As the end of the year approaches rapidly and everyone begins to eye days off and long weekends, this is a great time to reflect… on brand you.  Yes, take time to review what you accomplished this past year and start to think about changes in the year to come that will positively impact your personal brand.  Here are a few areas to get you started:

Review your LinkedIn profile – Is your LinkedIn profile updated?  When was the last time you updated any of your profile information or professional experience?  Have you been inviting and connecting with your network?  Take time to go through each section of your profile and make sure that is a great reflection on you.  With over 52 million profiles, your personal brand needs to be complete.

What are you saying on Twitter – Look at the tweets and links you publish.  Are these communications how you want to be branded?  What areas of improvement do you see?  Can you include more links or less links.  Are you talking too much to a select few people and not engaging more people?  Maybe you need to add or remove followers.  Do you need to create a custom background that is more in line with you and your personal brand?  Take time to make it a professional page so that you are easily found and able to be engaged.

Review your Facebook content – Facebook may be one of the places that you should focus more than others.  The reason is that your “friends” are able to post  anything to your wall and tag you in pictures… some of which you wish they would not.  Take time to un-tag yourself from unflattering pictures (i.e. – every picture is you holding a beer) and make sure that you are being presented in a better light.  If your boss or a potential employer either saw your page or wanted to become your “friend”, would you have anything to be concerned about?  If the answer is yes!!! then you have work to do!

What are you saying in your blog – Are you a bit all over the place?  Are you focusing too much on one topic and potentially becoming repetitive?  Take time to begin rethinking your topics, enhancing topics or even think about a major redesign of your blog.  Again, this is your personal brand and your direct thoughts… it MUST represent brand you!

Create a new year outline – After you review all of your social networking pages and are happy with how you are representing yourself, now it is time to make a list of ideas of what new to do.  Maybe you want to expand your expertise and partner with local businesses to expand your areas of expertise.  Maybe you want to volunteer more to network with a broader array of individuals.  Maybe you want to start writing white papers or become published another way.  Whatever you are thinking, put it on paper and put it somewhere you will look every single day so that you see through your goals.  And make this list a work in progress to allow you to continually update your objectives.

These are all simple steps and ones that should take place every year.  There may be other sites you need to review in addition to the ones covered, just make sure you have a look over each.  You are in a business world.  Businesses need to reflect and analyze their years to determine next year.  Treat your personal brand like a business.  Put the time and energy into you to make sure you are in the best position for a successful year.

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Keith McIlvaine is a Social Media Strategist within HR and Recruiting for a Fortune 500 company.  When he is not focused on leveraging social media and networking, Keith is also a personal branding coach and social media mentor.  He is passionate about his family and is a major soccer fanatic.  Follow Keith on Twitter.  The statements I have posted on this site are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

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Here are five tips from four fellow career experts and me that I compiled to share with you on how to more effectively stand out in your interviews:

1) Brand Yourself: Be sure to have your personal brand and supporting pitch ready to communicate to your interviewer(s). Having a one-to-three-word personal brand and follow-up pitch not only makes you look more professional, but also makes you more memorable when answering questions like, “Tell me about yourself,” and/or “Why should we pick you?” It provides you the opportunity to more concisely present your unique and differentiating value and more importantly to be remembered for it. Your interviewers aren’t going to remember everything you say in your interview, but they are much more likely to remember a strongly communicated personal brand and how well everything else you said reinforced and supported it. - Chris Perry, CareerRocketeer.com

2) Come Prepared: Did you know that getting a job today is based on 70% presentation and only 30% skills and abilities? In order to help applicants stand out from the hundreds they are competing against for that ONE POSITION, I always coach my clients to a “First Impressions Binder” to the interview. This binder showcases your resume, awards, letters of recommendation, bio, any articles or white papers you have written and the research that you did on the prospective company. The binder with “view thru” cover allows you to slip a custom cover into the binder with the company’s logo, your name, date, and person with which you are interviewing. It shows that you can focus on detail, you have supporting documentation and you did the research before showing up for the interview. - Angie Maizlish, WordsImpress.com

3) Make a Personal Connection: Interviewees need to connect with their interviewers in order to instill trust. There are three behaviors that can help interviewees instill trust almost instantly: (1) make eye contact and try to smile with your eyes, (2) be sincere and, if appropriate, offer a compliment you really mean about the company, why you want to work there, etc., and (3) be a person with whom a conversation is easy (i.e., even though you are possibly nervous, try to avoid looking overly anxious in your body language and speech). Remember that an interview is still a conversation, an interactive communication between two people. Trust is critical. - Paula Caligiuri, PaulaCaligiuri.com

