So you’ve read all our articles here at Brand-Yourself.com about how essential it is to maintain your online reputation and personal brand identity. You’ve successfully set up your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, emphasizing your individuality, visibility, consistency, and desirability as an employee.

The battle doesn’t end there, however.  Maintaining a personal brand is continuous work and will continue for the remainder of your working life – perhaps even beyond retirement.

In order to cultivate your identity and your online reputation, keep three things in mind:

Be smart, not paranoid.
This is the age of the World Wide Web and, although you should exercise basic common sense and abstain from releasing information like your social security number to the general masses, there is no need to be paranoid about your information being online.  Visibility is key, and it is up to you to take advantage of the accessibility of the Internet.  Although you obviously shouldn’t provide, say, a blueprint and a detailed aerial shot of your home, don’t make it difficult for interested employers to contact you, either.

Use your name as often as [logically] possible.
Look at your various websites and social networking profiles as web footprints.  Your online personality should be unique to you, but a clever, intelligent website means nothing if people have no idea who owns it.  It is crucial that your name be prominent on any work you post online – not only in titles and bylines, but also headings, URLs, etc. – so that there will be a higher chance of your page[s] receiving hits.  Exercise  discretion, however.  Sprinkling your name unnecessarily will look cheap and desperate, but thoroughly linking your work with your name shows that you are proud of what you can accomplish.

OWN YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION.
It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to own your personal brand identity.  If you haven’t already, do a quick search of your name and see what the Web says about you.  If you find there are people who share a similar name, you must work hard to differentiate yourself from those people.  Always keep in mind all those professional and personal traits that make you desirable to prospective employers, and protect this image with everything you’ve got.

Remember, your work isn’t finished once you’ve established a personal brand identity.  You must also work hard to regularly manage the impression you make on the rest of the world, ensuring now only that you remain individual but also that your brand remains true to who you are. Your online reputation is how people will differentiate you from the masses.

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Gabrielle is a recent graduate from Syracuse University, where she studied fashion design and fashion communications.  She occupies her time with photography and creating her own comic book, and  she plans to return to Syracuse in 2010 to pursue her Master’s Degree in art journalism.

From a previous article here on Brand-Yourself.com, we learn that personal branding consists of projecting three main qualities about yourself: your competencies (in other words, your skills); your personality, which includes your goals, values, and identity; and the unique value or benefit you are able to provide (i.e. what do you have to offer that sets you apart from the rest?).

As an extension of your personal brand, your personal bio must reinforce the image you present to prospective employers.  Do your best to stay true to your established brand identity, while also keeping in mind these three personal bio tips:

1. Keep it short and sweet.
   Brevity is the soul of wit, as Shakespeare says, and the people reading your bio will be relieved if you stick to this idea. They are on your website to get a quick idea of you, not to read a novel.  Stick to the same rule-of-thumb as for your résumé: include all essential information, but keep it concise and to-the-point.
2. Call him Ishmael.
   Remember to write your bio in third person.  After including your full name once, it is fine to refer to yourself by your first name for the remainder of the bio.  If, however, your career path requires a more formal style, use your surname for the rest of your bio instead.
3. Be yourself.
   You are not writing a research paper on pelicans or economics, so resist the urge to revert back to college composition class (where you wrote a certain way because you needed an A).  Your personal bio needs of course to be readable and grammatically correct, but don’t confuse a need for professionalism with a reason to stay bland and generic in your writing.  Allow some of yourself to show through your words.

Writing a personal bio may seem like a daunting task at first, but remember that you are the one in power (and that you are not being graded!).  Keep it simple and honest, and ensure that it remains cohesive with the other aspects of your personal brand.

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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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Gabrielle is a recent graduate from Syracuse University, where she studied fashion design and fashion communications.  She is in the process of building a small fashion business over the internet and  plans to return to Syracuse in 2010 to pursue her Master’s Degree in art journalism.

In an article from Web Worker daily, business writer Pamela Poole emphasizes that, in the business world, “personal branding is important, like it or not.”

“Image,” she continues, “is unavoidable.”

Remember: if you don’t brand yourself first, someone else will.  Think back to summer camp in third grade when you forever became known as the kid who still wet the bed.  Now multiply that feeling by one hundred.

