I asked all the experts here on Personal Branding Blog for their personal branding pet peeves.
Notice any trends?
Deborah Shane:
One of my pet peeves about people’s personal branding on their social platforms is when they follow a conversation that not everyone knows about. Best to take that stuff one on one or in the DM. Makes me feel apart from rather than ‘a part of’.
Wendy Brache:
When someone follows me on Twitter, I check out their Twitter profile and decide if we have the same interests—if so, I follow them back. When I get an automatic re-tweet from them saying “Thanks for the follow—friend on Facebook, connect with me on LinkedIn, and check out my blog, too!” –it’s like agreeing to go for coffee, and having your suitor try to book all your Friday nights for the year.
Ben Cathers:
When people fail to promote their social media presence in the most obvious of places – business cards, email signatures, and personal websites.
Dan Schawbel:
I see too many people who are careless about their LinkedIn profile. Instead of copy and pasting their resume to their LinkedIn profile, they would rather leave it blank. This makes it harder to be found by recruiters and it makes you look careless.
Roger C. Parker:
In our SEO world, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate the 2 types of “experts.” Type 1 offers genuine first-hand knowledge, experience, and passion. Type 2 identifies a market, hires a copywriter to create a convincing sales page, then searches for “minimally-acceptable” content to deliver on the offer. Often, the market responds to the landing page, not the product, and doesn’t receive full value.
Maria Elena Duron:
Those who really have extracted, expressed and exuded their personal brand in everything that they do and yet they deny that that’s personal branding. They tout that only products can have brands and yet they themselves are a brand. Self-promotion is not branding – period.
Donna Dunning:
Going to the website of a person branded as an expert and getting blatant marketing instead of useful content.
Heather Huhman:
Your personal brand is about how others perceive you. My pet peeve is when people build their brands by only talking about themselves.
Mary van de Wiel:
Keeping people at arm’s length. It makes it that much harder for others to connect with you. Engage, engage!
Jacob Share:
People who include a picture of their kids as their avatar, and they themselves might not even be in the picture! Regardless of the fact that I have 4 kids myself, this just drives me nuts. Use a smiling/grinning headshot unless you have a good reason not to.
Author:
Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.
