I’ve just finished writing my regular column for Enterprise Magazine. My topic this month was “personal branding on the web”. I’ll publish the full article here once it hits the streets, but I thought I’d share the unedited insights of two experts who shared their wisdom with me. I didn’t have space for all their thoughts in the actual article, so here they are in their full glory:
Tom Critchlow, from Distilled:
- Make sure you choose an online ‘handle’ which is both easy to remember, unique and short
- Be consistent. Make sure that you keep the same username across all the social media sites you sign up to (twitter, digg, etc etc). This makes it easy for people to connect the dots and helps your existing ‘friends’ on one social media site find you on other sites.
- Make sure that you choose an online username which you can rank for in Google. People use search. A lot of people use search actually and being able to rank for your own name is valuable because it allows you to present searchers with a page of your choosing and importantly you can set up a contact form etc on the site which leads me onto the next point:
- Make sure you are contactable. If someone wants to get in touch with you make it easy for them, whether it’s an email address in your twitter background, a contact form on a website or blog etc. Never underestimate the power of email!
- Monitor the conversation about you. Using a tool like google alerts (free) or Distilled’s reputation monitor (cheap, few more features) allows you to monitor the interwebs for any mentions of your name. It’s important to choose a unique, short name in point 1 above so people can find you but it also removes a lot of the headache associated with monitoring as well.
- Last but not least, engage! When someone emails you, email them back, when someone twitters you, twitter them back. If someone tweets something you can help them with don’t be afraid to send them a note. Online networking is hugely powerful and has gained Distilled £100,000s of business. Be nice to people and be nice to people and you’ll get it back in spades.
Carl Morris, from Native
The term “personal brand” is not to everyone’s taste, but if you do anything on the web you need to understand it. Your prospective client, employer or advocate will take seconds to figure out who you are. Attention is scarce! So you need to represent yourself in a way that makes it as easy as possible for them.
Full article online in a few weeks when it goes to print.
🙂
One major trouble with having the same username on all used social platforms is that almost never one is allowed to change user name.
In my case I’d been with SU for years collecting tons of great bookmarks.
During the last couple years I started developing a culinary network and engaged in twittering as well a couple other networks. For all of them I used a username relating to the food-stuff. I then came up with the idea to change my SU name accordingly. There’s no way to do so, not even to get data transferred to a new account…
That’s where the theory just doesn’t work out…
Thanks for all those other valuable thoughts, though.
I suppose that’s where the service provider have got to get their act together and allow those of us who want to change brand to be able to do it easily.
Glad you enjoyed the blog!