Identified

Network Network Network!

Your personal and professional networks play a huge role in your overall personal brand. Here are a few ways to go about networking in a way that is beneficial to you: 1) Keep in touch with all current and new contacts. Add them to your social media channels, email them or comment on their blog occasionally. If you engage with them, ask their opinions, and provide quality information, you will become a valuable resource to them (and perhaps to their network as well!). 2) Connect with people whose personal brands that are similar to yours. Use social media to “follow” people that might be able to help you. As outlined above, make sure you engage with them on a regular basis. 3) Always carry a business card. Keep it up to date and personal, and include links to your website and social media accounts. This way, people will always have several ways of getting in touch with you. 4) Attend conferences and tradeshows in your areas of interest. Most of them have networking lunches or happy hours built in, so make sure you attend them to maximize your experience. Keep in mind that each connection you add has this/her own network, which expands your network exponentially.

Consume New Information to Improve Your Personal Brand

Regularly consuming news and information that is relevant to your personal and professional interests will improve your personal brand because you’ll be learning and strengthening your skills. This is especially important if you’re looking to get into a certain industry, or if you’re in a period of unemployment and looking for a new job. Here are some easy ways to get news and information: Read the daily news, either online or in print Subscribe to an industry magazine, either online or in print Read or subscribe to relevant blogs Join some industry newsletters Take a class at your local community college or online Join an educational webinar Go to a conference or seminar Aside from the wealth of knowledge you’ll inherit, you may also find that your quest for knowledge can help you network. So be sure to connect with people in your industry to learn more ways to expand your knowledge and therefore improve your personal brand. What’s your best source of information? Please share below.

Always Be Seen In A Positive Light

It’s always important to be looked at in a positive way, whether it is at your job or in your personal life. In order to have a strong personal brand, it’s important that potential employers and people around you see you in a positive way. There are a couple different ways to make this happen 1) Make sure your social media profiles are clear of questionable content. Party pictures, inappropriate comments, or anything else of that nature, can damage your personal brand if you’ve based it around professionalism. A good way to decide whether something is appropriate or not would be to ask yourself if it’s something that you’d show your grandmother. If it isn’t, then it should probably be deleted. 2) Include your name and contact information when contributing Internet content that is in your areas of interest/expertise. This may include a forum discussion or blog comment. Attaching your name to your online footprint isimportant to increase recognition, especially if you’re posting anything about an industry in which you’d like to work. If, however, you want to be apart of a forum or online group that you want to keep separate from your professional life, use a nickname or pseudonym to keep the two separate. Have either of these strategies worked for you? What are other good ways to keep people looking at your personal brand in a positive way? Comment below and let us know!

How Your Personal Brand Can Help You Stand Out to Employers

For every company you apply to, there are dozens of other candidates competing for open positions. Creating a strong personal brand to show how you are different can help you stand out to potential employers. Here are some tips: Create a personal website, so that your resume is more than just a piece of paper. Include your resume and contact information. Add some videos or podcasts. Link to your social media accounts, your blog, and any other information that you believe is relevant. Keep it professional and show them how your educational and employment background has set you up for success. Showcase anything that sets you apart, whether it’s a college class project or an example of your work from a past job. Make sure to keep this site organized and updated with your most current information. Another thing to remember is that companies want you to show that you’re interested in them. Make sure you convey that you’re excited about the opportunity and show them how you will make a difference in their organization. Following any meeting, whether on the phone or in person, write a quick note to thank people for their time, reiterate why you’re a great fit, and mention your level of interest one more time. The most important thing to keep in mind is that employers don’t know why they should hire you unless you tell them. You know you’d be a great addition to their team, so make sure they know that too!

What Makes Your Brand Stand Out?

The importance of consistency in your personal brand cannot be stressed enough. In order to establish a credible personal brand, you will have to be able to do more than just establish a social media identity. Being able to talk and write about yourself in a way that is consistent with your brand is just as important as creating a LinkedIn and Facebook that share the same information.

