5 Reasons Why You Must Manage Your Personal Brand
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Understanding why personal branding is important is one thing. But don’t stop there. Once you’ve discovered your own personal brand, you still have to actively manage it daily via social networking tools and other online forums. If you don’t tend to your brand, then people will forget about you and you will lose control over what that brand represents. Here are five reasons why you need to stay on top of your brand to remain relevant and active in online conversations.
1. If you don’t manage it, it will be managed for you. Taking ownership of your personal brand is extremely important because otherwise people will categorize you based on a first impression. That first impression might not align to your branding strategy and the brand attributes that you selected might not be displaying. People can freely communicate about you behind your back and if that word-of-mouth isn’t accurately portraying you, then it will be much harder to reposition your brand in their minds. Brands of all capacities (corporate, product, personal) have lost a lot of control online, but they can still stand for something and have a web presence that communicates their mission. Without any time investment, you will start to find others who are branding you for better or worse.
2. You will miss out on conversations from which you can benefit. Imagine two people are tweeting about where to find a home in your area and you’re a real estate agent. Shouldn’t you be talking to both of them? Another example is if you were an Internet marketer and you identify a series of posts within a LinkedIn group between people who are trying to figure out how market their businesses online. Shouldn’t you chime in? This is one of the reasons why Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn’s Answers are such valuable tools.
3. Technology evolves and could leave you in the dust. From desktop computers, to laptops, to phones and now tablets, who can keep up anymore? Technology is moving at a rapid pace and it cannot be stopped. This is why being in touch with technology improvements is so significant now. You always have to be aware of what’s going on and if you’re smart, you’ll be an early adopter. If you don’t manage your brand, you won’t be able to take advantage of technology improvements and you won’t know what technologies are growing obsolete (such as MySpace).
4. People are searching for people just like you. Visibility creates opportunities (and more visibility). If you don’t manage your brand, then it will be very challenging to stand out in search engines and social networks, where recruiters, hiring managers and others are searching for people with your experience. If you search on LinkedIn or Bing for your name or your concept’s name, will you be first? If you aren’t, then someone else is landing the clients that you could have and being sought out by the media.
5. Your competition is managing its brand. Smart people know that in order to get ahead in today’s information-driven world, you have to participate or be extinct. Your competition is working hard when you’re not and vice versa. Competitors can manage your brand if you’re not careful. They can reposition their brands to combat yours when you’re not looking. If you aren’t active, they can come out with new content, products and services, while you are ignoring the changes in your industry.
via 5 Reasons Why You Must Manage Your Personal Brand : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum.