Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

If you've never gone through the exercise of defining your personal brand, now is a great time. Ask a close friend that has worked with you - and understands what you're like in the workplace - to brainstorm what makes you unforgettable. Ask the person to describe your strengths. What makes you unique? What value do you bring? How will people remember you? Do some soul searching to think about and what differentiates you from others doing the same type of work. Make an exhaustive list of all of your projects, successes and failures. What is the consistent "story" that this tells about you and what course your career has taken so far?

Make it your goal to come up with your own personal "keywords". Then, make sure all of your "marketing materials" - your blog, your social networking profiles and photos, your email sig, etc. - reflect what makes you special. Reconsider using an avatar or photo of your kids etc. in your profile - if it doesn't reflect your brand - and you want to be recognized when you meet someone in-person. (For job seekers, include your resume, your portfolio, or your business card on this list.) As you advance further into your brand building and possibly create new marketing materials like a personal web site, your personal keywords will become even more important from a search engine marketing perspective. So, be consistent using your keywords.

As a starter exercise, try a Google search with your key words only and see if you appear as one of the results. For example, for myself, I tried a search using the keywords: "director AND talent AND acquisition AND advertising AND Detroit". I was pleased to see I was the first result to appear. That said, there were 10 search results on the first page - and the remaining 9 were not my profile! (Looks like I have some work to do on my personal brand.)

Remember too, the statuses you post on social networks is also a reflection of your brand. Statuses that are valuable to those in your network might include: content in your areas of expertise, links to your blog entries, links to podcasts, YouTube or FlickR postings, links to events you'll be attending, TwitterPolls, or anything you feel could strengthen your relationship with others. Examples of status postings that could damage your personal brand might be: announcing your latest drinking binge, complaining about your current employer, romantic break-up / hook-ups, or chronically statusing your illnesses. To save yourself time, try an application like Ping.fm or HelloTxt.com to update all of your social profile statuses at once without having to log into each network. Apps such as Tweetburner allow you to track the click-through rate of links that you post - a great insight tool that can help you understanding what resonates most with your network.

As you build your brand, continue to build your social network as well. Connecting authentically with your co-workers, friends and family using social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is a powerful tool. The combination of building our network on social media and promoting our personal brand is just good common sense and a great form of job security.

Traci Armstrong