Dan
Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan,
April 09), and owner of the award winning Personal
Branding Blog.
Social media tools are becoming
mandatory for career success. They are free advertising and give you the
ability to connect directly with hiring managers, entrepreneurs and recruiters,
instead of applying for jobs through job boards, which are black holes.
Your digital assets — blog, podcast, and social networking profiles — are your
online identity and how people discover and connect with you. You have
the ability to leverage one or all of these social media tools in order to
present a positive image and be recruited for a position that aligns with your
passion.
In this post, you’ll learn how to
conduct a situational analysis, figure out exactly what your personal brand is,
select the best social media tools to connect with your audience, build your
online empire and finally, market your brand for career success. In light
of the launch of my new book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to
Achieve Career Success, we’re also giving away free copies
(details at the bottom of this post).
1. Conduct a
situational analysis
You can’t leverage social media for
career success unless you know where you stand today. This includes
taking a good look at your life, what your current responsibilities are, the
amount of resources you currently have and your career position. For
instance, if you have two children and a full-time job (two children is probably
another full-time job), you won’t be able to spend ten hours a day building a
community using social media tools. If you’re twenty years old and your
parents are wealthy, then you will have more time to invest in your online
brand and you may have extra cash to help market yourself. Also, you may have a
strong or a weak professional network, which can either support your brand or
hinder it moving forward.
When it comes to your career, you
need to decide if you’re looking to go to graduate school, start a company, or
get a full-time job at a company and climb that corporate ladder. These
decisions will impact how you use tools to communicate what you do, who you
serve, and how you want to be positioned relative to everyone else, along with
your goals and mission.
2. Unearth your
personal brand
Since social media tools require
multimedia and written components for profiles, you’ll need to figure out your
personal brand before you start building your profiles.
Start by assessing what your strengths are, what you’re passionate about and
then ask your network for feedback. Figure out how people describe you
already and how you want people to perceive you in the future. During this
time, you’ll want to stay true to yourself, remain authentic and be completely
transparent because that is how people are going to relate to you.
Decide on your personal brand
statement, a single picture/avatar to best represent you and fill out the
typical profile fields that you will find on the majority of social networks
(i.e. a summary, work experience, personal interests, etc). Your personal
brand statement isn’t a job title, like financial analyst or marketing
manager. Instead it tells the world two things: what you do and who
you serve. After you’ve written all of this information down, you’re
prepared to select the best social media tools for your branding strategy.
3. Select the
right tools
Social media tools should be
selected along the lines of three sets of criteria. First, the volume of
the social network is an important qualification because you want to market
yourself where a lot of people are already searching for people that have your
expertise. Plus, social networks like FacebookFacebook reviews
, LinkedInLinkedIn reviews, TwitterTwitter reviews
, FriendFeedFriendFeed
reviews, YouTubeYouTube reviews, FlickrFlickr reviews, DeliciousDelicious
reviews and DiggDigg reviews have millions of users that
can share your resume, profile, blog entries and more. This allows your
brand to go viral and that exposure can help you land a job without
applying. Second, the credibility of social networks helps you consider
only the tools that have successful individuals you’d want to network with to
help your career. For instance, LinkedIn is known to have many executives on
it, including Bill Gates.
Finally, the relevancy of the social
network, as it ties in to your career and industry, can void the other two
requirements. There are social networks for doctors (Medical Mingle), real
estate agents (Active Rain),
and many more. You’ll want to join these because you’ll meet people just
like you. Ning
contains social networks for almost every vertical as well.
Aside from social networks, I highly
encourage you to have your own personal digital asset. This could be
either a blog or a traditional website registered under your name or the topic
you want to own (with keywords). For blogging, use either Wordpress.com/.org, Bloggerblogger reviews, TypepadTypePad reviews or TumblrTumblr reviews. For traditional
websites, use a host such as Bluehost,
Godaddy, or a free
host like Bravenet.
4. Build your
online empire
Now that you have all the tools in
place and have filled out all your social networking profiles, it’s time to
start building your online empire. This means you have to start generating
a lot of content, either written, audio, video or all three. It also requires
you to become a resource and a valuable contributor to your community.
You’ll have to constantly share
interesting articles that you create or that you find on your topic and
distribute them throughout all of your networks (the ones that you chose in
step 4). The process for building your empire includes creating
interesting and relevant content and publishing it, over and over again.
To do this, you need to be committed, confident and passionate about what you
do or you’ll end up giving up.
5. Market your
brand
Marketing your
brand for career success is the hardest part of the
process. Most bloggers don’t even bother marketing their blogs.
They believe that creating content markets itself, which is completely false
and the reason why they have yet to reach a high level of success. Just
having social networking profiles isn’t enough. You need to invest ten
times as many hours in your marketing campaign as you do actually creating
content.
There are many routes you can take
to market your brand, such as being a member of a special interest group,
becoming a leader in that group and speaking to organizations. Then there’s
commenting on blogs in your industry, guest posting on other sites and
interviewing bloggers. You can pitch bloggers and traditional journalists
so that you can be a part of their stories and you can join forums, Facebook
fan pages and groups to meet other people that may want your services.
Regardless of the way you get your name out there, ensure it’s consistent with
your brand.
6. Monitor your
reputation
Whether you choose to use free or fee-based reputation monitoring tools, you need to keep
your pulse on what people are saying about you all the time. The
mandatory tools you need to use are search.twitter.com and google.com/alerts because you’ll be able to catch
microposts (Twitter) and macroposts (blogs/news articles) citing your
name.
You want to have a fast reaction time so that you can locate Tweets or blog posts that you can leverage as endorsements or find negative messages that you can prevent from spreading. Think about monitoring your reputation as an opportunity to learn more about how you’re projecting your brand to the world and take some of it as feedback to help you in your future career development.
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