Managing your personal brand while you’re on vacation is not easy. You’ll need to make decisions on how you want to handle your social media accounts. Do you automate? Do you try to keep up via your mobile phone and chance distracting yourself from wonderful vacation moments? Do you delegate it out to someone? Or, do you let your connections know and just leave it alone?
These same questions apply to email, phone calls and any other communication tools you utilize.
Productivity and time management experts will tell you to communicate with your contacts that you will be away. According to these experts, it will let them know not to expect an immediate response from you so you can truly “unplug” and focus on your vacation time.
What I’ve found is that when you inform people, they are reminded about you and you are on their radar. They begin sending emails to you of things they have been “meaning to discuss” with you. Granted they do realize you’re away and often their intent is to “get in line” in your inbox and move the responsibility of connecting with you upon your return from their list to yours. The challenge is that their behavior often “fills up” your inbox to the point that it cannot accept any more messages while you’re away. Plan to have someone culling through that inbox for you to avoid that problem during vacation or plan very specific moments when you’ll do that and be disciplined enough not to read the emails when you’re culling – just cull the subject lines and senders so you can get back to the vacation time that you worked so hard to enjoy!
Lastly, the toughest part is that most people don’t read the email you sent them communicating that you would be away. The email serves as a reminder to them. They begin sending you emails about things they have been meaning to talk you about for a long while now (but forgot until they were reminded by the email you sent notifying them of your vacation). And, they continue to email while you’re gone asking why you didn’t respond to your email or if you received their email. They greatly contribute to the inbox overload and you can be left with missing important emails from people who have concerns you need to address when you return.
All of this can wreak havoc on your personal brand. So how do you prepare for this?
Please let me know what you do. This next week I’m writing a blog post about this for this blog and will highlight answers that you share with me along with giving proper credit with who shared it.
You can leave your comments here, tweet me, post your response on my Facebook wall or in-message me. I look forward to hearing your answer/ideas/tips to the questions – How do you manage your personal brand while you’re on vacation?
Here’s this past week’s roundup of insightful articles:
- Trusted Personal Brand: One Conversation at a Time by Skip Weisman
- Super-Size Your Personal Brand on Social Media by Crystal Washington
- Why Don’t People Follow Good Advice? by Nance Rosen
- Turn Your Spare Time into Extra Income by Ceren Cubukcu
- 5 Signs Your Personal Brand has Disappeared by Heather Huhman
- Eliminate Costs for Increased Profit by Elinor Stutz
- 7 Signs It’s Time to Reinvent Your Personal Brand by Roger Parker
- “Tell Me About Yourself” One More Time by Alex Freund
- Career Coaching: Getting Help is for Wimps? by Richard Kirby
- 3 Must-Do’s in Bootstrapping Your Personal Brand by Maria Elena Duron
- Six Sales Tips for Sales Promotion by Chamber of Commerce
- Your LOI May Vary, But Should Never Waver by Jeff Shuey
- How to Say ‘No’ but Maintain a ‘Yes’ Personal Brand by Kate Southam
- 10 Ways to Get Brand Equity from a Panel Appearance by The Young Entrepreneur Council
- One Thing Everyone Should Know About Handling Stress by Beth Kuhel
- Productivity: Get Up Early (or Stay Up Late) by Erik Deckers
- Three Tips to Clean Up Your Digital Dirt by Leslie Truex
- Cultivating Your Tribe for Career Success by Marc Miller
- Recruiting the Effective Job Applicant by Ken Sundheim
- Build Your Brand with Hashtags by Crystal Washington
This next week we’ll cover:
- Lessons on Personal Branding from “The Boss”
- Personal Brand Types
- Time Management and Your Personal Brand
- The Power of Rehearsing
- Building a Meaningful Legacy
- Promiscuous LinkedIn Connections
- Is Job Hopping a Smart Career Strategy?
- And, Business Lessons from Distance Cyclists
We look forward to your comments and feedback!
Mahalo!
Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks– a word of mouth marketing firm, and a professional speaker and trainer on developing social networks that work. She provides workshops, webinars, seminars and direct services that help create conversation, connection, credibility, community and commerce around your brand. Maria Duron is founder and moderator of #brandchat – a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding that is recognized by Mashable as one the 15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers.
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