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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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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Wouldn’t it be great to crack the first page of Google results for a search of your name?  Or, if your links already appear on the first page, wouldn’t you like to add yet another result?  Your Google Profile is the simplest, most sure-fire way to add another opportunity for searchers to find you.

Once published, a preview link to your Google Profile will appear at the very bottom of Page 1 search results for your name – which can be extremely beneficial if you have a common name (and others have not yet claimed this space).  Here is an example:

To create a Google Profile, navigate to http://www.google.com/profiles, and come armed with a Google account (Gmail, Google Wave, etc).  From there, updating your profile is an absolute snap.  Follow these 7 steps to create the perfect Google profile that describes you well and encourages searchers to find and contact you elsewhere on the web.

1.  Display your full name and allow others to contact you.

Your Google Profile exists solely so searchers can find you and contact you -  checking these 2 boxes makes perfect sense.  All reward, no risk.

2.  Upload a picture.

Keep in mind that most folks searching for you via Google will likely know something about you, but not everything.  Maybe they met you at a conference, and only remember your name and face?   Including a close-up shot is the easiest way to set you apart from others that share your name.

3.  Include a detailed history.

Same philosophy as above – those searching for you will likely recognize you by a single defining trait.  Did they grow up with you in Omaha, Nebraska?  Do they know you from college or from prior work experience?  Take the time to fill out your past history in full detail, so anyone from your past will recognize that you are you.

4.  Write a killer “What I Do” section.

In the “What I Do” section, Google provides the examples of  “Actor, Engineer, Scientist”.  Boring!  Instead, amp this section up by including a few provocative titles that really describe what you do.  For an excellent example, see the snapshot below from Meg Guiseppi’s profile.

5.  Write a brief, but informative, bio.

Your Google Profile is not a final destination, it is merely a portal.  So, keep your bio brief and to the point.  Include enough information to identify yourself, and to encourage searchers to contact you elsewhere (embedded links work great mixed in with your text).  Note: Others might debate my point about keeping your bio brief, as many have an extremely long description.  Ultimately, it is up to you.

6.  Link, link, link.

Google allows you the opportunity to link to anywhere and everywhere you’d like.  This is your opportunity to send searchers to the real places you want them to connect with you.  Take a look at the Google profile of Robert Scoble, who has linked to over 40 places you can find him on the web.  Wow!  Here is a screen-shot of the pages I’ve linked to.  How many web destinations of your own can you think to link to?

7.  Include common misspellings of your name.

Google realizes that not all web searchers are prolific spellers.  You can include all the potential misspellings of your name so that your Google Profile will appear for all queries.  (Brett Favre, this is your lucky day).

What do you all think?  Do you have a Google Profile?  Share your link in the comments, let’s see those shiny profiles!

Ryan Rancatore can also be found at Personal Branding 101, discussing the tools and tactics that will help you build a killer personal brand in 2010 and beyond.

Ryan would love to connect with you on Twitter at @RyanRancatore, or on Linkedin, Facebook, or Brazen Careerist.

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To build your personal brand, you should proactively comment on blogs related to your field and interact with bloggers in your industry.

To help you get started, we developed a Blog Recommendation Engine that suggests what blogs you should be reading based on your field. It taps into a variety of authoritative blog sources including Technorati, AllTop, and user generated and expert-reviewed suggestions.

Leaving thoughtful comments on blogs posts establishes yourself as contributing member of your industry. Besides demonstrating your insight, it also connects you to top bloggers in your field and other blog commenters in your niche who can potentially advance your career. Follow our guidelines for leaving effective blog comments to maximize your time spent commenting.

The Blog Recommendation Engine is one part of our Hireability Dashboard, which breaks down the components of your personal brand online and grades the strength of each. It is part of the Niche Involvement section, which tracks your blog comments, blog comments mentioning you, recommended blogs and Twitter. The Visibility section tracks your Google search results, professional profiles, social networks, directories, web 2.0 services to protect your username on, and media related to your name.  The Credibility section tracks your blog, other blogs mentioning you, social bookmarks mentioning you, and news mentioning you. Each section shows you what you should do to create a strong personal brand online, and tracks your progress along the way:

The Next Step

Now it’s time to find out: which blogs should you be commenting on? Create a free Brand-Yourself.com account now and start managing your online reputation with our Hireability Dashboard. See you there, and let us know what you think here.

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