eBranding Becomes Mandatory for Surviving the Digital Age

June 30, 2008 at 11:10 am | In Career Development, People, Personal Branding, Reputation Management, Success Strategies, eBrand, social media | 4 Comments

This post is from my article that was published on BrandChannel.com on Friday evening. It is probably the most thorough article on the topic of personal eBranding and one of my better written pieces this year. I pooled a large team of experts to give some advice from their perspective. You can find the original article here.

Brand Speak

Introduction

Personal eBranding is the next wave of personal and professional development online. A personal brand is how you market yourself to others, whereas an eBrand is a digital representation of yourself online. Your brand is who you are and what you stand for, including values, competencies, attitudes, vision, mission, personality and appearance. The combined sum of everything you are and how you project it to others, whether online or offline, is your brand.

Therefore, if your name is only attached to a single blog, that blog becomes your personal eBrand. If you have commented on ten blogs, and have three social network profiles, then the sum of that participation and creation is your brand—it is how people perceive you. Any single individual can and should develop an eBrand. There are no barriers to entry anymore, as the cost of building an eBrand has been reduced to nothing.

The facts

Companies, as well as individuals, understand the importance of eBranding, and the untapped potential of social networks. In fact, 40 percent of companies are set to increase spending on social networks next year (Forrester Research). 78 percent of marketers are using blogs, 63 percent use video, and 56 percent use social networks (MarketingVox.com). Online profiles are monitored by recruiters constantly, and although your personal brand may remain constant as technology advances, your eBrand must be both consistent and up-to-date to accurately represent your brand as being knowledgeable and technologically savvy.

Google is the gateway to viewing and uncovering personal eBrands. A simple search determines if you have a presence, how many hits depict how impactful that presence is and the contentObsessed Personal Brands represents the credibility behind the brand. The first page of results for your name is critical for your reputation. Forty-nine percent of people actually change their search terms after not finding a desired result on the first page (iProspect). Being in the first page is great for brand visibility and expert positioning. Thirty-nine percent of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned among the top search engine results are the leaders in the field (iProspect).

People are often—understandably—obsessed with their eBrands. They want to know how many results they have for their name and how their results are manipulated by search engines. Forty-seven percent of internet users have done these ego searches, which is an increase from 22 percent five years ago (Pew/Internet Survey). As the number of communication vehicles increase, the need to constantly monitor and patrol your personal eBrand increases. Corporations have already noticed this trend and are starting to react. In fact, 51 percent of the Inc. 500 companies are monitoring social media through RSS feeds, web statistics, video downloads and more.

The ProcessPersonal Branding Process

  1. Discover – Before you enter the virtual world, you need to focus on finding out who you are and what you want to do. The majority of blogs fail because people don’t take time to learn about themselves, what they are passionate about and the topic they can write about. Passion is the driving force as much online as it is in reality. Before you go to build your brand, it helps to assess what conversations are taking place online and your current life situation.
  2. Create – After you’ve taken a stand on a topic, it’s time to choose a platform. Do you want to establish a blog? Are you more interested in joining a few social networks? Do you want to be a traditionalist and stick with a static webpage? These are questions you need to ask yourself. Choose your strategy wisely, as you don’t want to spread your brand too thin. For blogs, choose between WordPress.com/.org and Typepad.
  3. Communicate – Now that you have an eBrand, it’s time to communicate it to others. There are many ways to promote your blog or website online, such as doing guest blog posts, link exchanges, and by joining social networks. Remember that visibility creates opportunities.
  4. Maintain – Once you are established online, you will need to protect your reputation. A few ways to monitor your brand are to perform a Google or Technorati search for your name. Also, you must ensure the accuracy of all your online properties and keep them up-to-date, so as you grow, your eBrand grows as well.

Successful eBranding strategies

In the future, everyone will have some form of online presence, whether it be a simple web page, blog, article, or via comments or appearances on social networks. The following expert strategies offer some insight on how to best exploit eBranding opportunities.

