LinkedIn News Roundup: Tips on building your personal brand
Before we get to a couple of recent posts on personal branding, I thought it'd be a good idea to start the post with the video of Reid Hoffman's recent keynote presentation at the "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in San Jose.
Reid was also on a recent panel discussion on Social Networking at the recently concluded Google Zeitgest conference in Mountain View, which featured speakers ranging from John Legend to President Bill Clinton (via satellite). Check out that video here.
So, here are a couple of interesting articles we found this past week on building your personal brand:
* Do you know who is viewing your personal brand?
An interesting piece from the popular Web Worker Daily blog, Dan Schawbel highlights 5 tips on protecting your personal brand online.
It’s important to note that as you build your brand and reputation, you take significant time to ensure integrity and accuracy. You never want to Google your name and find that you are misrepresented by a blogger or a comment on your Facebook wall. As you become a web worker, you want to establish a daily means of checking your status. There are way too many people that lose opportunities from what employers have seen online
As we've outlined in prior posts, particularly the most recent one by Steve Patrizi, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to get started on strengthening your online brand with a focus on your professional accomplishments:
Branding is something that we as professionals need to take very seriously on an individual level. Ten years ago, Tom Peters penned an article for Fast Company called “The Brand Called You”, which stressed that it’s absolutely imperative for all professionals to develop a unique and personal “professional brand” that communicates the value they have to offer to prospective employers, employees, clients and business partners.
* Is your public image a liability?
Liz Ryan, the Savvy Networker asks if your public image is a liability, once again draws attention to the importance and the value of your online brand:
A majority of employers now routinely check their job candidates' MySpace, Linkedin and Facebook profiles for any impropriety, prior to making an offer. Can you blame them? It's not so much that your prospective employer worries about your keg parties or those photos of you with your favorite bong. It's that they worry, with reason, about your judgment in throwing these items online for anyone to see.
I'd like to once again draw attention to the above mentioned blog post by Steve Patrizi on how LinkedIn allows you to control that professional brand of yours most effectively:
That idea (of the "The Brand Called You") was true then and it’s even more true today. The major search engines and social networks have made all of us far more accessible and visible than ever before, making it so much more critical that we actively manage our own professional brands. And that’s where LinkedIn really shines, allowing you to take control of the major elements of your professional brand: the people you associate with, the questions you ask and the answers you provide, the recommendations you give and receive, and the way in which you express your experiences and skills.
Have you begun nurturing your professional brand online as you do offline? Feel free to leave comments on how you've used LinkedIn to effectively strengthen your professional brand.