Job Search | Personal Visibility – The Power of You!

Archive for the ‘Job Search’ Category

Out of Sight – Out of Mind!

You’ve got a LinkedIn profile that’s not as complete as it could be and you sometimes go days without looking. You occasionally peek at your Facebook page but you rarely, if ever, post. You have a Twitter account but don’t tweet (it was more of a curiosity thing). And although email is part of your life, you rarely give much thought as to how your missives and personal musings come across to their respective recipients. Sound just a little familiar?

More than once, you’ve thought that maybe everybody but your parents were more technically savvy than you? You keep telling yourself you really should learn this stuff and get-on-board but you just never seem to get around to it. You’ve got a “toe-in-the-water” and you’re getting by… or so you think.

Like it or not, you’re leaving an ever-increasing digital footprint that influences how others see you––your personal brand in other words. There was a time when our personal brands were simply a compilation of our observed behaviors but nowadays, your brand can be equally influenced by a myriad of factors, thanks to our inexorably evolving relationship with technology and our growing virtual networks. And the truth is, people are just more voyuer-istic than you might think in terms of their online curiosity about you––particularly if you’re in a more visible role like boss, committee member or some other influential position. However, it could be your neighbor, co-worker, significant other or even a potential employer. The good news is the fact that your digital footprint and related behaviors are controllable. However, it requires action on your part––some actions more simple than others but all doable by you, regardless of your level of expertise. Start by having a baseline profile from which to work and that will allow you to apply your personal information on a consistent basis by pasting and copying throughout each of your other profiles and being consistent is fundamental in controlling your information flow and personal brand. And wordsmithing is work-in-progress. You will edit today, tomorrow and forever in an effort to get it just right and keep it current. If you don’t have the time, hire someone to do it for you… getting your profile right is an important part of communicating who you are. Whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it for you, just make absolutely certain its done well––your brand depends on it.

Your digital footprint isn’t always about offense––you may need to play a bit of defense as well. If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, you may be well served to revisit your timeline comments and photographs and remove things that don’t reflect on you in a positive way. Given the search engine capibilities and particularly Facebook’s Graph Search, anything can and will be found. Cleaning up your timeline can be time consuming and Facebook doesn’t provide any utilities for helping you do so, however, there is a third-party utility called Simple Wash (formally Face Wash) and it will help identify all those unbecoming tidbits that you might not be so proud of in the broad daylight. In addition to scrubbing your Facebook timeline, maybe you’ve had already had some visibility and you find yourself with a couple of negative or not-so-positive “things” that pop up on the first few pages of a Google query of your name. Or just as bad, maybe there’s someone with your exact name that’s a real ne’er-do-well and they have a lot of negative information showing up and you’re tired of having to explain that its not you! Since you can’t remove these items, you have to think about suppressing or pushing them down by adding new, positive content. There are reputation management services out there that can do that for you like reputation.com or you can use one of the do-it-yourself utilities like Brand Yourself, Qnary or About and likely accomplish the same thing for a helluva lot less cost.

Back to offense: What are you famous for? What are your strengths, positive traits and the redeeming characteristics that make you who you are? What are you the most proud of and what do you do well? What’s worth bragging about? What are your features and benefits and have you attempted to put those into words? Somebody has to be in charge of your personal visibility campaign and since you’re the boss of you, you are probably the most qualified! Use the tools available to you and put them to work as your agent on a 24/7 basis. Remember: Out of sight, out of mind.

Well, what are you waiting for?

Advanced Personal Branding 101 – Are You in Control?

Just because you have a LinkedIn profile doesn’t mean your personal branding efforts are complete, however, you’re off to a great start! A great start because of LinkedIn’s membership base (approximately 300 million), visibility, ease-of-use and maybe the most important reason: the embedded search features which allow for a myriad of ways for YOU to be found (or discovered). Having a completed profile and professional headshot on LinkedIn is a giant step toward communicating your brand. However, just because you built it doesn’t mean they will come…so what’s next?

