Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

Pew Internet and American Life Project reported on December 16th that 18% of working college graduates said that their employer expects some form of self-marketing online as part of their job.

Reading this part of the research report made my day, as it is highly in favor of personal branding. I’m not surprised at all by this figure and believe that you will see this number increase drastically as we move forward. We need to keep evangelizing personal branding (they call it self-marketing) and companies will see the true value in social media as a way to connect people and build external voices. The 18% represents employers who recognize the significance of building their employee brands, as a way to extend their corporate reach, and increase employee retention (through this benefit). Salespeople need to sell themselves before the product, while technical specialists have an endless supply of information to share and marketers need to collect customer research and new idea’s. In my generation, college graduates are looking to advance at a rapid pace and through personal branding, they can accomplish years of work, in a few months.

Companies who are not embracing personal branding have two main concerns: the more visible their employee’s are, the more likely they will be recruited by competitors and the lack of control they have over employee blogs. As employee’s venture to the online world, they are viewed as ambassadors of the company and if they foul up, then the company’s brand takes the hit as well. The corporate “target” gets much bigger if employee’s are engaging in conversations online. Competitors can start throwing darts at the target, as well as unhappy customers.

As the adoption rate of social media and networks rises, the percentage of employers who build it into their job descriptions will climb as well. College graduates will expect that they will be allowed to blog and join social networks because they will be already participating in them prior to their job offer. The fact that 55% of online teens have created an online profile allows us to assume that as this generation enters the workforce, they will have the expectation that personal branding be a part of their job.

Nearly half of all internet users (47%) have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22%, as reported by the Pew Internet Project in 2002. Googling yourself is becoming a routine part of our life and if you’re not searchable through Google, then you won’t be seen by employers. Some people do it for fun, others for reputation management and some as a research project. People Google you in the same way, for the same reasons. Information found comes in a few formats: 1) Comments you write on other blogs 2) Websites that you currently own 3) People who blog about you 4) Press that you’ve received (bylined articles/written columns) 5) Profiles from social networks you belong to.  Scared of what you’ll see?  You can always fight back with SEO (search engine optimization).

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