Personal branding

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2010 Marketing Predictions and Hopes

30 December 2009 in Random Thoughts by Kate | View Comments

Well, it’s that time of year again.  What did we all just DO?  Where is it all GOING?  Here are a few of my predictions.  Most of them I truly feel will happen, but some of them I just really really hope to have happen.

  • Social Media will stop being a bunch of tools and will start being a legitimate strategy. We all know it, and have lamented it before.  Too many people have completely ignored strategy when using social media in the past few years and have just started grabbing at the shiney new objects in front them.  Social media will actually be viewed as part of your overall communications strategy, as it should be.  Which means, now more than ever, if you just start clicking buttons and throwing up Facebook pages, you’ll be behind the eight ball, and fast.
  • Data will be huge. Not just to sit and prove ROI for your marketing department.  The fact that we can measure so much more in the digital space means that we’re going to see such awesome research and data analysis on things on like behavior and social trending… just plain interesting “stuff”….we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.\
  • Social media marketing will explode in the higher ed space.  We’ve felt the energy rising on this one all year, and it’s really close to spilling over.  Simply put, if there’s any industry that has a pre-established and enormous audience that likes to be communicated to online, it’s higher ed.  Just get there.
  • Social media marketing will start becoming more prevalent in the B2B space, primarily in industries we wouldn’t have imagined. Think manufacturing or construction.  More people are accepting the wide-range of possibilities that fall under “social media marketing” and realizing that there really are benefits.  They might not be Facebook or Twitter, or they might not be externally-facing, but they’re there.
  • These industries will have front runners. What I mean is that a lot of the industries mentioned in the above prediction won’t enter the space en masse, rather a small group of companies will start to play around, and they’ll gain the advantage.  A lot can happen with a 6-month or 1-year head start.
  • Cause Marketing will not only be used a lot more, but people will stop scoffing at it as a simply a marketing ploy, and actually accept that it’s still good for society and that companies can still be very passionate about social issues, whether they’re benefiting financially or not (obviously this doesn’t include extreme cases).

Happy New Year!

What do you think the next year brings?

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Presentation: Using social networks to advance your career

6 October 2009 in Presentations by Kate | View Comments

I did a quick talk at Emerson College today on using social networks to research companies, network, job search etc.  I focused a lot of the presentation on personal branding, as I think that’s the crux of this whole equation: if you can demonstrate your value easily and in a more robust fashion than on your resume, you’ll be that much more attractive in the “real world.”

View more presentations from JustKate.
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Social Media Hurting Your Career?

27 August 2009 in Networking by Tyler | View Comments

gossipI recently read an article bringing up the ways that social media can hurt your career.  We have all seen these articles that highlight the horror stories of Joe who called in sick and his boss read his tweet about going to the Red Sox game, who subsequently fired him, or whatever.

While I think the three social networking don’ts highlighted should be considered, I still fail to see the fault in social networking regarding career advancement. While sometimes the incriminating tweets and status updates are funny to read, most people who have a handle on social networking platforms and how they work know the potential, good and bad, of anything you post reaching new readership.

My rule of thumb used to be: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your dear old Grandma to hear. Now that my social media usage has changed from strictly personal socialization to more utilitarian applications, including career advancement, my rule of thumb is: don’t post anything you that wouldn’t feel comfortable saying directly in person.

As long as you remember that it may seem like a post in outer-space, anyone can stumble upon anything. There are also different ways of saying similar things and you can still express your opinions in an inoffensive way. It’s about applying the simple rules of gossip that we learned in elementary school to this version of tech gossip…also, not everything thought needs to be said.

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5 Things to do to Organize your Personal Brand Online

13 July 2009 in Educating by Kate | View Comments

Need a weekend project?  How about organizing your personal brand on the web?

We’ve been dealing a bit with “online personal branding” with the executives of some of our portfolio companies, and one of the biggest things we’ve noticed is the feeling of being out of control of “where you are” online.  People don’t realize how many places they are or how many profiles they’ve set up.

The first step to creating an effective Web2.0 personal brand is organizing the existing presence you’ve got.  From there, you have focused content in a controlled number of places and can move forward in a clear direction.  Below are a few things you can do on a slow afternoon to get the process started.

  1. Create lists and purge.  Do a full centralization process on what platforms you have profiles on, what your user names and passwords are, and what the function of each list is.  Record everything in one place so it’s easier to do work.  Then, get rid of anything that’s not useful or not moving toward your end goals (they can professional or personal).  That Friendster profile from 5 years ago?  Sorry Friendster, but you’re just not working for me any more.
  2. Consistency is key.  Make sure that your avatars are consistent (you don’t have to have just one profile photo, but keep it to 2-3, especially if you’re talking about using these services for primarily professional purposes).  Use the same or similar bios or about paragraphs.  Update them all at the same time.
  3. Do a search on yourself.  Yeah, everyone does this.  But analyze it, record any notable mentions, or worrisome mentions.  You might find something worth showcasing on a profile.  You also might find a profile you forgot about or didn’t even know existed.  You want to know what’s out there, so do the search.  Try out a few different search engines too.  Yes, people do still use MSN search and yes those results can vary from Google.
  4. Connect and aggregate whenever you can.  If you can update on one tool and have that update hit several others, that means efficiency and streamlining.  Use RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, Friendfeed etc.  This makes life a lot easier.  If it helps you, you can also record what’s connected where (I use a pretty simple excel to keep track of it all).
  5. Pull together all of your content and work for people. If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of content out there that people would only be able to find if they searched your name and felt like sifting through pages of results.  Make it easier for people to see your body of work by giving them one access point.  I contribute to several blogs, write articles for various publications, and have a bunch of one-off “things” out there that I want to make sure people see.  I’ve set up my own website used (for now) as one place to go to see most of what I’ve done.  I also plan on flushing out my personal Portfolio [Please note: Interfolio IS a client of ours].

Do you have any other advice on organizing your Web 2.0 Personal Branding?  Do you have any favorite tools to accomplish this?

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