Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Six online sites for personal branding

I felt pretty bad that my initial post on personal branding was an epic fail. However, after watching how mainstream media also had an epic fail, I do not feel so bad. This post is also on personal branding, but I am not going to attempt to explain it again. This time I am just listing six important places a modern professional should establish his or her brand online:
  • A website - Here is my website. It is not very mature (although I have various old ones scattered across the web), but it is my current site. A website does not need to have all sorts of bells and whistles, but it should be some place that your online presence may call home. There are a number of free web hosting services. If you get serious, you should probably get a domain name too.
  • A blog - You are reading my blog. A blog is more dynamic than a website. Like websites, there are a number of free blogging services, Blogger and Wordpress being the most popular. It is easier to generate content for a blog than for a site. A blog can showcase your writing, which is valuable in any line of work.
  • Twitter - My Twitter handle is @ncooprider. Twitter has the ability to reach many people really quickly. The commitment level is less than with a blog or with Facebook, so your Twitter-network can include people you do not know and you can send out less-than-stellar tweets. Twitter can drive traffic to your site and blog, or just serve as a medium for crowd sourcing.
  • A Google Profile - Here is my Google profile. It is yet to be seen if this thing will really take off, but I think it is a valuable tool. You can see from my profile that my web presence was a little crazy, and this allows me to consolidate and clarify. This is crucial if your online brand extends beyond one or two services (which it must do to have real reach).
  • LinkedIn - Here is my LinkedIn profile. This is the professional social networking site. It may not pack the power of Facebook, but it makes that up in focus. Keeping a resume online here is easy and effective (last month I got a call from recruiters through this and I am not even looking for a job).
  • Facebook - My Facebook username is ncooprider. I got my first job out of school through Facebook. It is the biggest kid on the block. Some people hate it and there are a lot of things which are annoying about it, but it still lives up to its name.
There are many others that are useful, but these were the six I feel every professional should use. That goes double if the person is looking for a job, and triple if that person is in tech, media, or both. Think I am wrong? Post a comment!

1 comment:

Coop said...

You might notice that the URL and the title of this post do not match: Twitter was added after I prematurely hit the publish button.