York Solutions How to Reflect Your Personal Brand Online, in Person, and on Paper

March 15, 2016

Are you strategic in the articles that you share on your social media profiles, or do you tailor your resume to reflect your personal brand? Developing a personal brand is just the beginning to showcase brand YOU. While you want to craft a brand that is fresh and relevant, you also want to reflect authenticity and consistency. What does your personal brand say about you? In this blog, we share a post from a collaborative Think IT meeting which focused on ways to effectively communicate your brand.

Originally posted on Think IT

Before someone introduces themselves to you, you often already have an idea on who they might be or what they might be like based on the personal brand they have created for themselves. Your brand acts as a first impression, so it is important to think about how you want to appear to others.

Can you change your brand?

During Think IT’s Opportunity Management Group meeting last week, group member Andy Foster suggested that you can change the influence your personal brand has, but not the entire brand itself. Once you create a brand for yourself, people will come up with their own ideas of who they think you are. You may be able to adjust a few of the aspects that go into your brand, but you most likely will not be able to change someone’s mind about you completely. It is important to remember this as you are creating your personal brand, so you can accurately portray who you are and what you represent.

How do you create a professional brand?

Breakout groups were formed during our discussion and each group collaborated on a different aspect of branding. One common theme among all groups was the principle of remaining authentic. There are many different ways you can market yourself, but being authentic throughout is what is going to gain the trust of others and keep your brand believable. Below are just a few of the techniques you can use to create your personal brand.

Group one was asked to think about LinkedIn and to reflect on what they believe to be helpful when creating a profile. The result of the collaboration of the group is as follows:

• Be sure you have relevant recommendations listed
• Write neutral posts
• Remember to be active in order to have your name/face show up on other pages ( “like” posts)
• Take advantage and use LinkedIn as a networking tool
• Regularly make small updates to your profile to keep you relevant and to show you are active
• Always have something in the “current position” section of your profile (this will help people find you when doing searches that relate to your career/position)

Group two was given the scenario of “You have just moved to a different state and want to recreate an impactful personal brand to set you apart from everyone else”. They discussed what strategy they would use to be “different” and how they would go about executing that strategy. Here is what they came up with:

• Be involved in volunteering (at work, your kids’ school, within the community)
• Remember the importance of “onboarding” (new job, coaching, etc.)
• Engage in professional networking

Group three had a conversation about the do’s and don’ts of writing a resume, what makes a resume stand out, and ways to reflect your personal brand on your resume. These are the thoughts and suggestions that the group members came up with:

• Use the S.T.A.R. format (Situation – define the general context, Task – identify the key objective, Action – describe the action you took or initiated, Results – summarize the outcome)
• Include an executive summary
• Make sure the bullet points tie into the executive summary
• Use keywords (others will be able to view/access your resume based on words they use on a web search in comparison to words you use throughout your resume)

What does your personal brand say about you?

Posted By: Renee MacLean

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