If you’re like many people, you’re also on Facebook , Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and a handful of other networking related sites. You may not be as active as some you know, but odds are you’ve at least set up a profile to see what they’re all about–right? Maybe you’ve even created a Klout account to measure your “social influence” on a scale from 1-100. Have you uploaded your photo to Gravatar and registered on Google Profiles to make yourself more “discoverable” in the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo? Have you ventured over to GoDaddy and purchased your name as a dot com (or .net, .me, or all of the available extensions)? Speaking of URL ownership, if you haven’t done so already, make certain you edit and claim your name on your LinkedIn URL while it’s still available. Click on “Edit Profile” on your LinkedIn toolbar and just below your picture you will see your LinkedIn address. Click “edit” next to your address and look to the right side of the page and click on “Custom URL” and type in your preferred name (without spaces). If its available your address will now be linkedin.com/in/yourname instead of the long string of numbers you were assigned by default. This will make you easier to search in LinkedIn and facilitate better search engine results as you begin to coordinate your overall branding efforts.

Like most, you probably have a little bit of yourself spread around in several different places on the web creating a very fragmented digital footprint. Odds are, each of your personal profiles are not as complete as they should be, your information is inconsistent and this lack of coordinated effort is suppressing your personal brand effectiveness and likely making for something less-than-optimal in terms of results when someone types your name into one of the many search engines. And more people than you might think are searching your name: friends, co-workers, new acquaintances, business associates (before, during or after the meeting), vendors, parents in your child’s play group, a prospective or current employer, a committee member, a recruiter, and so forth and so on––you get the point, right? And given the evolving efficiency of the search engines and particularly technology like Facebook’s new Graph Search, people can find damn near anything about you––most of which you control but some you don’t unless you take the necessary steps to opt out of public information aggregators like Spokeo. The point is, YOU have to take control if you want to communicate an effective personal brand.

So, with an ever increasing digital footprint, how do you coordinate your overall presence, move yourself up in the search engine standings and maximize your personal branding efforts? The most efficient way to accomplish this is by using one of several personal branding sites like BrandYourself, Qnary (pronounced like Canary) or About, just to name what I consider to be the top three choices to help coordinate and amplify your personal brand. These sites allow you to create a comprehensive profile by either choosing to transfer information directly from LinkedIn in the case of BrandYourself or just copying and pasting from your already completed LinkedIn profile for the others. Once completed, each has the appearance of a personalized website about you. If you happen to own your name as a dot com, you can go to “Domain Management” on the GoDaddy site and forward yourname.com directly to your site-of-choice address (ex: brand yourself.com/yourname) or for a small annual fee Brand Yourself will mask your personal URL and your Brand Yourself address will be yourname.com instead of brand yourself.com/yourname. While it may sound more complicated than it is––its actually very simple. With yourname.com as your personalized website, you can now add your URL on your LinkedIn page under “Contact Info”, your Facebook page under the “About” tab, Twitter, AARP, and just about any other site where the profile page allows for a personal website.

Here’s the really cool part: The real purpose of these personal branding sites is to link all of your online activities together under a hub and spoke type of approach in order to maximize your visibility with the various search engines. It works well… I’ve done it and so can you! Each of these sites allow you to link Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gravatar, WordPress, Klout, Instagram, press releases, and just about anything else you can think of for the purpose of coordinating your online presence and most important, optimizing YOU with the various search engines. Remember; be consistent when completing profile information about yourself. Be diligent in making certain you leave no stone unturned related to your personal branding efforts and last, be patient as it takes several weeks to see results in the various search engines.

Hang in there… it can be done!

Personal Branding? It Doesn’t Apply to Me…or Does It?

