or weekly basis. Why can’t we classify our "friends" according to type of relationship? There should be more choices, like following relationship types: family, friends, followers, & associates.
Doing this would allow us to organize contacts to be more aligned with groups, apps, and sort out what each type of "friend" could access. I’m one of those people who want’s all contacts to "see" everything I do on Facebook – but I would still like to be able to sort my contacts by type.
This is one area that Facebook and the rest of social network services will have a hard time to provide PIM functionality that many people still use. That’s my $.02 – what do you think? What other types of relationships could be included?
Technorati tags: Facebook, Social Networking, Social Relationships
Aug 17, 2007 | blog
Are you positioning yourself for growth? How much buzz surrounds your personal brand? Wonder what you could do to change that?
Well, one way to start giving people another facet of you is to leverage Social Media. Social Media is made up of many types of tools that can help you not only work to enhance your brand, but also start connecting with people in new ways.
From Wikipedia:
Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves.
Social media can be more than the sum of its parts; blogs, wikis, social networks, presence applications, lifecasting and video are just tools and methods to enrich interactions with your connections. While broadcasting your every move (lifecasting) may not seem like a wise move to most of us, it’s one example of gaining exposure for your idea (i.e. justin.tv).
However, social media also includes ideas and things that have become common, even mainstream – take blogging for example. Blogs are becoming ubiquitous in communicating, sharing ideas, reporting, and personal branding. Blogs are really your own social network in their own right (but hey, that’s another post) because they allow you to do so much more.
From your personal blog, you can talk about your own ideas, topics, perspectives, and most importantly – set your own agenda. From your blog, you can launch into podcasting, video posts, host your own OpenID, host a PDF of your resume, and link to all your online resources.
Some of those resources should be a social network. For nearly any professional, a service like LinkedIn is a great place to start. Yes, it’s an online social network, but it is tailored to professionals connecting with professionals in a controlled environment. It’s really an organized, standardized way to host a copy of your resume, allow people to search resumes, gain authority (via recommendations which are like references), post & search jobs, and accept/deny invitations to “connect” with peers as you see fit.
Some more socially adept individuals will point out that LinkedIn is deficient in many interactive social aspects, such as being able to share pictures, status updates, funny icons, favorites lists (movies, music, etc), and the like. The good part is that none of this clouds the primary purpose of LinkedIn: to network with like-minded professionals.
Now for the more adventurous, there is Facebook where many professionals are starting to leverage the advanced features, using them to better understand their contacts and communicate with them around the world in real time.
Another quickly growing tool in social media is a micro-blogging/presence application such as Twitter. The speed with with you can communicate, share information, get updates, news, and the like is incredible. The important thing to remember about Twitter (and similar services) is to not judge it by it’s original purpose. The Twitter question “What are you doing?” was just a launchpad. In 140 characters or less, you can communicate a status, a thought, a question, a frustration, a plea, a thank you… Twitter is just another view of the online community that you build.
I guess the point of this is that online communities, be they blogs, social networks or IM are only as good as the effort you put into them. Just like in offline relationships, the effort to understand, learn and grow is crucial to succeeding and gaining benefit for you – and your network!
Technorati tags: Social Media, Social Networking, LinkedIn
Aug 9, 2007 | blog
Before I get started, I’m not going to abandon my LinkedIn account – I’ve invested a lot in my profile and believe there is value to the service.
There has been a lot of talk recently about Jeff Pulver’s decision to leave LinkedIn and simply use Facebook as his lone social network. The problem in announcing something like this in a mainstream business publication like Jeff’s article in Business Week is how general business people perceive it.
While an adventurous few of these users are willing to try these services, the majority are just awakening to online social networking and, of course, find things like Facebook to seem unprofessional. You have to admit that LinkedIn comes across as a professional-oriented service that is designed to build professional relationships between its users.
This has probably helped cultivate strong feelings about Jeff’s switch…. that and most user’s anxiety to change. Also, most people work so hard on their professional image (i.e. Personal Brand) climbing the corporate ladder, that they cringe at the thought of using something that may seem less than professional.
Of course, I think the point of Jeff’s BW article was to stir the pot. Good!
Related Links:
P.S.
I can’t help but wonder if this doesn’t somehow tie into Robert Scoble’s announcement that he is no longer answering email?
Technorati tags: Jeff Pulver, Chris Brogan, LinkedIn, Facebook, Linked vs. Facebook
Jul 21, 2007 | blog
I’ve had this great experience over the last few days, networking and meeting dozens of people in Chris Brogan’s Grasshoppers group. An amazing social networking group that started life as a Facebook group, attracting somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 members in about 72 hours (someone correct me if I’m off on that).
The main concept of Grasshoppers is that it really has no structure and is only there to help each other. Got a question, toss it to the group. Need to find a talented PHP coder – ask the group. Need help finding equipment to donate for a good cause – ask the group. Grasshoppers is meant to be a dynamic association to help with just about anything, anywhere. Interesting group!
Recently Chris has created a Grasshoppers social network for the group over on Ning, and while we’re sure to loose some members in the transition, people really interested will make the jump. Some (even notable bloggers) have possibly mistaken the move as an intent to spread the Grasshoppers group to as many platforms as possible. That’s furthest from the realities. As a group of people, not a function of software, the group needed more options to get at the information the group is creating, and Facebook doesn’t account for that very well. At least not yet.
If you interested in a networking group that doesn’t place demands on your time, respects your skills, and participation level, then check out the Grasshoppers group. It’s also a great way to add contacts and extend your networking as well.
Technorati tags: Grasshoppers, Social Networking, Facebook, Chris Brogan
