Personal Branding
Right now, the big thing is self- branding. We’re told we should have our own website, write our own blog, comment on other people’s blogs, start our own e-newsletter, join as many social networking sites as possible, start our own group on LinkedIn or become a top expert by answering questions asked by group members on LinkedIn to name a few branding tips.
How am I supposed to get any paying work done if I am doing all this work to brand myself?
I was reading a post on LinkedIn the other day from someone who said they wouldn’t hire anyone who wasn’t on LinkedIn and who didn’t have at least 100 contacts.
Doesn’t this negate anyone who is not on LinkedIn or who is but only has 89 contacts? Whatever happened to qualifications, experience, and being a team player?
Is it just me or do other people also feel that Andy Warhol’s prediction of “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” has become a quest for eternal fame —after all everything continues to live on the net, doesn’t it?
A network used to be comprised of friends, people we admired and wanted to get to know better and acquaintances. Now it seems to have become a race to get as many names in your online network as possible whether you know, admire or even care who they are.
Isn’t it somehow sad that we are following the dictum to ask the contacts we have in our LinkedIn network to recommend us and if that isn’t enough invite people to join LinkedIn so they can give us a recommendation? All this social networking to burnish our personal brand!
A friend of mine recently went to a workshop because he was impressed by the instructor’s web profile only to be disappointed that the reality didn’t match the cyber brand. This made me think of the ad for a brand of audiotape “is it real or is it Memorex?”
I have to confess I have been self-branding recently, have you been too?
Margaret McGannCPRS Member
Years in the PR industry: 16+
Vancouver, BC
Tags: Andy Warhol, branding, linkedin, self-branding, social networking
March 11th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I’m guilty of this. The pressure to do it is overwhelming.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Hey I just want to introduce myself to everyone. My name is Kenneth.
This is a great board I have checked in from time to time and I think I‘m ready to participate and contribute with you guys.
I thought about starting my own board but I‘m glad I found this one instead. Great Info!
Peace....
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:43 am
There are a couple of different ways I go about it. Ping.FM is a service where you can update multiple profiles at once from one dashboard. The other option is to pull feeds from services you use most often ie. Twitter etc. and just stream those into your other services. Look for the add RSS option.