Before the Internet, people you didn’t know usually did not have an impression of you before they met you unless you were famous or within the same social circle. However, with the advent of social media in the early-to-mid 2000′s, employers and clients gained the ability to look you up online and learn about you. This gave people the ability to find out about you beyond what you told them in an elevator pitch or a resume.
Personal Branding
This is important to bloggers because the way we market ourselves and how well we do it affects how well we get paid. If we were half as good at marketing ourselves as we are at writing, we’d make a lot more money than we do now. That’s why I’m helping bloggers learn about developing their own personal brand online.
Social media
Because the Internet is inherently a social medium, what other people say about you is going to come up on search engines and conversations that people have on social media. While there is no way to track down every single mention of your name on the Internet, it is instructive to take a general survey of what kind of chatter there is out there about you.
What people say about you on your personal social media accounts has a different kind of impact on your personal brand than what you say about yourself. Opinions speak volumes. They can make or break a recommendation, a job opportunity, or a new client relationship. They can also have the opposite effect, like when someone tells someone else through word of mouth that so-and-so did a shoddy job and should not be hired. You need to have a solid understanding of how people talk about you, what they are saying, and how it relates to your personal brand.
In most cases, the simple fact that other people are talking about you in the first place means something good—it means that they know who you are and believe that you have something to offer your field. In the worst cases, however, you may have someone who doesn’t especially think highly of you, and that has an impact as well. Either way, before you can do anything about supporting the good and dealing with the not so good, you need to know what you’re dealing with.
To-do list
- Read the websites of your company and/or your clients. How are you described? Are there links to your other online profiles? Do you like the way they present you?
- Read your recent social media conversations. Has anyone recommended you recently? Have there been any introductions? How did those people refer to you?
- Look at your Linked n page. Have you made use of the recommendation option? If so, what have the people who recommended you talked about? Are they the things that you want to emphasize for your personal branding efforts?
- If you have a blog, read your recent comments. What do people respond to about you and what you write about? Does this support your vision for your own personal brand?
Positioning Yourself
At this point you know what you look like on the search engines, on your social media profiles and blogging, and through the lens of what other people say about you. The final piece to survey in understanding the current state of your personal brand is finding out where you need to be and where you want to be.
In any field there are the leading platforms, relevant issues and most popular conferences. All of these areas have an online presence, and to get the most of your personal branding efforts, you want to make your voice heard there. When you look at this part of the survey, ask around to people you know and trust, like co-workers or good clients, to make sure that you find relevant online outlets you may not be aware of.
To-do list
- What are the dominant social media networks in your field? List them out and note whether or not you are active there. Where are your friends, co-workers and competitors? Are you there yet?
- What are the major blogs in your field? Make a list of what you read, along with what others you respect in your field read. If you are a blogger already, find out how you can connect to those bloggers and potentially work with them. If you are not a blogger (yet), where would you like to start reading and commenting regularly?
- What are the hot topics in your field right now? List them out, and see which of them align with what you want to be known for through your personal branding efforts.
What is Personal Branding?
by Jim Kukral & Murray Newlands
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is an online marketing expert who founded Influence People, a San Francisco-based online marketing and blogger outreach consulting firm. Jim Kukral and Murray Newlands recently wrote What is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! to help people learn how to market themselves.
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If you personalised your blog or your website definitely people will feel it. So personalised and gain people’s trust.
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personal branding is very important these days and you can use Facebook,youtube etc. Thanks for the post
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Well popularity of social media has increased a lot. Social media is indeed good to market your business and to get traffic as well. You can increase your sales also with this.