  • “Figure out your objectives before you do anything.” – Geoff Livingston, Author, now is gone
  • “Own a niche.” – Ben McConnell, Co-Author, Citizen Marketers
  • “Be curious about social media and study the people that are experts at using these tools to see what is working for them.” – Mack Collier, Blogger and Consultant, The Viral Garden
  • “Definitely make sure you’ve claimed your Zoominfo.com profile. You can make sure its up to date and request removal of anything inaccurate.” – Andy Beal, Co-Author, Radically Transparent
  • “Don’t rely on the old rules of buying access via advertising or begging mainstream media to write about you. Instead publish great (and free) content on the Web that people are eager to consume.” – David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR
  • “Invest in an effective logo design. More often than not, your target audience will see your logo before any other aspect of the company, and despite opinion to the contrary, people judge books by their covers.” – David Airey, Graphic Designer and Blogger
  • “Be aware of your digital identity; you can’t entirely control your digital trail but you can put your best foot forward with a well-written blog and by being generous in your social networks.” – Debbie Weil, Author, The Corporate Blogging Book
  • “I like creating a personal branding hub to bring together all of your social and online activities into one jumping off place.” – John Jantsch, Author and Blogger, Duct Tape Marketing
  • “Be generous with your time. Answer questions, respond to queries.” – Shel Holtz, Co-Author, Blogging for Business

Challenges brands face online

There are many challenges that personal and corporate brands face online. Companies are being forced to open their culture and communicate with the outside world in a way that embraces two-way communication. People need to be found and positioned as experts in their niches. In both situations, there are challenges that may impede the branding process. The following experts shed light on these challenges:

  • “Brands face two main challenges online today: making sure they have a presence where their current and future customers are and moving forward with trends faster than ever before.” – Allen Stern, Editor, CenterNetworks
  • “With the explosion of so much personal digital communication—social networks, IM platforms, blogs, podcasts, virtual worlds, mobile, etc.—brands are facing the prospect of too many channels. We’ve gone from the concept of mass marketing to mass micromarketing in an incredibly short period of time, and it’s difficult for brand managers to understand which are the most important to focus on.” – Scott Monty, Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motors
  • “Moving past message control and stepping into conversations where they are responsible to add value to the community.” – Matt Dickman, Vice President of Digital Marketing, Fleishman-Hillard.
  • “If a brand value is service and your web presence makes it a real challenge to get immediate assistance, then you are weakening the foundation of your brand.” – Ed Roach, Branding Expert

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Within the next five minutes, you have the ability to ignite your personal eBrand by using tools such as a WordPress.com blog, a Facebook or LinkedIn profile or by simply microblogging using a Twitter account. Indeed, eBranding requires a multi-pronged online strategy that exploits every content-appropriate platform and level available. As each asset is built, you will need to keep tabs on it, provide fresh updates and comments, and use Google Alerts and Technorati to track your online exposure and popularity. Whether you are an entrepreneur or a corporate employee, eBranding will bring meaning to your life and expedite your professional networking profile and profitability opportunities.

Today, eBranding is growing exponentially, and both individuals and corporations who underestimate the power of their online reputation will suffer from arriving late to a venue that is already crowded with established brands. As our entire society is transferred to digital bits, your eBrand becomes a digital asset and an avatar for being a part of a brave new world.

Will Our Personal Brands Enter a Dark Age of Distraction?

June 27, 2008 at 11:12 am | In Book Reviews, Interview, People, Personal Branding | 1 Comment

Maggie Jackson

Today, I had the chance to speak with Maggie Jackson, whose book I highlighted in last weeks “top 10 book” post. This book is very timely, especially when we continuously talk about how social media is impacting our lives. A lot of the time, I give you positive benefits such as expert positioning, while other posts I’ve spoken about how reputation management is required in the digital age. Maggie talks about how we must be aware of these distractions and how to live a life with more focus.

Maggie is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention, while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload.

1) Maggie, how will distractions pull us into the dark age?