Many potential employers may ask you for a writing sample when you’re applying for jobs. Having a personal style to your writing that makes you unique is a great way to make your personal brand stand out from the rest. This could mean anything; whether you have an interesting tone of writing, or an original idea that you include in your sample, a hiring manager will be sure to notice.

Be able to talk in a way that is consistent with your brand. Go back to the original mission statement that you created, and practice discussing some different issues in a way that aligns with your statement. Make sure that when it comes time to demonstrate to potential employers how you could make their company better, you are able to accurately display what sets your personal brand apart from the rest. 

Establishing an Online Presence

 

The strength of your personal brand can always be improved. Creating an online presence that is consistent with your established brand is a helpful to make a name for yourself in the webosphere. 

Put your social network accounts to good use. Some ways to do this are commenting on an article or posting a link and starting a conversation about it on Twitter or Facebook. Interact as much as possible with influential people and companies in the industries that interest you. Use these networking sites to contact people and establish connections. Remember to keep these interactions positive, and use these outlets to show your knowledge and interest about a subject. The more your contacts see this, the more opportunities you will have that could lead to potential jobs.

Starting a blog is a little more time consuming, but is also a great way to establish an online presence and it’s an easy way to create online content about something that you’re interested in. Showing that you’re able to produce your own content shows possible employers that you have original thoughts, great writing skills, and that you’re engaged in technology. Promoting your blog with people and companies in your social networks will generate more views and the more readers that you have, the better.

If you’ve branded yourself around being a social media expert, one way to prove this would be to go on social media news sites and get involved as much as possible. Another thing to remember is to always maintain consistency between different forms of communication. Whether it’s your blog or your Twitter account, make sure that you’re not contradicting your personal brand.

 

Photo courtesy of socialmediatoday.com.

Creating Your Mission Statement

A mission statement is an important part of every company. While a mission statement should only be about a sentence long, it gives the company a purpose and shows what the company is trying to accomplish, and how they’re going to accomplish it.

This can also be a great tool for every individual. Creating a personal statement like this can be useful to put on resumes, or even as a tool to learn more about yourself and your goals. So what’s a good way to create your mission statement?

Step 1: Make a list of words that describe you. Do you consider yourself attentive, creative or helpful? Add those to the list. It is a good idea to get a second opinion on this, just in case you see yourself differently than others do.

Step 2: Think about your career goals, and how some of your personality characteristics might play into that. If you’re interested in graphic design or advertising, your creativity is a trait that positions you well for a career in either of these industries.

Step 3: Create a 1-2 sentence statement using the goals and personality traits that you have brainstormed. Incorporate your goals and your way of achieving them, just like a company would do in their mission statement. If that doesn’t work for you, write a little bit more and try and cut that down to a clear and concise 1-2 sentences.

This will be a quick and helpful way to contribute to your personal brand, with the added benefit of getting to learn a little bit more about yourself in the process.

 

Image courtesy of eHow.com. 

3 Tips to Creating a Successful Personal Brand

1)    Be Authentic: Think about who you really are, not who you want to be. How would you describe yourself to other people? What qualities do you admire about yourself? These are a few questions to consider. If you consider yourself organized, look around for some evidence of that. If you have a closet that is organized by color in rainbow order, it’s safe to make an assumption that you’re a well-organized individual.

2)    Get Outside Opinion: Ask people around you how they would describe you. Family, friends and coworkers can offer you a great perspective. While creating your personal brand, it’s important to have an understanding of how other people see you, and getting perspective from people who know you will can be a great way to do this. Using the previous example, if your roommate describes you as messy, it might be time to reconsider the strength of your organizational skills. This will also allow future employers to consider what it would be like to work with you, as well as how you’d fit in at their company.

