Personal Branding free essay sample

The Internet is a tool that allows any user to command his future with the click of a mouse. It has made possible connections and interconnections that grow into a wonderful web community. The Internet has revolutionized career development for personal empowerment, self-management and networking. It allows us to discover, create, communicate and maintain out personal brand for our future. The Web gives us the opportunity to promote â€Å"our brand† for ourselves by joining a social network and using our page as a billboard to advertise our talents and goals.Developing a personal brand makes us a more valuable asset, whether to the company we work for, a potential employer, or your own enterprise. This paper discusses the development and deployment of â€Å"personal branding† through appropriate social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It gives and insight on strategies for using social media for career advantage, privacy issues and its future outlook. We will write a custom essay sample on Personal Branding or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page From the job seeker side, traditional resumes don’t differentiate our brands because they don’t capitalize on our personalities and our industry voice (Musgrave, 2007).Now, instead of just having a resume, we will all have to communicate online, share our knowledge, and make new connections— just about every day. When all resumes start looking almost identical to employers, our creative ideas and networks make us stand out. Employers will know if we care enough about our industry by performing Google searches on our name and reviewing our commentary on social networks (Schawbel, 2011). The traditional resume will evolve, encompassing more social media. LinkedIn 1. Built for users to make professional contacts 2.Since its creation, it has been geared toward the professional business crowd and has more than 60 million members to date 3. Each user profile can be personalised to feature recommendations from colleagues, a self-portrait, relevant links and special interest groups. 4. Has a resume, cover letter, and reference document together. You can summarise your qualifications, goals and interests and gather electronic endorsements from your managers. 5. Job search can be conducted which gives a potential bridge to a new job opportunity. 6. Acts as a virtual resume and venue for expressing your brandFacebook 1. Simple and effective social networking tool and very little clutter and the ability to post photos from social events 2. Allows users to develop their own applications while enabling customised widgets and links to personal blogs 3. Facebook is currently the dominant social network, giving you free access to a variety of events, groups and profile pages around the world 4. Besides keeping in touch with friends, it now acts as an open business platform, allowing users to share their professional lives together. Twitter 1. Great for networking because you can use @ and # symbols.This is good for notifying your network of changes in life or updates on what you are currently doing 2. Broadcasting on current activities can be done via mobile phones up to 140 characters per message 3. People can start following you vice versa without having to accept a friend request The process of self-branding is a little different on the Internet and Web than it is in the more traditional media. The Web does not present a ‘royal road’ to easy advertising success (Armstrong, 1997). The medium however, does have many interesting features that can be used to build a successful personal branding profile.Personal branding is about telling the public something about your ‘product’. Social networking tools can reveal an applicant’s experience, marketable talents, interpersonal skills and personality. The following part of the paper discusses why LinkedIn and Facebook are selected as the most suitable platforms for publishing a job seeker profile, for a career advantage. Why LinkedIn This professional network allows you to conduct searchers to find people you’ve met in your career or your personal life such as old classmates, co-workers etc.After profile creation is completed, it allows you to find out who you can connect to so you can expand your network. As such, recommendations can be received and given from clients, co-workers, managers and partners. These can act as firsthand endorsements of your performance in a current or past job. Furthermore, as long as your audience on Twitter is identical to your LinkedIn profile, you can sync them which allow you to scale your brand. So instead of updating both platforms with your contacts, you can just share all of your contents with the @ and #tag.While some are using the popular site as a job-search locator, some will build their business one contact as a time. Why Facebook Professionals often promote themselves on Facebook because it is home to over 400 million users. The population is even greater than the whole of United States. An example is that political candidates, like President Barack Obama use this platform to win elections. Facebook should be certainly used to a career advantage. Aside from searching for your friends and colleagues, you can retrieve them from your Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo!Account. While LinkedIn addresses your professional profile, Facebook does caters more to your social interests such as favourite movie, music, idols, jobs, religion and so on. The more information you put up on Facebook, the more someone can learn about you. Why and Why not Twitter When it comes to building a career, Twitter is extremely important because it levels the playing ground. The main difference between Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is that people can start following you vice versa without having to accept a friend request.On Twitter you can directly communicate without interference and talk to hiring managers and people whom are genuinely interested in the network with them. On the other hand, you can automatically tweet your blog posts as they are published. This saves time from having to copy each blog headline in order to tweet it manually. However, for building a personal brand, Twitter limits the opportunity to do so as you can only type or text up to 140 characters per message (Meyers Gerstman, 2001).If a job seeker isn’t actively involved in social networks, he will be at a competitive disadvantage. Contributing to several social media platforms is one of the best ways to position a personal brand. It is easier to reach an audience that already exists than to find a new audience. Today the new generation is more willing to give up their personal information on social networking sites. People are now willing to spread their information about themselves, whether personal or professional without fear on these networks.Unfortunately in most cases, their identity gets stolen eventually; they receive spams, viruses and junk mails. This is why employers should be aware of false applicants. As the Internet is a public domain, there are concerns about privacy issues. Schawbel (2001) found that they do provide a privacy area where you can change your privacy settings from your audience. Limited access to a profile should be set to keep unwanted people lurking and stalking your profile. This concerns safely and privacy of personal life. On Facebook, we can block out or delete people who send unwanted or threatening messages that could mentally harm us. This is to promote our profiles in a safe and peaceful manner, in order to have a higher chance in building our professional profiles. Brands represent who we are, from the clothes we wear to the goods we purchase. It is very important that we maintain a good and clean reputation on our social media profiles. In differentiating myself from other potential applicants, an advantage is I personally do not drink or club.Therefore employers who seek to hire employees will not find me in pictures getting drunk or looking sloppy. Unless, they are looking for an employee to works at the bar or a nightclub. Even so when there is an online damage to my reputation for example, bad publicity or blackmails. Comments should be done immediately on the blog, in revealing the truth to that social media’s community. Apart from these, I have leadership qualities, the passion to work, engage with people in a positive manner with enthusiasm.When someone is confident, he gains respect from others and can accomplish his goal. Besides creativity is very important. When is comes to become a successful entrepreneur, you need to be able to come up with new ideas before others do. In using these creative promotional strategies, determination combined with a good level of intellect will deliver positive results. In addition, the external marketing and advertising the self can be referenced in newspapers, TV or magazine advertisements.