If you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, I understand what personal branding is, but I still don’t get why I need to put time into this,” you’re right where most people are when they first start learning about personal branding.
It’s common to think of personal branding as something that famous people do, or something that college kids need to do to help find their first job, but taking care of your personal brand is important no matter what stage in your career you are at.
This chapter isn’t called “Why You Need a Personal Brand,” it’s called “Why You Need TO SHAPE Your Personal Brand.”
The truth is, you already have a personal brand, whether you’ve done anything about it or not. Your current personal brand is out there, and while it may be weak, it is your starting point. Your job as CEO of the company of YOU is to do everything you can to shape that personal branding into what you want to convey.
Taking Responsibility
The first reason to shape your personal branding efforts is to take responsibility. If you aren’t going to take responsibility for your personal brand, who will? This may seem like a no-brainer, but the truth is, it’s a decision you have to make, and something that you will need to keep up with once you start.
Something changes when you truly take responsibility for how you present yourself in person, online, and in every other way. It starts to seep slowly into how you make decisions, how you think about yourself, and the effects of that stretch far and wide.
Control the tone of conversation
Taking responsibility for your personal brand means that you take control of the tone of the conversation about you online, and that you start the conversation about you in person.
Starting and owning the tone of the conversation about you online is an important avenue to build a solid base of the kind of conversation you want to have about you in that space. It is critical to be vigilant about what you say about yourself, and equally important to know and take responsibility for what is out there from any source.
If you are looking for work clients, or any kind of opportunity, chances are they are looking online to find out what they can about you. And as Kevin Donline of the Star Tribune Minneapolis in St. Paul, Minnesota reported:
Seventy-seven percent of recruiters report using search engines to find background data on candidates. Of that number, 35 percent eliminated a candidate because of what they found online.
This means that three out of four recruiters will look up information about you online, and those who do will use that information to eliminate more than one in three candidates they are considering.
Taking the responsibility and owning your own personal brand puts you in the driver’s seat, and you will find that your awareness, not only of your brand, but of the way your brand interacts with and affects your business and field overall can be a powerful thing.
by Jim Kukral & Murray Newlands
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, a San Francisco-based online marketing and blogger outreach consulting firm. Jim Kukral and Murray Newlands recently wrote What is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! to help people learn how to market themselves.
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True, branding our business means greater responsibility and its very important to always keep in mind that how you present yourself in person, online, matters a lot because the whole world is watching us through our sites. We cannot distance ourselves from our responsibilities. Branding also means giving our business and ourselves as the owners a very formal and unique identity.
Hi Brian
Yes once you start the branding of your business you make it much easier for your clients to find you and it will actually help you to build a relationship of trust with those clients you interact with online.
Buddy very inspiring writing I must confess. I just enjoyed your post and wanna say it’s good to know something about personal branding. I think it’ll be helpful for my business. Thanks a lot for good post.
Hi Jonathan
It is really to best option now for business so many many websites online now and everyone fighting to get to the top of the serps it only makes sense that you would brand your business across the internet. By doing this it will make it much easier for your potential customers to find you online.