3)    Be Consistent: If you have created your personal brand with authenticity and an understanding of self, this shouldn’t be a problem. Make sure that what you are saying and what is being said about you is consistent with the brand you’ve established for yourself. Keeping similar descriptions of personal information and work experience is an excellent way to do this. Maintaining your social media profiles in a consistent manor is a great way to show the strength of your personal brand to potential employers.

 

Image courtesy of personalbrandingblog.com.

 

 

Harvard Business School: Job searchers should spend 80% of their time on…

According to MakeUseOf, the Internet contains about 5 million terabytes of data, but Google has only indexed 0.04% of the entire thing. There's a ton of content on the Web that Google can't index, either because the content is exclusively on a private network, or Google’s web crawling bot excludes it. Every Google search you make ignores 99.96% of the data on the internet.

Icebergs make for great metaphors.

Just like Google, many job search engines don't include the majority of openings at companies. Most of the time, these positions are filled quickly and through referrals. Don't believe it? Let's see what Harvard Business School has to say:

"Networking is a way to develop relationships that help you gain insight into an industry, a company, or a career path. Given that 65 to 85 percent of jobs are found through networking, it should be the focus of about 80 percent of your allotted search time."

Read that again – 80% of your job search time should be focused on networking. Not making minor formatting tweaks on your resume, not digging through job boards. Instead, you should be connecting with classmates, colleagues, and business contacts.

Forget what your university advisors told you about Facebook

Back in late 2007, Kevin Colvin, a bank intern, decided he had enough. Halloween landed on a Wednesday and the party of the year couldn’t be missed. Kevin pulled the ol’ call-into-work-sick trick. He sent an email to his boss, slipped into a saucy, midriff-revealing fairy costume and headed out to party. It was nothing new - countless employees before his time did the same and nothing ever went wrong, right?

The face that launched a thousand FW:FW:FW:FW:RE:LOL threads.

He forgot about Facebook. A co-worker, probably disgruntled over Kevin’s midweek shenanigans, saw the party photos in the morning and forwarded a link to Kevin’s boss, Paul Davis. Paul shared the link with the entire office, which in turn leaked the story to outsiders. Online gossip rag Gawker caught word and shared his story far and wide: “Bank intern busted by Facebook”.

While poor Kevin was at fault, he didn’t necessarily have a strong reason for being overly cautious. Facebook only had around 50 million users at the time and was just an upcoming social networking site, not today’s omnipresent force of nature. Kevin was a deer in the headlights – the massive media frenzy took him by surprise, so unsurprisingly, he completely removed himself from the public spotlight.

Fast forward 4 years: everything is different.

- 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visited a social networking site

- 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook

- More time is spent on Facebook than Google and Yahoo combined.

Job hunters - there’s no point in running away from social media. The world is now just one giant community populated by online users. Some say to act like you're living in a big town, while others say to act like you're at a party. Either way, people and companies are using your online presence (or lack of) to judge you. It’s not a matter of whether or not you want to participate; it’s how you participate.

The recruiting industry is already incorporating social media into their recruitment processes. Recruiters love the ease of the process and the candidates are often better than those discovered through traditional methods. If you want to be successful, seize the moment and take full control of your online presence. It’s already part of industry standards. (LinkedIn, anyone?)

Still a bit reluctant on opening up to the digital world?

13-year old Rebecca Black’s “Friday” music video currently has the highest count of “dislike” votes in the history of YouTube. She was literally moved to tears when her song was deemed the “Worst Song Ever” by countless media outlets and bloggers. If her teenage years weren’t awkward enough, she now had the world laughing at her. And just like Kevin, her story showed up on Gawker.

But what about the headline? “Friday’ Singer Rebecca Black Is a Millionaire, Thanks to Us”. Rebecca didn’t run away from social media – she withstood the storm, played the hand she was dealt, and came out an Internet legend. 400k+ Twitter followers ain’t bad either.

Kevin, if you’re reading this, click here to build your Identified profile. Forget the past, let’s get you back into the game.