Suzy Spaatz' Travels in Social Media

Social Networking - What’s in it for YOU?

This article was originally written for an internal EMC newsletter. I have modified it slightly. The aim is for people to understand the personal benefit of creating and maintaining a personal brand, which will make them more employable in the end.

What’s in it for you?

Your participation in online communities and networks increases your digital footprint and can also raise your personal profile as an expert on certain topics. If the content you write is interesting, it will be re-blogged, re-tweeted, re-posted. 

If you blog, tweet or use LinkedIN, your opinions and posts become public data, so you should be conscious of the image you want to portray online. Stay professional and try not to engage in obnoxious behaviour or use foul language.

Online engagement is of personal benefit to you and interestingly, makes you more employable.  Employers research your background by “googling” you.  

According to the Colorado Technical University:

• 45% of employers view potential candidates online
• 24% of employers said they made a hire after reviewing a social media profile
• 33% of employers admitted that they decided NOT to offer a job after reviewing a social media profile

These are U.S. figures, but this is increasingly true in Europe.

What will you want employers, or anyone for that matter, to find? What is the “personal brand” you want them to see?

Creating your personal brand

According to Wikipedia, “Personal Branding” is the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands. My former EMC colleague and now best-selling author Dan Schawbel is an expert in Personal Branding.  He defined the 4 steps in the personal branding process. Here is my version of these steps.

1.      Discover: Think about who you are, what your goals are and where your passions lie. The best topics to talk about online are the ones you know a lot about. Your passion for them will shine through and you will be quickly seen as an expert in them.

2.      Create: This starts with your resume, either online or offline. Your LinkedIn profile is the most obvious one your peers will look at, so ensure you have a professional picture here and a detailed summary of your experiences. Try to get colleagues to recommend you.  Update your Twitter profile, link to your blog or website, if you have one, and create a custom brackground using Twitbacks.com or other.  While Facebook is mostly used for personal relationships, don’t make the pic of your recent drunken escapades your profile picture. It will pop up when you LIKE articles on other websites, so be smart.  The same is true for Google+, if you decide this is the social network for you. If you write a personal blog, choose a web URL that includes your name. After all, your name is what people will search online.

3.      Communicate:  
a.       Now it’s time to tell people what you know! You can choose any social medium you want and feel most comfortable using. EMC , for example, encourages employees to joing internal community conversations!  2/3 of EMCs employees have joined our internal forum EMC One, share their opinion and collaborate online. There are plenty also plenty of bloggers at EMC. Here are just a few of the featured blogs.
b.      The quickest way to get going is Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that lets you convey your opinion in 140 characters. You can search your key topics and follow people who also tweet about it. If you tweet about your company’s topics, do use your company’s official hashtag (such as #EMC), follow your colleagues and company-branded accounts and re-tweet what they say.  
c.      Follow your employer’s brand on Facebook, if they have Facebook pages, and comment actively! You may even be invited to join online Facebook chats for your company.
d.      If you are ready to do more, maybe you want to set up a simple blog. Try Tumblr, Blogger, TypePad or WordPress.
e.       The newest social network Google+ may also be a great way for you to engage, as you can follow colleagues and other subject matter experts. 

4.      Maintain: Everything you create online reflects on you. You want to use what you did in the past to get what you want in the future. As you gain more followers and fans, your reputation will be pop up all over the web, from blog post, to tweet, to video, and more. You’ll want to keep a close eye on where your name and personal brand is.  Here are some free tools to do this:
a.       Audit your professional online brand: Use a tool like MyWebCareer to uncover and monitor your personal brand and explore your networks. You can tweak and optimize your professional online brand very easily.
b.      Measure your online influence: Two tools stand out here: Klout and Peerindex.  The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The higher the score (from 1-100), the more influence you have. Peerindex uses a similar algorithm. Both address the fact that merely being popular doesn’t indicate authority, so they measure a whole host of factors. 

Measuring online influence is a topic for another article…

22 July 2011 ·

• Tags
• socialmedia
• personalbrand
• socialnetworking
• klout
• peerindex
• emc