A dark age is a turning point in history, and it is not a one-dimensional time of negative occurrences and lack of progress. For instance, many past dark ages experienced incredible tech gains. In the Middle Ages, the eyeglasses, the fireplace, the windmill, the stirrup, the rudder, the compass, and the mechanical clock were invented. But in total, a dark age is a time of cultural losses. It’s a dark time when we are not going deeply in thought or relationships because we are not using our powers of attention fully and wisely.

For instance, it’s one thing to be ignorant because of a lack of information; it’s another to be ignorant when we’re surrounded by information, but we don’t have the will or ability to tap into it. If we think that what comes up first on Google is knowledge, then I argue that we as a civilization are slipping into a dark age. And today, studies show that tech-savvy younger people often don’t know how to evaluate or assess information from the Web. U.S. 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 developed countries on assessments of problem-solving – a key twenty-first century skill. And U.S. knowledge workers are so scattered and interrupted that they say they literally don’t have time to think.

Second, if the thinnest type of person-to-person contact is what we prefer, this is another sign of a dark age. Our technologies have given us extraordinary connectivity. One sociologist parsed the five-year email archive of one 24-year-old and found that he had ties to 11.7 million people in the world! Yet studies show that when our networks of tie grow, we have less contact with others – fewer face to face meetings, telephone calls etc – except by email. We are increasingly depending too heavily on diets of the thinnest, most faceless means of communications. One quarter of Americans have no close confidante – a level of social isolation significantly higher than even just 20 years ago. Social networks and other tech ties have a place in our digital world, but they shouldn’t be our front and center, dominant means of relating to one another.

Two points are important to keep in mind: I’m not saying ‘Blame the Blackberry’ or any technology. We live in a world of flux, and that changes how we pay attention. Our awareness is a little more blurry and our focus is split and diffused. We live in a culture of distraction, one where our attentional skills are eroding, because of deep changes in our society, culture, and habits – and new experiences of time and space. Of course, the way in which we live also gives us great positive rewards as well—freedom, mobility, the idea that careers are fluid, the flattening of hierarchies. The costs are diffusion and fragmentation, and that undermine our abilities to relate and think deeply.

2) Are all distractions necessary? Even though, as you say, they consume 28% of the average US worker’s day, do you feel that they can actually help someone, instead of lowering productivity?

Distraction and being distracted are slippery concepts, because a distraction is in the eye of the beholder. I can be distracted by the screen, or focused on the screen and distracted by my daughter. The distraction is whatever pulls you away from your primary goal. Distraction in and of itself is not bad; in the medical world, distraction is one of the main ways in which pain can be alleviated.

Distraction, for me, is shorthand for not using our attentional skills well. There are no specific distractions that are categorically bad. I’m also not arguing that technology itself is bad. I’m arguing that we’re off-kilter; the balance has flung too far towards these shallower means of communication and thought. We need to wrestle ourselves back so we don’t lose the capability to understand what it is to think and relate deeply – and to pursue our goals.

3) How can one avoid distraction? Do you have 3 top tips?

1) Speak a Language of Attention – Attention isn’t just one thing. It’s now considered by many neuroscientists to be a tripartite set of skills made up of focus, awareness, and executive attention, i.e. planning and decision-making. Perhaps most importantly, scientists are beginning to discover that attention can be bolstered through practice and training. There’s more research yet to be done on this score, but these initial discoveries can help us thrive in a world of overload. Try deliberately using all your senses to expand your awareness fully when you’re in a new situation, such as a job interview. Or when you are struggling with a tough task, try keeping the “spotlight” of your focus on that challenge, pulling it back if your mind drifts. Think of these attentional skills as different arrows in your cognitive quiver.

2) Be Wary of Interruptions – An interruption is much more than a delay in your to-do list. Researchers from the new field of “interruption science” have discovered that knowledge workers switch tasks every three minutes. And once interrupted, a worker takes an average 25 minutes to return to their original task, according to informatics scientist Gloria Mark. Humans are built to be interrupted, since that’s how we stay tuned to changes in our environment. But that means we have trouble pursuing our goals, and even remembering our goals, since our short-term memory is quite limited. Try to turn off the ringers and control the urge to check email constantly if you want to get focused work done.