In a word, yes. It applies to everyone–one way or another. Whether you’re the semi-retired 70-something that barely uses the internet, the I’m-too-busy-to-use-social-media-stay-at-home-mom, a recent college graduate who will get to it later, an hourly worker that thinks it doesn’t matter, a small business owner that just can’t seem to find the time or my favorite–“I don’t do Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the rest of that crap so it just doesn’t matter”. Let me start with the latter, the so-called ghost. Being a “ghost” is basically a brand in and of itself and in today’s environment everyone leaves a digital footprint, so to remain completely anonymous requires just about as much effort as building and amplifying a more mainstream and beneficial personal brand. And taking control of your brand is becoming more and more important, particularly with our rapidly growing use and reliance on technology. Take for instance the announcement from Facebook this past week regarding what some are considering to be a real category-killer related to search engine functionality–Graph Search or what has been referred to as “the global mapping of everybody and how they are related”. Think of it like the Kevin Bacon game called Six Degrees of Separation! Mark Zuckerberg described it as a utility that allows users to sort through content that has been shared with them. Put differently, people will be able to find you in new and different ways that are ultimately far more efficient–scary, huh? And no doubt that advertisers (and Facebook) will leverage that same data to create more targeted and personalized messages in the future, but that’s another storyline all together. The point being, finding out things about any of us is getting easier and easier, therefore, each of us is best served to be in control of our personal information–all of those digital bits and pieces add up to your brand. The question is: Are you in control of that brand?

I’ve suggested in previous articles to establish a baseline brand by using a networking site like LinkedIn, even if you don’t have any real interest in networking or changing jobs. It just so happens to be the largest, most visible and user-friendly networking site and it would serve you well to set up a profile and invest the time and energy to fine-tune that profile to the point that it tells your complete story–whatever that might be. So, whether you’re the 70-something, the hourly worker, a mid-level manager, the stay-at-home-mom or a recent graduate, you have a story to tell and you should tell it well. You should also be acutely aware that people are looking at you on the internet and it’s certainly in your best interest to take control of how your brand is being communicated to anyone choosing to look. And, there’s way more people looking than you might think! Your neighbors, moms in your play group, co-workers, committee members, employers (current and potential), recruiters and new acquaintances just to name a few. And you never know when a new opportunity is going to present itself–personally or professionally. Don’t miss out, huh.

You will find LinkedIn to be very user friendly. Yes, it will take some time. Yes, it will be worth the effort. LinkedIn began as a networking site, however, the recent success of LinkedIn centers largely on their transition to a recruiting and employment platform, particularly given the fees they are collecting from employers that use the platform as a very cost effective recruiting and hiring tool–its certainly marginalizing the headhunters and traditional employment agencies. However, recruiting and networking aside, the primary reason to create and fine-tune a LinkedIn profile is because of the role it plays in your overall personal branding strategy. This also becomes important in the optimization of your name in the various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo or LinkedIn’s very own search engine being used by employers to identify hiring candidates–you may not be looking but what if a better opportunity found you? It happens every day…

And maybe the most important reason: Once you have your LinkedIn profile completed to your satisfaction you can either transfer or paste and copy your information over to a myriad of other sites and those sites will work together in optimizing your personal brand and visibility. We’ll talk about those steps next.

Stay tuned…

Internet – The New First Impression

Your personal brand is a composition of several factors, including personality, style and a whole host of general behaviors. However, this article isn’t about changing your personal brand, its about helping you effectively amplify your visibility by using every tool and utility available to you––maybe even some you don’t know about! So, where do I start, you ask? It’s 2013 and odds are, you have at least one online profile and in all likelihood, several: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, just to name a few of the more common platforms. And if you consider that the internet is the new first impression, you must ask yourself: what exactly is your profile saying about you? What about that photo you’re using? Many people have incomplete profiles and a grainy out-of-focus photo or worse yet, no photo at all! In today’s virtual world, the lack of attention to detail could be a metaphor for the personal brand message you’re unintentionally sending and it’s positively not in your best interest… personally or professionally.

You probably remember the old adage about “one chance to make a first impression”, right? Plus, you never know who’s looking at your profile and more importantly… why. If you’re like most people, your profile is public and you’re not really that close to many of your contacts and they just don’t know you all that well. Put differently, if you don’t make the effort to tell people exactly who you are––they won’t know anymore than you’re profile tells them. Their impression will be based on what you’ve said or in many cases, not said. Are you missing out on a recruiting opportunity or career upgrade, an advantageous social invite or short-list consideration?

