What is Personal Branding? Career Planning and Your Personal Brand
The phrase “personal branding” has become quite popular as of late. It’s primarily associated with the concept of marketing yourself proactively across the various social media and networking platforms like Facebook.
Picture a celebrity who stays connected to their fans through any one of the following social media examples:
- sharing updates on their own website
- posting regular updates on their Facebook or MySpace page
- sending regular tweets using Twitter
- posting up video clips on YouTube
- making regular posts on their own blog
It’s so great when we get to see more of the actual person behind their “famous” persona. I’m one of those people who likes a celebrity even more if I get a sense that in “real” life, that the person is intelligent, well spoken, down-to-earth, and just has an overall nice vibe.
All that said, picture also how a less famous person can utilize social media to create and establish their own personal brand. Can you see the reasons why someone might want to use social media to create their own personal brand? Someone like you?
One of the main reasons for you to be aware of this personal branding concept is because of its likely impact on your career planning endeavors, especially since:
- A growing number of companies and organizations actually use social networking websites, like Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com, to look up information on prospective and current employees. In some career fields, like marketing and advertising, many companies expect that applicants not only be knowledgeable about social media but also have a strong, positive online presence (e.g., personal brand).
- The number of overall users of social media keep going up and up, making websites like Facebook and LinkedIn seemingly permanent fixtures into the foreseeable future.
- There are a growing number of examples of “ordinary” people like you and me successfully getting jobs through the use of social media.
There is a video clip on another social media website, YouTube, that helps to dispel the notion that social media is a fad or that social media is not as big or significant as some claim. The following video clip will also wrap up this particular post, so after watching the clip, please go on to the next post, Why Personal Branding is Important in Career Planning.
Below is a reverse chronological list of my previous posts on personal branding, starting with this current post:
- What is Personal Branding? Career Planning and Your Personal Brand
- What is Your Career Brand?
- Introducing the Concept of Career Branding
- Protect Your Online Image