3) Focus on One Another – We’re so used to splitting our focus between pdas and tvs, and people and tasks that it’s hard to truly attend to any one thing. But continuous partial attention undermines the depth and quality of our relationships and our interactions. When we give each other half-focus in conversations, on conference calls, or at meals, we are effectively saying, “you aren’t worth my time.”

Perform a People Search Instead of a Job Search

June 26, 2008 at 11:16 am | In Career Development, Networking, Personal Branding, Recruitment, Success Strategies | 5 Comments

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Are you sick and tired of applying for jobs? Did you know that 80% of jobs are never even advertised? How about if I told you that only 10% of jobs come from sending a blind resume? Most jobs are filled before you even interview for them. What HR doesn’t tell you is that they already have a list of recommended candidates from other employees or recruiters. You need to spend your time wisely when you are searching for a job. The more time you allocate to submitting your resume and cover letter to corporate websites and job boards on major sites, the less time you are spending actually meeting the hiring managers who are recruiting for those spots.

Is job searching dead?

As I type this, you are probably applying for a job the typical way. Realistically, job searching is far from dead, but the smartest seekers are the ones that build relationships with companies they are genuinely interested in. We all need to stop wasting time to find “stepping stone” jobs and more time targeting places we know we would be happily employed at. Aside from the statistics shown above, that have been passed around for the past few years, the main issue with job searching is time investment.

The process of getting hired is search, submission, contact, interview (could be multiple rounds), offer and acceptance. By searching for jobs, you will be going through this process and it might stop at the last interview, without an offer. When this happens, all you receive in return is practice for the next cycle. We don’t receive proper feedback during the corporate interview process, therefore we aren’t more prepared for next time (but mentally we think we are). It’s time to invest less in searching for jobs.

The rise of people search

We’ve already gone over using Google to search for your brand and other people’s. Technorati is also a great search engine to locate people by blog topic. What we haven’t looked at is people-specific search engines and there are quite a few now. My two favorites are Twello, which just came out, and Wink. Twello is a personal brand locater for Twitter. It works much better than Twitters search interface and is much cleaner looking. I enjoy Wink because it’s the most accurate of all the people search engines, which isn’t saying too much. It locates your LinkedIn and Facebook account as well and displays your avatar.

People Search

Also, there is ZabaSearch, PeekYou, Pipl, ZoomInfo, and Spoke. There isn’t much differentiation between these services, but you can give them all a try and tell me which you prefer. The next question you will ask is “what if I don’t know the recruiters name?” I tend to use Facebook and blogs to find people before I do some research. I also think that word-of-mouth is critical to uncovering personal brands that are in hiding.

Subscribe to blogs that mention people and you’re bound to connect with who you are looking for at some point. Don’t be afraid of reaching out to someone by contacting them through their preference. You have nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is not receiving a response and the best case scenario is a new friend. Contact at least 5 people a day and your life will change. I know mine has.

Applying Personal Social Media Techniques to Corporate EMC

June 25, 2008 at 11:08 am | In Personal Branding, Success Methodologies, social media | 18 Comments
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Since this blog is specifically tied to the concept of personal branding, I fail to explain what my day job is. A lot of people think all I do is this blog, the magazine, the TV show, the awards, the articles and the upcoming book. I actually spent a lot of time figuring out, experimenting and executing social media programs at EMC Corporation, where I’m a social media specialist. When I was first hired in November of 2007, I was one of the first Fortune 500 employees tasks with bringing social media to the enterprise. I obtained my job because of my work outside of EMC and have never been more happy. A lot of my learnings have been applied to EMC, specifically the PR and HR areas. Today, I want to showcase my work at EMC, explain why it’s significant and then compare/contrast it to my work with personal branding.

