Top 10 Rules for Having a Strong Personal Brand. Sometimes on Twitter (@DanSchawbel) I get into rants when ideas or thoughts come into my head.
The other night, I tweeted a list of ten rules. I didn’t even bother saying what they pertain to, but from the tweets it was apparent that they had to do with how to be successful. From my viewpoint, they were completely focused on how to become a strong personal brand. If you actually follow all ten, you too will be a personal branding expert. Aside from breaking down the top ten rules below, I sincerely think a lot of success is about confidence in yourself, which translates into a positive attitude and then success is the output. Top 10 Rules for Having a Strong Personal Brand Rule #1: Never give up!
This one is self-explanatory. Rule #2: Believe in yourself so other people can believe in you. The best way to get other people excited about working with you or being part of your community is to feel the emotion that you want them to feel. Take a good look at yourself. Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks. In 2007, Jim MacMillan was at the top of his profession — a photojournalist who had just shared a Pulitzer Prize for pictures from Iraq’s deadliest combat zones — but he also started to wonder what kind of future that profession had in store for him.
His newsroom in Philadelphia was making steep job cuts in the face of plummeting revenues. Then MacMillan attended a BlogWorld conference and returned with a determination to re-invent himself though social networking. MacMillan has since become highly skilled at using social networking to gain new fans of his photography, and he is hardly alone. Over the last few years, creative professionals — including musicians, writers and artists — have found they can reach an engaged audience by making songs available on a MySpace page or building a national readership by blogging.
“I saw that the real value of a new media profile, or a social media profile, is distribution [to an online audience],” MacMillan says. Game-changers Skip the Wild Parties. HOW TO: Measure Online Influence. Obsessed with the idea that Google doesn’t have the one right answer, in late 2008 Micah Baldwin joined Lijit Networks—his sixth startup—which believes each blogger has a right answer.
Influence is difficult to ascertain online. What about that guy on Twitter with 25,000 followers? Isn’t he influential? What about that woman who has 5,000 RSS subscribers? She has to be influential, correct? People who are truly influential become conduits for human based filtering and content discovery within their communities, as members of the community look to the person of influence to connect them to people and content they should trust, and fuel positive community growth. Understanding influence Influence is defined as “implicit or explicit effect of one thing (or person) on another,” which online can be further simplified to “can someone’s words (and/or video) make you think or do something?”
Personal brand is truly an aggregated representation of online activity. How does one become influential? Social networking tools for the recruiter. Neil Bolton, CEO of Canberra-based recruitment software company Recruitment Systems, provides some tips for using social networking tools in the company’s latest newsletter: The main networks used by recruiters today are LinkedIn with 33 million members and Facebook with 150 million members.
LinkedIn recruiters will soon benefit from new candidate searching tools and the ability to contact multiple candidates with private messages (known as InMail). New Facebook applications are also making it easier to effectively target top candidates and to market new jobs. If your traditional candidate sourcing techniques are underperforming or overly expensive, consider using the following tools: The new LinkedIn Recruiter – it is major investment at over US$5000 per year but can help you engage both clients and candidates with campaign management tools. HOW TO: Build the Ultimate Social Media Resume.
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog.
Social media resumes are important for attracting hiring managers directly to you, without you having to submit your resume, blindly, to them. The problem with submitting your resume online to job postings is that most job postings aren't even vacant, might not exist, and 80% of jobs offers are received through networking. With a social media resume, you're able to paint a completely different portrait of yourself for hiring managers and customize it to reflect your personal brand.
With the inclusion of various multimedia elements, sharing options, integrated social networking feeds and the same elements you'd find in a traditional resume, you are better equipped for success. Social media has allowed us to reverse the recruiting process. Here is the social media resume process: 1. Options for websites Options for blogs 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.