As you continually work to improve your personal brand, you are going to consider many social media tools to utilize.  Along this journey, I am sure that Twitter will be one of them.  The reason that Twitter is such a good outlet for you is that Twitter is a means to express both your professional and personal sides.  The professional and personal mixture, of course, being your own unique personal brand.

The problem begins when your personal brand sways more heavily one way over the other.  This is most concerning when the personal emphasis is the heavier of the two.

As Mack Collier tweeted, “Getting on Twitter is NOT a strategy, Twitter is a tactic to execute a social media strategy”.  Such a wise statement.

Twitter is a tool for you to continually work to create and expand upon your personal brand.  Any social networking tool is not a strategy, but instead is a tool (and this cannot be forgotten).  Twitter is searchable by Bing and now by Google which further exposes you and your personal branding message.

Let’s take an example for a moment.  Pretend Katy is an SEO “expert” and she is working to position her personal brand firmly in the SEO field.  Katy wants to be more easily found so she signs up for Twitter.  Katy starts to tweet so that she may spread insight and connect with others on SEO tactics and strategy.  However, over time, she lets her personality enter more and more.  Katy begins to tweet on non-SEO topics and engage in conversations outside of her personal brand and on non-business related subjects.  Katy continues to tweet but the focus is now closer to a 50/50 split on SEO related material versus non-business subjects.

There are two opposing tactics at play in this example.

1. Katy’s personality is coming through, which is not necessarily a bad thing to happen.  This allows her followers to better know her and be able to engage with her on a variety of topics.  However, by taking her message further away from the SEO space, Katy’s personal brand begins to falter in terms of having a consistent message.
2. Because Katy’s tweets are not as consistent as when she started, then the results that appear in a Bing or Google search will not necessarily produce the SEO-based results that she desires.  By keeping SEO as the major theme and sprinkling other topics in on an as needed basis, Katy will continue to increase her personal brand in the SEO space and potentially position her as a leader in the field.As with any personal brand message and social media strategy, you must have a clear picture as to what you would like to convey as your personal brand as well as the selected tools to help create your brand.  This means working to communicate a clear and consistent message of you.

So, to answer the question: “is Twitter a good tool for your personal brand?”  Yes it is a valuable tool.  However, it is only a good tool if you use it in a manner that supports your personal brand and does not dilute the message you are working to communicate.

Make a Twitter plan and execute the strategy.  Your personal brand relies on it!

You’ve written your resume, and sent it out to what seems like hundreds of companies without any success.  Perhaps it’s time to look at one of the most important, and yet often neglected, parts of the resume – your career objective.  If done correctly, this will show potential employers at a glance that you are serious about the job in question and know what you want to do.  A poorly executed objective, however, may disqualify you from the position altogether.

Follow these simple steps to write a winning career objective every time.

• Be pithy. Generally, an objective should be limited to a sentence or two.  It’s all about saying as much as needed in as small a space as possible.  Remember, this is only the first thing that a potential employer sees, and the goal is to write so that he or she wants to continue reading the rest of your resume.
• Begin with ‘To’ not ‘I.’ The career objective on your resume should tell what you can do for the company, and not what you expect to get from the company.  When you’re competing with hundreds of other applicants, the employer’s focus is on which one of you can benefit them the most.  Here is an example of a quality resume objective: “To work for a small graphics company using my graphic design, layout, and drafting skills.” This shows what you can do for them instead of saying, “I want to work for a small graphics company to improve my graphic design and layout skills.”
• Convey facts. Words such as challenging, useful, educational, helpful, etc. mean different things to each person, and therefore do not convey specific messages to a possible employer.  Instead, explain how you want to use your English degree and editing skills to work for a book publisher.
• Use action verbs. It is tempting to try to stand out with your objective by starting it with something other than ‘to’ such as: my goal is, I hope to, my plan is, etc.  Not only does this show employers that you are more concerned with helping yourself than with helping his or her company, but the passive voice makes the sentence wordy and weak.  Phrases such as to work, to promote, and to advance show that you know what your career goal is and how you can help your prospective employer.
• Decide how specific you need to be. This is by far the trickiest part of writing a career objective for your resume.  If you know exactly what job you want within a company and understand what type of skills that job requires, then your objective can be written like this, “To work as an office production assistant with a small film company specializing in television using my clerical skills and Communications degree.” Unless you understand what the job requires and have specific skills, however, you will probably want to write something a bit broader such as “To work in an advertising agency using my experience in graphic design, layout, and copywriting.” This does not mention what position you seek, but includes a varied list of qualifications that would make you an attractive candidate to work in graphics or ad copy.
• Use what experience you have. If you’re a recent college graduate, you may not have many practical, real world skills that you can list in your objective.  Don’t worry.  Consider what you were good at in college (editing, researching, memorizing facts) and re-word it for a corporate environment.  If you were good at gathering data for essays then you have skills as a researcher.  Similarly, if you have a photographic memory then that can be a marketable quality.

