Twitter Personal Branding Q + A #7

Responses to recent tweets by people about personal branding and Gen-Y, Twitter, presentations and lack of focus.

Rene LeMerle, @ReneLeMerle, twittered: do Gen Y care about their personal brand? the more i delve, the more i feel this building of personal brands is a gen x and older phenomenon

Jacob Share, @jacobshare: I don’t have this impression. An important part of personal branding is reputation management, and a recent study by the Pew Research Center discovered that “young adults [i.e. Gen-Yers] are more likely to restrict what they share and whom they share it with.” You might argue that Gen-Yers have more to hide from potential employers in the first place, but that’s debatable.

That said, I can imagine where this impression comes from.

Personal brands without calling it personal brands

Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers were already well into their careers when personal branding was coined, i.e. they already had personal brands without calling them as much. Even if they also needed to learn the tools, applying those tools to their pre-established personal contact networks made getting tangible results much quicker, which will only encourage more effort in that direction.

Gen-Yers, on the other hand, are just starting their careers, and most of them are only beginning to build their personal brands from scratch, and to appreciate what personal branding can do for them.

William Wilson, @theclothier, twittered: Why do some people care so little about their personal #brand, that they paint such horrible pictures of themselves on Twitter?

Jacob Share, @jacobshare: Ignorance.

Although people seem to know that tweets are public, either they don’t realize that their tweet will be just as findable as most any other typed text online – that is, indefinitely, thanks to Google – or they think it will be lost in the tweet masses and never noticed by anyone important. Of course, there are so many examples of that illusion, especially when it’s employees tweeting about their boss.

Joey Zakutney, @JoeyZakutney, twittered: Trying to develop a presentation about my personal brand. Anyone have cool ideas for how to present this content!?

Jacob Share, @jacobshare: To give you some specific suggestions, I clicked through to your Twitter profile to see how you present yourself and what you tweet about. Your Bio lists over 10 interests (!) and even then only some of your tweets were related to those topics. At the time of this writing, your Web site is down and although it shows a nice car, it’s not clear how your Twitter background image is relevant to your brand.

So I’m not really sure what your personal brand is.

Assuming you’ve already decided what your personal brand should be, your ambiguous Twitter profile means that the first thing you need to do is to focus your branding message. For example, one glance at your profile should tell the viewer what your personal brand is about and then have the adjacent tweets to back it up.

Once your personal branding message is clearer, you’ll be much better placed to present about it. One idea for you: your Twitter profile lists ‘Web 2.0’ as an interest. If you consider yourself a Web 2.0 expert, why not present the social media profiles you’re most proud of but with a twist that has each profile emphasizing a specific presentation point, and then pointing at the next profile in line. This way, to get the full presentation, a person would need to visit all the profiles.

You could even make a screencast of yourself giving the presentation with a voice over.

All the world

Jenna Starkey, @JennaStarkey, twittered: How do I create a personal brand w/ my new blog when I want to talk about everything? It’s a problem.

Jacob Share, @jacobshare: It certainly is easier to build a personal brand around expertise in a specific domain, but it is also possible to build a personal brand just around a personality. If you have a unique way of expressing yourself, or tend to take a different angle when approaching any topic, your blogging will attract people who like (or hate!) your style and just want to hang around to see what you’ll say or do next.

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.