Personal Branding

Objectives How do you see yourself? How do others see you? What is your personal brand?

Activity 1 How do you see yourself? Complete a SWOT Analysis – examine your online profiles and what messages they send to your audiences for example, potential employers on social media: Strengths : Skills and attributes that you DO have potential employers are looking for; Weaknesses : Skills and attributes you DON’T have that employers are looking for; Opportunities : Skills and attributes you DO have but employers are not looking for them yet; Threats : Skills and attributes you DO have but employers are no longer looking for.

How do you see yourself? Now, consider how you can maximize the strengths and opportunities in your profiles and how you can reduce weaknesses and threats through learning and developing your skills. Now consider how you can use different social networks where your potential employers or business partners might be engaging. Can you engage with them on these networks? How? How often?

Get Ahead Find your target audience: Your target audience is the people you want to work with or establish a professional network. Your professional connection. Social and professional circle. Know your influencers: Key influencers and individuals who would make employment decisions or help in your application process, or will be the bridge between other important people. Later on, you will reach them on their social networks. Know your competition: Make a SWOT analysis of people who do the same type of work you do or have the same skills you have. It will give you a wider view to understand your uniqueness. You can research them in their professional networks. My top ten competitors were searched in LinkedIn, which is the social media site that I am going to use for job hunting as many job ads are posted frequently in this network. Using the keyword Integrated Marketing Communications, all the results are filtered selecting those who are based in the US in the same order they appear in the lists. You can check what kinds of skills they have and their use of social media for personal branding.

Activity 2 How do others see you? Have you ever googled yourself? Visit or another popular search engine in a country of your choice and type in your name in the search box – make a note of your results. Later Activity: Search for a job on jobs section for a job that interests you. Make a list of attributes, skills and abilities the employers are looking for.

Brand Yourself Once you have a clear idea of your personal brand, it’s time to share it. Classic branding tools are CVs (Resumes) and cover letters, but in today’s world you need to communicate your brand online. Now is time to consider setting up a website, becoming a blogger, creating your online CV/Resume on LinkedIn, using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Youtube to communicate consistently your brand. You can use BrandYourself.com to share your brand and control what people find when they Google you.BrandYourself.com

Create an Engagement Plan We all know that managing your online personal brand through social networks could be time consuming. Here are some tools that could help you to leverage your work and make things a little bit easier: HootsuiteHootsuite helps you to manage all your social media accounts from one web-based dashboard. You can schedule your post and invite multiple collaborators. Most features of this tool are free but if you want to upgrade the service, additional fees apply. TweetDeckTweetDeck is another great app that helps you to schedule your tweets, monitor and manage accounts and stay up to date with alerts to new tweets. KloutKlout helps you measure your social media influence. It gets the data from the user social networks linked to Klout. It analyzes the size of the user’s network, the type of content and the people interaction with that content. There are other tools that have similar function such as Twentyfeet, Crowdbooster and Tweetstats. You can select the social media channels that suit your needs.

Be Careful! Think twice! Have you ever heard the old phrase “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”? Thanks to social media, it is no longer true. What happens on the web stays on the web.“what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”

Good Luck Connect with me on social media and stay in touch Thank you for a great semester!