In the beginningEMC Internal Social Network

When I first started out, one of my main objectives was to help build social media proficiency within the company and then to evolve the PR practice. We issued 3 social media releases (SMR) for major product and thought leadership announcements, through wire services. A very special shout out to Brian Solis, Todd Defren and Chris Heur, who evangelized and inspired SMR’s. Each release had a podcast, a few product pictures and sharing utilities.

At the same time, we were building an internal social network, under the leadership of Len Devanna(Director) and Chuck Hollis(VP), and with help from Jamie Johnson, Chris Britt and a few others. Chuck catalogs the journey in his other blog here. The purpose of the network was to connect employees based on professional and personal interests in a single forum, while allowing anyone to create a blog, wiki or conversation (thread). Special thanks to Kevin Kempskie, Steve Todd, Gina Minks, Hadley Weinzierl, Michael Gallant, Bill Petro, Dave Donohue, Heather Milne, Barry Burke, Mark Twomey and Polly Pearson for all their hard work spreading social media throughout EMC.

EMC’s social media releases (Wire)

EMC World 2008 and beyond

Anyone who truly understands this space knows that in order to succeed it’s a team effort. It’s now 2008 and a lot has changed with respect to social media at my company. The most exciting part is that everyone is working as a team and we can get more done in less time. Every year, thousands of EMC employees gather at EMC World, which is our largest event by far. This year, I was tasked, with forming a social media program around the event for over 9,000 people. With the combined energy and enthusiasm, we were able to launch EMC into the social media galaxy.

Joe Tucci (CEO/Chairman of EMC) presenting our social media newsroom

Special thanks to the web team for pulling this off. This was probably one of the highlights of my career.

Social media breakdown

EMC Social Media Press Release

  • Social media newsroom: A compilation of content for the media and attendees, including a YouTube, Twitter and Flickr widget, as well as product information and relevant links.
  • Social media release: Instead of using a wire service, our web team developed an SMR wrap-up of the entire event, with podcasts, pictures, and the ability to share the release using del.icio.us and digg.
  • Twitter: We currently have two accounts, both of which I’ve been supervising lately. The first is a 1-way press release distribution account (@EMCCorp) and the second was specifically designed for EMC World (@EMCWorld), as a tool to direct people to content or places on-site.
  • YouTube – Included keynote presentations, such as Joe Tucci’s keynote, as well as daily wrap-up’s each day and man-on-the-street customer interviews on-site.
  • Facebook – We set up a Facebook event page, where people could register and it linked directly to our EMC World website.
  • Flickr - This was used for the media specifically, so they could pull pictures and bio’s of executives, as well as view pictures LIVE from the event and product pictures.
  • Communities – These were for all registered participants and gave them the ability to talk amongst each other before, during and after the event.

Aside from this accomplishment, we have converted many in-house bloggers to external EMC “blog champions.” There is a lot to look forward in the future, as we expand into the B2C realm. Other companies have used social media, such as Zappos, Cisco, Microsoft, Home Depot and Ernst & Young. I can only see more companies adopting this in the future, but do feel right now is the best time. I say this because it costs very little to get involved and marketing budgets have been cut, due to the economy.

Tying it back to personal branding

When it comes to corporate social media programs, it’s not just about “the grand vision” or the “tools used.” It’s about the people that execute it. The conversations employees have with customers and partners through these tools is what’s important because their personal brand is on the line, as well as the company’s. The more voices you have participating in conversations where they can lend expertise or interact to get feedback the better. At this stage, companies need to accept the important of social media, as a channel to communicate, get feedback, learn and build brand. Your employees can’t sit back anymore or they will be left out. This is similar to being the person in the corner at a party and no one wants that.

Compared to corporate branding with social media, personal branding is much easier. The more people that get involved, the harder it is to control the message and the medium. A single individual can “publish-on-demand”, yet a group of individuals might have to check with each other pre-post. It’s easy for an A-list blogger to spread a message than a less-known blogger, unless you have many corporate bloggers as spokespeople working together to spread it. The same strategies can be used in both corporate and personal branding.

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