Personal Visibility – The Power of You!

Personal branding is a term that describes the self-packaging process of creating a uniquely distinguishable personal asset with the objective of leaving an indelible and positive impression on those you interact with both knowingly and unknowingly. Let’s focus on the “unknowingly” for a minute. You’ve just left a business meeting, a casual luncheon or job interview and one of the participants decides to look you up on Spokeo just to see what else they can learn about you. By simply entering your name they find your relationship status, home value, education level, number of children, hobbies and likely several pictures that you’ve posted on Facebook or elsewhere––yikes! Spokeo and several other similar sites aggregate public information and make it available to anyone and everyone and in my experience it’s very often inclusive of incorrect or misleading information that’s helping others form opinions about you––can you afford that? Maybe that same person Googles you and finds something less-than-flattering or nothing at all––either could have unintended consequences. Maybe they look up your LinkedIn profile that was put together in haste and you haven’t bothered to add a photo––what does that say about you? Or they stumble across your Facebook page because you haven’t set the appropriate security settings and they have access to every photo and comment you’ve ever posted… ooops? Like it or not, you already have a personal brand and the question is a simple one: Are you in control of that brand?  The answer is not as complex as you might think, however, if you don’t take control of your personal brand in today’s digital world, others will and the outcome will likely have unintended consequences––the loss of opportunity. Remember, the internet is the NEW first impression…and second chances, as always, are difficult to come by.

Personal branding is simply self-presentation or impression management with your goal being to influence perceptions in a positive and authentic manner. Self-efficacy is key here and taking advantage of available tools are a few keystrokes away. Hopefully you’re working diligently on fine-tuning a baseline branding platform with a utility like LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter if you’re a college student, a stay-at-home-mom, an entry level employee or a senior manager, you have a brand and story to tell and with a little effort on your part you can establish this important baseline. Once this baseline is in place, we can discuss three very important components of building and elevating your personal brand:

• Consistency – This is essential when building any brand, particularly in establishing who you are in this virtual online world. You must consistently present yourself whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or a whole host of other online personal and professional online profiles. Anything less than consistency can create unnecessary confusion in the establishment of your personal brand.
• Diligence – Don’t waiver when communicating your brand. It’s important that your personal brand consistency is evident throughout all of your controllable profiles.
• Patience – Building your personal brand takes time. Although you can have an immediate impact on your image and brand, a long term view is necessary as you work to develop this invaluable personal asset.

It won’t be long before how you see yourself and how others see you will be one-in-the-same. Once you’re comfortable with how your social resume is constructed you can begin to focus on optimizing your visibility by using the tools and resources available to best position YOU for discoverability. Now that’s something worth working for!

Stay tuned…