Since you have such a short space to make a good impression, be careful in selecting the skills to list.  Choose ones that will be the most advantageous to each individual company.  You may have to re-write your objective several times for different jobs, but a well-written objective will help put you ahead of your competition.

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Brand-Yourself.com is a platform to diagnose, manage and monitor your online reputation for career success. Did you know that 83% of employers use the web to research job applicants? If you’re ready to proactively control your Google results and get hired, rather than cut from the applicant pool, try us for free and start controlling how you’re perceived online. Go ahead. Take our tools for a spin.

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Bethany Stringer is a graduate of Texas A&M University (class of ‘08) and has her B.A. in English Literature with minors in History and Psychology.  Writing her first story at the age of 5 (with help from Mom), Bethany still enjoys writing and researching about everything from business and history to travel and fiction.  Enamored with languages, she plans to teach English in Russia in 2010 as a CELTA certified teacher.  She owned her own business working horses when she was 17, and still loves riding her horse Romeo.  Always appreciating a challenge, she loves sea kayaking and prefers Rachmaninov to Bach.

The hallmark of a visible personal brand online is the ability to be found through search engines and social/professional networks. How visible are you?

To answer this, we developed a Hireability Dashboard that breaks down the components of your personal brand online and grades the strength of each. The first section we’ll talk about today is visibility. Can you be found?

The visibility portion of the Hireability Dashboard is broken up into tabs: your Google search results, professional profiles, social networks, directories, web 2.0 services you want to protect your username on, and media related to your name.

The first tab, your Google Search Results, makes it easy to understand what someone else will see when they Google your name up to 65 Google results.

Now instead of having to Google yourself to see what’s changed within the first ten results, you can log into your Dashboard and see what’s changed up to 65 reulsts.

You can also confirm items as about you, moving them into a separate column of confirmed items.  This makes it easy to understand which Google results are actually about you. We also display the Google result rank so you know if it shows up as the first, second, fifteenth, or thirtieth result.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Professional Profiles. Here, we track the professional profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Social Networks. Here, we track the social networking profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Directories. Directories are like online Yellow Pages for people. Here, we track the directory profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Protect These. Here, we track the web 2.0 services you’re on, and suggest others you should join of to protect your username and prevent cases of mistaken identity.

The Next Step

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of some of our tools, it’s time to discover: How visible is your personal brand online? To find out, create a free Brand-Yourself.com account now and start managing your online reputation with our Hireability Dashboard. See you there! Get started now.

Interviewing is something that is going to take practice and preparation no matter how experienced you are in the job search process.  When you are in the interview you never know what type of interview it will be or what off the wall questions a potential employer might ask you.

It is important to realize the position of the person across the table from you when you are in an interview.  The potential employer is looking to find insight into how you act on your feet, how well you can think through problems and all in all how well you would work within the company.

After that initial realization of everyone’s expectations here are 5 tips to help you figure out how to interview well.

How to interview well

1. Don’t launch into your answers. Take a few moments to collect your thoughts then give a good answer rather than a fast answer.
2. Practice practice practice. I cannot emphasize how important it is to get comfortable being asked questions and having to respond.  You do not want the interview to be the place you are being asked your first questions on the spot.
3. Know your strengths. It is important to show off in the interview what you are good at.  This helps you control the conversation a bit more and makes sure that you cover the important topics.
4. Stay calm. No matter what happens it is important that you stay calm.  You are in a tough position, you want to stay relaxed and roll with the punches.
5. Know your employer. This is probably one of the most important aspects of how to interview well.  You need to know something about your employer.  If you can’t do the research up front they will think you don’t care.  It should only take 15 minutes on the web to discover some important news.

Interviewing well is not something that is going to come easy.  It is important that you figure out how to interview well early on so that you do not miss job opportunities.

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Brand-Yourself.com is a platform to diagnose, manage and monitor your online reputation for career success. Did you know that 83% of employers use the web to research job applicants? If you’re ready to proactively control your Google results and get hired, rather than cut from the applicant pool, try us for free and start controlling how you’re perceived online. Go ahead. Take our tools for a spin.