4) Tell a Good Story: My tip is to use stories. Every human being, including hiring managers, loves a good story. People who tell good stories are memorable and compelling. So if the interviewer asks, “What is your greatest strength (or weakness)?” or “Why did you get into this line of work?”, answer in the form of a short, one-minute-or-less, story. In fact, aim for three sentences. Sentence #1 is the set-up, usually a problem of some kind (“my company was losing money on inventory”). Sentence #2 is the action or what you did to solve the problem (“I designed a new system to track incoming and outgoing shipments”). Sentence #3 is the happy ending with you as hero (“after a year our inventory costs went down 50%”). Your story can be longer than three sentences, but strive for short! Practice your stories until you can tell them quickly and clearly. - Karen Burns, KarenBurnsWorkingGirl.com

5) Be Creative: When interviewing with multiple people from the same company separately, do not ask the same questions of each person. They will talk and it will look very unimaginative that you asked the same question as well looking like you can’t think on your feet or make a connection with each individual interviewer. Make each interviewer feel special by asking specific questions to their position or what topic they are talking to you about. Also, come prepared with questions! Sounds basic but so many people don’t do it! At the end of an interview if they ask you if you have any questions, that’s still an interview question. Look smart by asking insightful questions. It will make you look like you are really processing what the interviewer has said and are internalizing this information to determine whether it’s a good fit for you and them. - Jennifer Spencer, Spencer-Group.com

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Chris Perry is a Gen Y Brand and Marketing Generator, a Career Search and Personal Branding Expert and the Founder of Career Rocketeer, the Career Search and Personal Branding Blog.

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A senior-level executive recently told me he was so impressed with a resume sample of mine that he was tempted to copy some of it. Instead, he decided to work with me to create one capturing his own unique promise of value and written for his career target.

You probably know that thousands of good resumes are readily available online and thousands of resume books are full of thousands more.

Because strategic resume writing is always changing to meet the needs of hiring decision makers, it’s a good idea to take a look at up-to-date samples by top resume writers to get a handle on new trends in formatting and what kind of relevant key words and content to include.

But it’s not okay to actually use the content. Why?

► A great resume uniquely brands that specific job seeker. What you read in a sample may sort of  sound like you, but it isn’t really you.

Don’t you want hiring decision makers to clearly know what differentiates you from everyone else and why your value proposition and ROI make you the best hiring choice? You can only do that by differentiating your resume with your own personal brand message crystallizing your own unique combination of key attributes, pivotal strengths, and passions.

► The achievements on the sample couldn’t possible be the same as yours. The situations, people  involved, numbers, and facts are all different.

Your own approach to solving the problem that led to the achievement will provide the evidence to back up your personal brand promise. Don’t settle for some generic achievement that sounds good, but doesn’t specifically brand how you make things happen.

► Your resume needs to target the specific kind of job you’re seeking and resonate with hiring  decision makers assessing people for that job.

The sample that’s tantalizing you can’t possibly align what you have to offer with the stated qualifications for the job(s) you’re seeking. You HAVE to determine the key functional areas  required for the job and pump your resume with your expertise and contributions in those specific  areas.

► The formatting of your resume depends upon the compelling content you’re working with and  how  best to position your value promise.

Create the content first and then decide on the format. Don’t just choose a template and fill in the blanks.

► Even though the resume samples you see probably have fictionalized names and other identifying  information, they’re most likely real resumes written for real people who may still be actively job  searching.

The resume sample that you copy may be in circulation right now for the same jobs you’re interested in. It may be hitting the computer screens or desks of the same recruiters and hiring decision makers you’re trying to impress.

How do you think it will impact your chances, if someone reviewing your resume realizes it’s suspiciously similar to another one they’ve got in their files?

► “Using” published content is stealing and violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

ANYTHING published online is automatically copyrighted to the author, whether or not they clearly state the copyright. Integrity is a critical attribute for any business leader worth her or his salt. Certainly, your ethics should dissuade you from plagiarizing.

If that doesn’t stop you, do you really want to risk a law suit that could possibly tarnish your online and offline brand reputation?

There’s just no way around it — you have to invest the time and do the work yourself or hire a professional (and still expect to do some hard work), if you want to make your mark in today’s overly-competitive executive job search landscape.

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Related series of posts:

Best of Executive Resume Branding Tactics and Advice

A C-level/Senior Executive Branding, Online Identity, and Job Search Strategist, Meg Guiseppi loves collaborating with forward-focused corporate leaders to differentiate their unique value proposition, demystify the new world of executive search, and strategically position them for job search acceleration. She is one of only a handful of career professionals to hold both the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist and Master Resume Writer credentials. Meg is also a Certified VisualCV Creator and Certified Professional Resume Writer. For a wealth of insider tips on personal branding and executive job search, visit her Executive Resume Branding Blog/Website. Follow Meg on Twitter.

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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.

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