Key: Personal Branding and Social Networking
Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments
By Susan Older
Founder, Displaced Journalists
Febrauary 22. 2010
Job applications are so five minutes ago. Ask anyone who has spent day after day submitting cover letters and resumes online to no avail. On the rare occasion that you get a callback, it generally leads nowhere. Why?
Because they’ve never heard of you.
You haven’t marketed yourself.
If you plan on getting back into the game or even choosing a new career, you have to “brand” yourself, says Dan Schawbel, author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success.”
In the current climate, it’s all about “personal branding,” says Schawbel. When competition is stiff, you have to make yourself stand out from other applicants, whether it’s for a specific job or a small-business loan to finance your new venture.
If you don’t own your personal domain name, i.e., yourname@yourname.com, go to any of the domain name sites and buy it immediately. It’s not expensive, usually about $10 a year to own the domain name. You can decide later what to do with it. You can use it for your blog or a website, even just so you’ll have that email address with your own domain name.
Most, if not all of us, have Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. If you don’t, set them up today. Have you ever wondered just how much networking is enough? Can social networking ever be bad for your job search? Are some network sites better than others? How do these sites really work?
As for how they work, they all have good “help” sections. And I’ve added some excellent guides to social networking to our Good Books section (see menu).
Schawbel warns that you can do more harm than good to your personal brand if you misuse social networking sites. For example, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see, because the chances are good that they will see it. In the end, one ill-considered post could cost you a job. Don’t tweet too much; it makes you look like a slacker who does nothing but tweet. On the other hand, don’t tweet too little; it makes you look uninvolved. These are my words, not Schawbel’s.
Make sure you have a significant number of friends on Facebook. On LinkedIn, make sure you actively pursue connections. The same goes for followers on Twitter. Employers are likely to conduct a search to see how “connected” you are. If two equally qualified job candidates are vying for the same job, and one has 250 friends, connections or followers, while the other has only eight, guess who’s going to get the job? The one with more connections.
When asked what the most important message of “Me 2.0” is, this young, savvy author says the secret of success in the new world of work is being “commander of your career.”
“A commander is a state-of-mind,” he says, “and in order to help you unlock the commander inside of you, I wrote this book to navigate you through my personal branding process.”
The book includes:
- A proven 4-step process for building a powerful brand (discover, create, communicate, maintain).
- Tips on using social media tools for personal empowerment, confidence building, and professional networking in order to attract jobs directly to you, without applying.
- Tested advice on how to create an online and offline presence for career protection and self-promotion.
- More than 40 expert quotes from leaders including Don Tapscott, Guy Kawasaki, Penelope Trunk, and David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine among others.
- More than 70 research reports, three personal case studies and examples to give you a broader perspective on the topic
For even more tips on branding yourself, check out Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog and his Personal Branding Magazine.
Tags: Brand > Journalist > layoffs > New Ideas > Social networking > Solutions
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