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.
Ola Rynge is an entrepreneur with a passion for the personal development side of personal branding (covered in this blog) as well as the application of personal branding and social media for entrepreneurs and small businesses (covered in The Rynge Blog).
His company, The Rynge Group specializes in market oriented small business and idea development, including social media strategies and implementations.
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