Managing Your Personal Brand Online
July 4, 2011
Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about the ways in which people share their “personal brand” online.
It started when the Globe & Mail published an essay I wrote for their Facts & Arguments page—big national readership and potential for widespread sharing via social networks. A big honour and a checked box on my bucket list.
On the eve of the planned print run, the paper posted it on their web site and a contact of mine tweeted the link before I even knew it was live. My wife asked what I’d put on my blog to “greet” people who might Google my name after reading it.
The answer was: nothing. It hadn’t occurred to me to do so.
The problem was that I hadn’t thought about “marketing” the piece as I had no ulterior motive apart from just sharing something that’s important to me. It had nothing to do with my professional life, so I figured I’d share the link on my Facebook page and that would be that.
But of course, she was right. My blog is a part of my online world and to not connect it to this endeavour would have been a disservice to myself. If you work in marketing (as I do for not-for-profits), you need to demonstrate an understanding of how to bridge relevant content via social networks and make that content easy to find. Not just during business hours, but always.
With friends walking in the door for a dinner party, wine bottle in hand, I made my apologies and sat down at the laptop to dash off a post about the article. And as the piece hit the newsstands, I saw a marked increase in blog traffic.
Until now I’ve had fairly steadfast rules about social media: Facebook is for personal interactions, LinkedIn is for professional networking and Twitter…well, the jury’s still out on that. I’m still searching for the right balance between healthcare/charitable sector posts and irreverent tweets about life in general. I rarely shy away of tweeting something that might be of value to my sector, but I’ve often deleted draft tweets that might have come across as too edgy (my litmus test: if you wouldn’t say it aloud in an office environment, it’s probably not fit for Twitter).
In the end I shared the Globe & Mail link on all three networks, being careful to frame it as a personal pursuit (particularly for LinkedIn, to avoid sending my arm’s-length contacts to a web site they would likely have no interest in reading).
It reminded me of the many times I’ve cringed reading inane LinkedIn posts about the weather or heavy sales promotions on a Facebook feed. In my mind the former undermines a person’s solid professional presentation, while the latter makes me feel like I’ve been ambushed by a cocktail party sales pitch.
Perhaps I’m taking this all too seriously. I’d love to hear other people’s personal experiences (and mishaps) with social media. Leave a comment if you’d like to share—if it leads to another Facts & Arguments submission, I’ll be sure to give you props.
