Happy 4th of July! I was just reading this article on Mashable.com about branding. It intrigued me to blog, because it sums up a few of the top things I have worked hard to accomplish as an entrepreneur. If you own your own business or planning to, this is a wonderful and simplified guide to the beginnings of branding. Check out these five important steps that often get overlooked and reevaluate your business. You will be glad you did!
1. Don’t Ignore Brand Mentions
58% of Americans don’t even Google themselves, but employers and potential customers certainly will. It’s safe to say that people are already talking about you, either online or offline.
As you create your personal brand on a variety of platforms, your name will start popping up in search engines and on social networks. This can be both beneficial to your brand or harmful depending on the context. The viral nature of social networks, as well as their new ubiquity, should encourage you to start listening in on what people are saying about you.
Negative mentions will spread fast unless you keep your ear close to the web, so I recommend you setup a Google alert for your name, your company’s name, key competitors, partners, and industry buzz terms. There are many other free tools that can help you monitor your brand. You can also try Social Mention for a more complete solution to brand mentions on social networks.
2. Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin
A future problem, which some might say is a current problem, is the volume of social networks and the amount of status updates and messages you receive each day. If you’re active on each and every social network that launches, you will start to spread yourself too thin, which can really hurt your brand. You won’t possibly be able to update all of your social profiles, as well as keep track of pictures, profile information, groups, etc. In general, you should only join the largest
social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as those networks in your industry.As I noted in a previous Mashable post, you should reserve your full name on as many of the popular social networks as possible by using a service such as namechk.com,
before someone who shares your name claims them and you’re locked out for life. But just because you have claimed your name everywhere doesn’t mean you should expend valuable time and energy maintaining a presence on every social network.
There are some websites that allow you to scale your social feeds so that one status update can automatically spread to other networks, without manually publishing content. You can use hellotxt.com or ping.fm to spread your status message to many social networks at once, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. You can also go to your LinkedIn profile and syndicate your tweets for your LinkedIn status
update automatically or by using “#in” for each tweet (if you want to be
selective). There is also a Facebook application for Twitter so you can syndicate your tweets through your Facebook profile.
3. Know Your Audience
It’s really easy to forgot who you’re connected with on social networks as they grow. You might start out with high school, college, and summer camp friends, and then add some co-workers when you start a new job. There will be a point where you’re going to have to make a strategic decision, who you accept and who you don’t. The second you add your manager or colleagues is the time when you have to rethink what you publish or what you syndicate from other social networks. One mistake
could cause you trouble.
On Facebook, you may want to have a profile page for your inner circle of friends and family members and then a Facebook Fan Page for your professional image. This way, you can make your profile private and hide it from search, while having a fan
page that you can point your coworkers to. They will know that you are
hiding your profile but should respect your privacy, especially since
you’re giving them the option to follow your fan page.
4. Limit Self-Promotion
Certainly,
self-promotion is an extremely important part of building your brand
because if no one knows of your achievements or the company you work
for, then how are they going to do business with you? Yet, I’ve noticed
that people often over-promote themselves in various ways across the web.
Successful
self-promotion only works in moderation, because if you’re constantly
only promoting yourself, many people will unfollow, unfriend, or block
you from their network. The best way to build a strong personal brand is
to promote other people, which creates goodwill and a connection, as
well as distributing value based on what you have to offer: Your
expertise. If you’re helping people 80 or 90% of the time, then people
will be much more accepting of your self-promotional messages the other
10%. You will also start to notice that other people will promote you —
and their endorsement is even stronger than your own proclamations.
5. Be Consistent
Consistency is extremely important when it comes to any kind of branding, from personal to corporate.
Selecting a unified “picture” and spreading it across all your social media —
your website, your blog, your presentations, your press kits, your business cards, etc. — will build image recognition in the mind of your audience. Consistency is significant for pictures, your name, as well as the fonts, the colors and the overall message that you communicate through your online properties.
There is no question that you already have a personal brand — whether you built it yourself or not.
The way to differentiate it from everyone else is through management. By paying attention to mentions of your name online, not spreading yourself too thin, knowing your audience, offering more value than self-promotion, and being consistent, you can be very successful.
Original Article Posted On Mashable.com:
5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