Take your time, tell your story and make certain your profile accurately portrays who you are––fill in all the blanks and do it well. Whatever you do, don’t embellish or mis-represent yourself. As simple as it sounds, most don’t invest the time and thought and yet a few words or in some cases, the lack of, are a deciding factor in the very important impression left with your reader. Now, let’s talk about that picture on your profile. Don’t do out-of-focus, don’t do the arms length overhead iPhone shot and for God’s sake, get rid of the one with an arm around your neck and an unknown person’s body cropped out. And what about those without a photo…wonder what they’re hiding? The statistics suggest that your LinkedIn profile is seven times more likely to be viewed when it includes a photograph of you. In the for-what-it’s-worth category, get a professional headshot or two––it’ll be the best $150 you’ve ever spent and in today’s environment you’ll certainly get your money’s worth!

Stand out––don’t blend in.

Take Control of Your Personal Brand – You Never Know Who’s Looking!

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…

Establishing Your Personal Brand–A Stake in the Ground

Notwithstanding the fact that you may already have profiles and interactions on a number of different sites, lets focus on establishing a meaningful baseline that can best facilitate the promotion of your personal brand–a stake in the ground in other words.

It seems the most efficient place to do this is with one of the current internet pillars–LinkedIn. Yes, LinkedIn. Format, ease-of-use, visibility, number of users, overall connectivity, a ubiquitous presence and maybe the most important reason–the internal and external search features allowing people to find you. Find you for networking purposes, a career opportunity or a whole host of reasons that might be advantageous and to your benefit…particularly your career path. Personal visibility is key here and to earlier comments, with this kind of elevated visibility, your profile and picture shouldn’t be the equivalent of getting caught in that old t-shirt and sweat pants that you occasionally lay around the house in! Spend the time, fine tune your profile and understand that putting your best image on LinkedIn is work-in-progress and will likely require several edits before you’re reasonably comfortable with your page. It’s OK to search “best linkedin profiles” and “best linkedin summaries” to get an idea about your verbiage. There are video tutorials and lots of “how to” advice. Use every resource available to you and invest the time to do it right, even if it takes you several weeks. Before you know it your LinkedIn profile will begin to take shape and whether you’re a stay-at-home-mom or Fortune 50 CEO, you will find with a little effort that you can tell a very compelling story on LinkedIn about who you are–a framework for your personal brand.

Speaking of stakes in the ground, do you own your name as a dot com (ex. johndoe.com)? Do you own your kiddos names? If not, you should and the sooner you do so the greater the likelihood those names will be available. It’s simple–download the free GoDaddy app on your smart phone or tablet and then type your name into the search bar. If it’s available, buy it–period. If your given name is not available, find a variation that’s satisfactory to you and own that instead (ex. jdoe.com or jbdoe.com). As a matter of practical advice there are always specials available for GoGaddy if you google “GoDaddy specials” before you purchase. Even without the specials available to you we’re talking $10-12 dollars a year to own these precious URL‘s (they will be even more important in the future). Why you ask? Well, you could always hire a developer and spend several hundred or even thousands developing your own website or simply take advantage of a free GoDaddy service and redirect the URL to your LinkedIn page–voila!, now you effectively have your own website and anyone (and by that I mean anyone) can do it. At the very minimum, purchase your name (and the kiddos) and just hold on to them until you figure out what you want to do.

Next, we’ll talk about using free to inexpensive providers to transition the work you’ve done on LinkedIn with a keystroke or two over to a personalized website–a simple transition and the beginning of what I call a hub and spoke approach to personal brand building. And anyone can do it.

Stay tuned…

Personal Visibility – The Power of You!

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Blogs I Follow

Tom McCollum

Tom McCollum

Meta

Follow Blog via Email

Archive for the ‘Job Search’ Category

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Blogs I Follow

Tom McCollum

Meta

Follow Blog via Email

Archive for the ‘Job Search’ Category

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: