This weekend I engaged in a discussion at LinkedIn Answers about Personal Branding & Corporate Branding, discussing the different aspects of how personal brands and corporate brands can work together and against each other. Since this is a complex question which you may not have given much thought to, I thought that I’d share my ideas with you.

How corporate and personal brands empower or diminished each other

Competence

For the corporation, strong personal brands among the staff show the competences and strengths of the employees as well as the fact that they are interested and engaged in their line of work. For the personal brand it is great to have a network of strong brands around yourself and also to be connected to a strong corporate brand in your line of work.

On the other hand, if the company has weak competence, that brand will be hurt by the fact that the employees are not as sharp as expected. Also if some event (think Enron) happens, that will also have an impact on the personal brand of the staff, whether they have anything to do with what destroyed the corporate brand or not.

Inventory of resources in the company – working with your passion

If you are working in a place where the company cares about its brand and about the personal brands of the employees, it will be easier to find the right competence within the organization instead of using consultants for unnecessary tasks. (I believe in consultants, but they should be used in the proper manner.) This will give the employee a better chance of doing the things they are passionate about (as they have branded themselves) and will in the long run strengthen the corporate brand since it will be a better place to work at and hence attract better employees.

If there are weak personal brands in the organization, it will attract weak and unmotivated co-workers, which will have a negative impact on both brands.

Customer care / receptionist / salespeople

These are areas within the company where every client (hopefully) meets an actual human being. The way this person communicates will have a immense impact on whether or not the client feels happy. The brand of the person interacting with the client is carrying two brands, that of the company and that of himself. Both brands will be affected in either a positive or a negative direction depending on the associations that the client gets.

Conclusion

Both the company and the employees have everything to gain from working with their brands, and also thinking of how they can empower each other’s brands and the brands they are associated with in different networks or contexts. I believe that an increased brand awareness throughout the corporation will also benefit the corporate brand as well as make the employees more motivated to add to the corporate brand as well as start working on their own brands.

Have any of you faced situations in which the corporate brand and the personal brand have empowered or worked against each other?  How did you benefit from it (if positive), or deal with it (if negative)?

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Your personal brand is divided into two parts, your Personal Brand Image and your Personal Brand Identity, where the Personal Brand Image is how your peers perceive you and your identity, personality, values, skills, and abilities. Your Personal Brand Identity is who you really are (identity, personality, values, skills, and abilities) and what you want to communicate to others.

There are a lot of ways in which you can align the two, but today we will focus on networking and events.

When you see someone at a restaurant, in a meeting room, or at a networking event, you will automatically add definitions to your image of that person. If she is having lunch with a head hunter that you recognize, it will probably empower certain areas of her brand image such as skill level and professionalism, while having dinner with her daughter will add to her image of being a good mother, emotional skills etc. The bottom line is, your brand image is affected by the company you keep.

Using Facebook and LinkedIn to meet with the right people

Let’s say you want to meet with a certain type of person, to pick their brain, to hang out or to make inquiries about if their office is a good place to be looking for work. The first thing I normally do is to find out if there is anyone in my network that fits the profile, or if there is anyone that knows someone with the profile I am looking for. So how do I do this?

First I go to my LinkedIn account, looking around for certain skills, positions and interests of the people that I know personally. If somene fits the profile, then I just contact them. I do the same on Facebook, but the search possibilities are much more limited. OftenI find that I do not know the right person directly but that my connections know someone, which is almost as good. Let your connection help you get connected.  Ask for an introduction.

Finding the events where you want to be seen

You have now met with the connections in your network and also with some of their connections, but you still wants more. Maybe you are looking at the local chamber of commerce and other traditional networks for the right events to practice your networking skills. If you do that, it is a great start, but I have found that looking at which events my connections go to is much more efficient as far as find the best ones. The good thing is that Facebook and LinkedIn lets you do that easily.

LinkedIn lets you list the events that your connections are visiting by going to the events section. Here you can see them ordered by date or popularity. You can also recommend events to your connections.

On Facebook, you cannot actually list the events of others, but you can keep track of the one you are invited to and who else is attending. Go to the events page where you will see upcoming events and also the upcoming birthdays of your connections.

How do you use the social media networks to network offline?  Share your tips and success stories in the comments section.

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There’s a new kid on the block of Social Media Networks, and it is not a small newcomer, but a giant. Google Buzz is the name and it has a huge user base since it is connected to Gmail. It just launched last Tuesday and it already has more than 160,000 posts and comments each hour.

So how can Google Buzz impact your Personal Brand?

Keep your Google Profile updated

In my opinion, Google Profile has been a bit disconnected with no clear purpose other than SEO up until now. Your Google Profile is also your Buzz Profile, so if someone searches for you on Google Buzz, they might end up reading your Google Profile as well. Check out this post by my fellow writer Ryan Rancatore on how to Create The Perfect Google Profile In 7 Steps to optimize your Buzz searchability.

Another part of the Google Profile is how your social search results appears. Take a look at here to see how the sites listed in Google Profile affect your social search content (you have to be signed in to Google to see the results).

Find people in your industry, and follow them

Just like on Twitter, you can follow the key opinion leaders of your industry to learn from them and also follow companies or employees of companies that you are interested in working for. Add insightful comments to their content. In the early days it is easier to stand out because the active user base is small, so make a splash now! It shouldn’t take too much effort to get them to follow you, at least not in the beginning.

Showcase your skills

To get followed and maintain your follower base, create useful and interesting blog articles, photos, videos and other content that are of interest to your industry and future employer or client. Google Buzz has multimedia support built-in, so use it!

I think it is important to look back on one’s core values every now and then, and reflect on how you have defined the way you differentiate yourself from everyone else. Let that show in the way you post and communicate on the different social networks.

Keep focused

With an increasing number of social networks, it is vital to make sure that you maintain and evolve as necessary your strategy for how to act in the social media landscape. There is a risk that you and your message may get diluted if working in too many channels at the same time.

To make sure that you know what is being said about you in different online channels, you should set up search profiles. Google Alerts is quite good, but has serious limitations in reliability (especially for non-English sources). If you have basic programming knowledge I would recommend using Yahoo pipes! to make a specific search profile for your needs. Or, you can sign up for the beta test of the Rynge Media Monitor a tool which will continuously monitor several key phrases from a variety of sources.

Add Google Buzz to your set of Social Media Icons

On your webpage, blog, resume etc., add a Google Buzz icon together with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter if you are planing to use the new service.

For more information on how to use Google Buzz, have a look at this guide.

In what ways do you think Google buzz can be used to market your personal brand? How are you using it now, and what’s your plan going forward?  If you are not using it, why is that?

If you are a Gmail user, follow me on Google Buzz.

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Passion is important to me and my work with personal branding. To achieve excellence you have to be passionate about what you do. In my earlier posts, I have covered “Why I’m Passionate About Passion” and “How to Reach your Potential by Working with your Passion” and today we will look at how to keep the passion maximized once you have found it.  Here’s what I’ve been doing, and what I invite you to try:

1. Keep setting new goals and challenge yourself
   Setting goals for yourself will keep you focused on what exactly you are trying to accomplish. If your goals are SMART you will find them to be easier to follow up with and to verify that you reached the goals. One of the main reasons for losing passion in something is a lack of continuously setting new goals. All of the sudden there are no more goals to achieve and you feel that you have accomplished what you set out to do. The key here is to set new goals before achieving the old ones, focusing on reaching the next level. That way, there is always something left to strive for.  Think both personal and professional.
2. Reward yourself
   Every time you achieve a goal or even an objective, make it a habit to celebrate the achievement. When I reach a goal my reward could be anything from a long coffee break at the Skybar at the nearby hotel to a weekend out of town. You have to figure out what reward is best for you and your team, but make sure it is not counter-productive, e.g. eating a big cake when you reached the goal of losing 2 kilos (Yes, I go by the metric system).
3. Delegate/Outsource/Automate
   In every position there are tasks that steal energy and drain the passion out of you. Identify these tasks and if possible, let someone else deal with them. Try to find someone that is passionate about the task at hand. Don’t limit your search to the company that you are working for, maybe a virtual assistant could help you out.
   Some things cannot be delegated or outsourced, and therefore have to be done by you even if you do not like it. Start by seeing if you somehow can transform them to a task that is aligned with your passion. If that fails, start creating checklists for the tasks and try to automate them as much as possible. Not everything has to or can be done with passion.
4. Create a passionate surrounding
   As I stated in my last post about passion, the people around you play a very important role in developing your passion. Show your team, your boss, and your clients that you are passionate about your job and do not let them steal that energy away from you. It will feel a little like faking it at first, but as you act like you truly feel, it will become more and more natural. (More on Fake it ’til you make it)
5. Get professional help
   It could be a mentor, a coach, a psychologist or a good friend. The important part is that it is someone that you trust and that listens to you with your wellbeing in mind. Share your goals, your achievements, when you are in the flow, etc. Make sure your relationship is constructive, fun, rewarding, and that it is adding to your positive energy.

These tips will help you in maintaining your passion, but you will not necessarily feel that your are in the flow or that you are passionate 100% of the time. But look at the big picture. Even if you are not feeling passionate in this instant, are you moving in the right direction? It is important to have some “sticktoitiveness” to achieve your goals of reaching new levels of personal development.

I will leave you with an inspirational quote from Earl Nightingale: “The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.”

What do you think? Looking forward to reading your comments!

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