Recently, Dan Schawbel released his seven personal branding predictions for 2011. Among them:
- Your online personal brand will be consolidated
- Soft skills become more important than hard skills
- As the economy gets better, the war for talent ignites
- Social networks will become completely ineffective for one-to-many marketing efforts
- Personal brands have more responsibilities
- Social media becomes widely used in the workplace
- People establishing their online brands earlier in life
I’d add three others:
- Marketing your online brand will be increasingly important as more jobs open
- Online reputation management will continue to be important for both individuals and companies
- Mobile tools will influence the future of personal branding
Marketing your online brand
This was a difficult year for job seekers. Recent college graduates and seasoned professionals alike were struggling and competing for the small number of available jobs in the market. However, an important lesson came out of the intense competition: You need to know how to market (and brand) yourself effectively in order to stand out in a tough market. Many job seekers in 2010 learned this the hard way—spending months unemployed and wondering if they’d ever find work.
In 2011, I predict that many job seekers will realize the importance of marketing themselves (and not just in marketing-related industries). Creating and maintaining a personal brand is much like marketing a company or product—except that product is you.
Monitoring your reputation online
With the job market looking up in 2011, both employers and candidates will continue watching their brands closely on the Internet. People will want more in-depth brand monitoring solutions as they strive to create a positive online impression of themselves or their company.
An up-and-coming solutions for job seekers is Vizibility.
Mobile applications & websites
Mobile Internet, e-mail, and applications are already popular—but they’ll continue to grow over the next year as more people purchase smart phones and unlimited cell phone plans. Personal branding applications and solutions will become more widely available to a variety of providers and cell phone models.
