When confronted with the concept of branding, our thinking generally gravitates towards corporations and their respective brands.  Unfortunately, we tend to neglect the most important brand – ourselves.

Whether you’re looking for a job or comfortable in your current situation, building your own personal brand is an important and continuous process that cannot be overstated.  In years past; building a reputation, creating visibility, and/or demonstrating mastery of topic material was a timely process that required a great deal of physical interaction.

The proliferation of the Internet, and in particular, social media, has revolutionized this process and created a new paradigm in personal brand-building.  Your physical and virtual identities are increasingly becoming ubiquitous.  Here are a few approaches on leveraging social media to build your most important brand and stay above the “noise”.

 

Start a blog and become relevant to an active and engaged community.  A Wordpress  account takes only a few minutes.  Be authentic and demonstrate your understanding of the subject matter through your writing.  Essentially, develop quality content.

Content is king and drives users to your site.  A brief introduction into search optimization (SEO/SEM) will assist you in driving users to your site right from the start in an efficient manner. Services such as MyBlogLog allow you to know who is visiting your blog and gives you the ability to connect with them.  This effectively expands your social graph via the content you create essentially creating a network effect.  It’s a social and informative experience with a touch of serendipity.

Become visible in the blogosphere beyond your own personal blog.  Read other prominent bloggers within your area of expertise and comment to become an active participant across the blogosphere.  Organize the various RSS feeds via Google Reader. It’s not just relevancy, it’s safe and trusted visibility within your respected peer group(s) that allows you to promote personal credibility and legitimacy.

 

Get LinkedIn and get connected.  Strengthen your network of professional colleagues and provide your background in a safe and trusted way.  Being a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) can expand your network fast, but it dilutes the value of your personal network.  Make sure the connection is a win-win.  Build out your experiences and expertise and get noticed by the right people that can assist in furthering your professional development.

Having trusted and personal referrals is important to professional development.  Address the Q&A section and join relevant groups on LinkedIn to further create and drive content.  This also allows you to interact with similar professionals who may possess common interest and/or objectives.  Many successful business relationships and employment opportunities have happened as a result of leveraging these specific tools.  Visual CV is yet another good example of this

Embed your content for redistribution.  Create a viral effect by embedding content into other accounts.  Create slideshows on SlideShare, videos on YouTube, pictures on Flickr, and tag on Delicious.  Embed a picture or video on your blog, type a tinyURL on Twitter, comment on FriendFeed, or include your latest blog feed on your Facebook and/or LinkedIn account.

It’s not just about creating the content on one platform.  It’s about spreading your content through multiple platforms.  It drives incremental visitors to your site.  By embedding content across the various platforms, you’ve magnified your message and created a strong viral effect.

Content isn’t just words.  It’s visual too.  Get multimedia.   Sometimes a picture says a thousand words.  If you have a great message, it will be consumed.  Have a conveying graph or chart to showcase?  That’s a great start to get your audience engaged.

Creating a personal social media presence provides the following invaluable benefits: 

• Develops and further strengthens your reputation

• Promotes your goals and agenda in a genuine and non-intrusive manner

• Showcases your mastery of your area(s) expertise

 And most importantly,

         it allows you to stand-out from the rest.  It's all about differentiation!

It’s a win-win – you’ve demonstrated your knowledge base and opened/engaged your professional network in creative and social ways.  And did I mention, you got your message(s) across.

It’s a small investment, but the payoff can be large.

I’ll see you there!