You don’t want to be branded by someone else as the proverbial corporate bed-wetter, so it is up to you to create your own identity.  However, don’t get carried away; your image should be real.  It should not be a false depiction or seem too contrived.

Your Personal Brand

Essentially, your personal brand consists of three main qualities: competencies (in other words, your skills); personality, which includes your goals, values, and identity; and the unique value or benefit you are able to provide (i.e. what do you have to offer that sets you apart form the rest?).

As you begin to solidify your personal brand identity, keep these three points in mind:

• INDIVIDUALITY

What makes you different and valuable?  Although job titles are important on your résumé, don’t focus too much on them when creating your personal brand.  There are thousands of other people who have been general managers and research assistants, and you need to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

• VISIBILITY

Enhance your profile by getting your name out there.  Start a blog, take on side projects, teach a class, speak at workshops, get on panel discussions at conferences – the important thing is to get yourself known by people outside your place of employment so that you have a larger, more diverse network of people who can serve as references and possible job opportunities.  Chances are, if a possible employer has heard of you (in a good way) before you even apply for a job, you are automatically more desirable.

• CONSISTENCY

Maintaining your personal brand is ongoing and will continue throughout your entire life cycle.  It is important not only that your personal brand identity reflects you truthfully as a person, but also that your identity doesn’t develop multiple personalities over the course of your life that may confuse or alienate interested parties.

You alone are in charge of and responsible for your personal brand identity.  Approach it as you would a real-life brand, and work hard to maintain and protect that brand.  You will be acting as the CEO, project manager, and administrative assistant of the most important company in the world: yourself.

Gabrielle is a recent graduate from Syracuse University, where she studied fashion design and fashion communications.  She is in the process of building a small fashion business over the internet and  plans to return to Syracuse in 2010 to pursue her Master’s Degree in art journalism.

We all know a picture is worth a thousand words, but do we also realize it could mean a thousand dollars a week?

As C.G. Lynch, a writer for business leadership website CIO notes, the photo you use on various social networking sites “may be used by people whom you don’t know very well as they try to size you up – personally or professionally.”

Quite simply, he concludes, “it matters.”

While an appropriate profile photo may not necessarily guarantee or eliminate you from a particular job placement, it certainly helps a prospective employer get an idea of who you are. After all, you wouldn’t go into a business meeting with a bag over your head, would you?

As you set up profiles and post photos on various social networking sites, keep these points in mind:

1:  DO post your photo where applicable.
Prospective employers will most likely want to see the face behind the name.  Including an appropriate (more on that below) photo will add personality to your profile, and it will reinforce the idea that you are an individual, rather than an anonymous wall of type on a computer screen.

2:  DO keep in mind the nature of each social networking site to which you belong, and adapt each profile photo to reflect this.
For example, a more formal, clean business-type photo is appropriate for a more professional website like LinkedIn, whereas on Facebook or Twitter it may seem forced, unnatural, and out-of-place.  It is important to project a professional image as needed; however, being a business photo in a sea of business photos is just as bad as being a faceless résumé in a sea of faceless résumés.

3:  DO appear clean and well-groomed.
You want to look your best, but naturally so.  Wearing too much makeup or dramatically altering your photo digitally may read as being phony or superficial and could potentially do more harm than good.  It may help to ask a friend to take a clean, simple, well-lit photograph of you, although now is not the time to show off your (or your friend’s) edgy art photography skills.

4:  DO be consistent in your image, while still remembering point #2.
You are ultimately selling yourself as a brand and need to present a clear, honest depiction of yourself. Contradictions in image from site to site (or from internet to real-life) may confuse prospective employers and cause them to doubt your integrity.

5:  DO be smart and exercise common sense and decorum.
Chances are, if the thought of showing your profile photo to your grandmother or your spiritual adviser doesn’t make you queasy, you are probably headed in the right direction.

With these five things in mind, you should be well on your way to a more successful, more cohesive, and most  importantly – more desirable personal brand image.

Above all, regarding any part of your internet identity (be it your profile photo or your political views), remember to please post responsibly.

Gabrielle is a recent graduate from Syracuse University, where she studied fashion design and fashion communications.  She is in the process of building a small fashion business over the internet and  plans to return to Syracuse in 2010 to pursue her Master’s Degree in art journalism.