Last week I discussed “Building Trust in the Digital World” with guests and members of SMEI. Attached, incase you missed the event, is a video clip of my presentation (thanks to SMEI for that!) along with accompanying slides.
I regularly contribute blog posts on social media to the Entreprenuerial Woman Magazine – here is the latest one on using social media to build your personal brand.
Personal Branding
The concept of personal branding has had a lot of coverage in these difficult economic times as people look to market themselves more effectively in order to stimulate their careers. Personal branding is, in essence, a means to package yourself in such a way as to present a particular image for career purposes. It is the way you market yourself to your peers and prospects.
The idea of having a professional image is not a new one – uniforms have been standard for many occupations for centuries. The difference with personal branding is that the concept is not to make you look like one of the crowd, but rather to make you stand out from it.
When considering your personal brand you should look at many factors: the way you speak, the way you look, the car your drive, your education, and your character, but the single most important aspect to consider when building your brand is that it has to be real. It has to reflect the real you. A personal brand that portrays a false image will be apparent to everyone you come into contact with and will do more harm than good.
Identify the unique aspects of your personality, skills and experience and use those to make “you†stand out from the crowd. By building on a personal brand that it true to you, your efforts will be more rewarded and your image will be more realistic and authentic.
Using social media is an ideal way to build your personal brand, to expand and reinforce your network, but there are risks that you should be aware of.
Tips For Building Your Personal Brand Online
Here are some tips that will help you take advantage of social media to build your brand safely:
1. When networking on Facebook or other social forums always use the privacy controls to limit access to your information (usually you can find these by clicking on “accountâ€).
2. Use Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks to make people aware of what you do or want to do. Highlight your unique experiences in these forums
3. Google yourself or use Pipl to see whats being said about you and do the Granny test on the results – if Granny wouldnt approve then perhaps the content isnt appropriate to enhance your business profile.
4. Use your profiles in these forums to present an appropriate professional image. Include a good headshot that is authentic and dont post any photos, videos or images that compromise your image.
5. Portray yourself professionally (as appropriate to your industry) in all forums.
6. Be true to who you are: transparency leads to trust – if you have a good reputation people are more likely to do business with you.
7. Remember that you have a valid and unique opinion. Dont be afraid to voice it.
8. Always be respectful of others. It is okay to disagree but be polite about it.
9. If you are young and looking for a job be aware that a party boy or girl image may seem cool to your peers but it wont help you get a job or grow your professional network.
10. Online networking is a vital tool for anyone trying to build a career but dont get sidetracked or sucked in. Avoid this by scheduling time for online networking and sticking to it.
11. Dont make friends with everyone and anyone. Be selective. It will help you manage the volume of information and will also expose you to less risk.
Personal branding is being used more and more to help people highlight their professional attributes and experience, grow and enhance their networks, build business and to find new careers. In our next post on this subject we will look more closely at which social media tools to use and how to use them to do this effectively.
It has been a big week for online advertising with announcements at the inaugural Twitter conference, Chirp, that Twitter is finally about to monetize its micro blog service by adding ad functionality and the announcement from Apple last week that it was going to introduce a mobile advertising platform called iAd.
Twitter Promoted Tweets
According to the Twitter blog, promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users. Twitter will begin to roll out the Promoted Tweets platform in partnership with some of its big advertising partners like Starbucks.
Right now these promoted Tweets are limited to specific searches, for example if you search for “Starbucks” on Twitter today you will see the following:
Reaction to the announcement has been mixed, many recognized that Twitter had to do something like this in order to grow revenues others resent the move seeing it as invasive.
iAd Mobile Advertising
Apple’s hugely successful iPhone is becoming more open from a developers perspective making it easier for third parties and app developers to make money. A component of iPhone OS4 released last week, iAd is Apple’s mobile advertising platform. It will feature rich media ads which, according to Apple, are aimed at stimulating emotion and interaction. For advertisers, iAd gives them a new way to reach consumers a highly targeted fashion. Mobile advertising is nothing new but it is the first time Apple has openly embraced the model.
Google owns the digital advertising market and only time will tell whether Twitter or Apple will make a significant impact with their new offerings. From a marketing perspective these innovations give us new ways to reach our audiences in a highly targeted way which can only be a good thing.
The service allows you to license your work easily and at no cost. With various different license offerings based on how much freedom you want to give people to use your writing and in which forums, Creative Commons steps you through an easy process to find the right license and then you simply download some HTML to your web-site and your covered like so:
People using the works are then morally and legally obliged to use them accordingly (or not at all if you so choose). Whether or not people act appropriately remains to be seen and there’s also the issue of the global reach of the Internet with different laws governing different jurisdictions but if this plagiarism is a concern for you then Creative Commons is definitely a step in the right direction to protecting your work.
Search Engine Optimisation is a must if you want to make sure your intended audience finds your website but it can be time consuming and technical – patience is invariably required and it is usually best to employ an expert to help. There are, however, some things that you can do to improve your website ranking that are easy to do and don’t require the assistance of an SEO specialist.
Easy Ways To Improve Your Ranking
1. Update your site regularly – this may seem obvious but many corporate sites rarely change. Search engines like sites that change often so by updating your site frequently you can improve your ranking .
2.In case you haven’t done so, remember to submit your site to Google and other search engines to help them find and crawl your site.
3. Post video to YouTube – posting a video on YouTube and linking it back to your site has the added benefit of building really valuable links to your site.
4. Add a podcast – our traffic peaks every time we podcast and by submitting the podcast to top pod sites, the effect ripples. Coincidence? I think not.
5. Label your images – most sites don’t bother but this is viable real estate on your site, use it. Image titles should relate back to your keywords and offering for maximum impact.
6. Use Google’s webmaster tools – make sure your site is crawled regularly, submit your sitemap and identify any problems so that you can fix them. If you can’t work out how submit your sitemap do it page by page in Google.
7. Get bookmarks – book marks build links and the more you have the better. Hit on employees, partners and colleagues to bookmark your site. Good sites include Digg, or Stumble Upon.
8. Comment regularly on relevant high traffic blogs and always remember to insert your url correctly.
9. Spend some time developing a keyword map for your products and services so as to identify the most effective words to use and those to avoid. Content on your web site is key to helping the search engines understand what your site is all about. When considering content, remember to put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
10. Use bold and headings to identify key terms in your text.
11. This one should be first on the list but it seems so obvious I almost left it out. Use a website traffic tool like Google Analytics to measure traffic to your site. If you don’t then how will you know which of the above is working.
If you don’t have time for SEO yourself, remember, it is one of the services we provide. We’d love to talk to you about your SEO goals.
