Getting Started With Your Personal Brand

In earlier posts, I’ve discussed that the concept of personal branding is a trend that has been making a big impact in career development.

I mentioned in the previous post that personal branding can be a very useful tool for practically anyone, from the job seeker to the college student. In this post, I’ll continue to explain why personal branding can be so important and effective as well as share some simple steps to engage in your own personal branding.

You know by now that more and more employers will actually google their employees and any prospective employees. So, it’s important to be careful about how you manage any of the content that you put up on the Internet. Being careful means that you take the necessary time to become very knowledgeable about the privacy settings of any of the websites where you share anything, like writings, updates and pictures.

For most of us, I’m talking about Facebook. And if you follow the news at all, last month (May 2010) seems to be the month where Facebook has done a lot of public relations damage control while implementing fixes to their privacy policies and settings.

So perhaps overall we’re slowly moving in a direction to being better able to control the information that we share online. And just to be sure that someone else hasn’t put up anything embarrassing about us somewhere online, be sure to google yourself on a regular basis if you are part of a circle of friends or acquaintances that take frequent pictures.

In fact, I think that googling yourself should be one of the first steps that you take if you are at all interested in purposefully managing your personal brand. And even if you have no interest whatsoever in a personal brand, I strongly recommend that you google yourself regularly just to know what’s out there about you, if anything.

At this point, please check out an article from Yahoo HotJobs for a brief overview about how to manage and protect your online reputation. I’ve also written about this topic.

Here’s a short and simple way to get started with your personal brand. As I’ve already stated, you can google yourself to see what’s out there already about you.

The next step is to take a moment to think about this whole personal branding concept and how it could all apply to you. What are your goals and intentions, if any, with your own personal brand as it relates to social media and your career planning? Considering writing down your initial plans, if any.

Then, continue to stay on top of the latest online articles pertaining to personal branding to see if you come across any tips to incorporate into your own career planning.

Below is a reverse chronological list of my previous posts on personal branding, starting with this post:

Career Action Now

Purposeful career planning blog