Beyond the Glass Ceiling

Teleseminars for Careerists from "A Brand You World"

Via Guy Kawaski, a great series of podcasts on personal branding for careerists from the "A Brand You World" Global Summit. Just about everything you'd want to know about creating a personal brand.

You may also want to check out this article-- 7 Simple Steps to Nurture Your Personal Brand--and this "Change This" Manifesto,  Build Your Brand in Bits and Bytes: Building Your Personal Brand Online. The latter includes some excellent tips on how to go from being "Digitally Dissed" or (worse yet) "Digitally Disastrous" to "Digitally Distinct."

Blogging for Personal Branding from Rosetta Thurman

I've written a lot about personal branding here, so by now you can guess where I stand. Today, Rosetta Thurman, nonprofit executive extroidanaire, has a great post on how blogging has helped her develop her personal brand and make a mark in her profession at only 24. Definitely worth a read!

Career Homework: Make a Business Card that Reflects Your Brand

This Friday's homework assignment is to work on an important element of your own personal branding--your business card.

If you work for a company or organization, you probably have a card through them (although a surprising number of people are not given cards, I've found). But if you're going to market yourself, not your company, then you should seriously consider creating your own business cards that reflect your personal brand--who YOU are, not who your organization says you are.

Designing Your Card
The purpose of a card is not only to introduce you and give people you meet a way to contact you later, but it's also to help you stand out from the crowd. A nicely-designed and produced business card is going to say a lot about your brand, so it's worth it to spend some time doing something more creative.

Luckily there's been an explosion in the quality of cards in the past few years so here are a lot of really cool and interesting business card examples to stimulate your thinking. The card above is from a Flickr photoset on the art of the business card. It's a great place to start for some creative inspiration.

Here are some other interesting sites to check out:

• Creative Bits
• Six Most Uniquely Creative Business Cards of SXSWi 2007
• Business Cards at Pile of Photos
• Creative Business Card Design Ideas
• Creative Business Cards from Blog Oh Blog

Some of these may be prohibitively expensive to produce and/or may be a little too far-out for your particular identity. But there's a lot of space for inspiration here and plenty of ways to break out from the crowd using color, graphics and other design elements.

Producing Your Cards
Depending on the complexity of your card, you can, of course produce your own business cards with your printer and those perforated sheets of business cards they sell at Staples. This will do in a pinch, but if you're going to be serious about your identity, you might as well spend a few bucks to get it right.

If you decide to go with one of the really far-out cards above, you may need to work with a local print shop to discuss various options, especially if you're looking for some kind of punch-out design, mixed media, etc. But most of us won't go that route so you can also try some online options.

VistaPrint
One of the most well-known of the online printers, VistaPrint offers decent value, some good design templates (including a blank template) and a fair amount of flexibility in producing your cards. They also guarantee low prices. They offer a variety of finishes (matte, glossy, foil embellishments) and for $1.99, you can get an electronic version to attach to emails, etc. More on their pricing is available here.

UPDATE--I based my suggestion for VistaPrint on my own experiences and those of a few people I know. In comments, Dave noted that he wouldn't recommend VistaPrint, so I went looking for some reviews to get a more balanced picture. You can find them here. Mostly positive, but when people don't like VistaPrint, they REALLY don't like them.

Moo
Another way to be creative is in the type of card you produce. Moo lets you create mini cards that are 28x77 mm. A set of 100 is $19.99 and you can have up to 100 different images--so each card could actually be a different image if you wanted. You can then add up to 6 lines of text on the reverse. Here are some examples of Moo business cards. You can also create text only cards if you prefer.

Another option with Moo is the sticker book. I wouldn't use this to replace my business card, but they could be a fun supplement to your branding, especially if you come up with a particularly cool design or logo.

Using Your Cards
So what do you do with your cards once you've printed them up? Well, there are the obvious uses--passing them out at conferences, networking events, etc. But you might also want to check out some of the ideas in these articles, 30 Creative Ways to Use Business Cards and 8 Ways to Use Your Business Cards to Network.

Let me know if you have any other tips, tricks or resources for creating and using business cards. Now I'm off to work on my own.

Building Your Online Brand: Start with the Message

Over the next few weeks I'm writing about how you can build a strong online personal brand using some free tools that are readily available to anyone with Internet access. A few days ago I reviewed why it's important to have a strong online identity. In today's post, I'm going to talk about some of the elements of personal branding in preparation for later posts on using the tools.

What Is a "Personal Brand"?
In the world of organizations, a brand is the total perceived value of that organization, relative to competitors, as viewed by a particular audience. In other words, a brand is how people view an organization in comparison to other, similar organizations. Your personal brand, then,  is the perception that people have of you, as compared to other people in similar positions.  Obviously the goal of personal branding is to create a consistent, positive message about who you are and what you stand for that will make you stand out from the crowd.

The Elements of Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the sum total of information about you that people will use to form an impression of your value. Your appearance, your personal characteristics, your work experience and education, your strengths, your passions, your work values and your accomplishments are all factors in developing your brand. What makes your brand personal, though, is how you position these elements to show you as a unique individual. In other words, how do you use all of this information to convey to your audience what makes YOU special?

Some Resources for Developing Your Personal Brand
There are a lot of helpful online resources for developing your personal brand. You may want to start with this quiz, What's the Value of Your Personal Brand? It will give you a good idea of the steps you'll need to take in putting together your online identity. Then check out the slideshow I've embedded above and some of these other resources

• Personal Branding and Career Self-Marketing Tools
• Personal Branding Podcast
• Your Core and Functional Brands
• Excerpts from Be Your Own Brand

For those new to developing an online identity, it's important for you to start with some of these exercises to begin developing your personal brand before you dive into using tools.

If you've already been using some of the online branding tools I mentioned previously--blogging, Linked In, etc.--it's probably a good idea for you to go back to this initial stage of thinking through your personal brand and then looking at what  you have online to see how well it's communicating your brand.

Branding can be difficult, especially for women because it can feel like bragging. But in a world where our competition for a job isn't just down the street, it's across the country or on another continent, branding is really a critical tool to develop.

How To Improve Your Online Visibility and Begin Developing Your Personal Brand

Last week I wrote about my experiences using the Career Distinction Online Identity Calculator, noting that my use of several social media tools has boosted my personal Google ranking. I think this is a subject that's so important for women who are looking to make career connections so over the next few weeks, I want to share some ideas on how to use Web 2.0 tools to increase your online visibility and help you develop your online "brand."

In this post I'm going to discuss why I think it's important for women to have a personal brand and market themselves online. I'm also going to give a quick intro to what I consider to be the key tools of building your online identity. In subsequent posts I'm going to explore how you can use these tools to build your own online brand and boost your career prospects in the process.

Four Reasons Why Your Online Brand Matters
There are four key reasons why your online brand matters:

1. First impressions of you are increasingly being formed online. According to a 2006 ExecuNet survey of recruiters, 77% are using Google, Yahoo and other searches to pre-screen job candidates. Thirty-five percent of those using search engines indicate that they've eliminated candidates from consideration based on what they found as a result of those searches. So the next time you send in your resume, the first thing a recruiter is probably doing is Googling you. The question is, what will be found?
2. Having a strong online "brand" will give you a competitive advantage over other job candidates. While recruiters and potential employers are using Google to find out about potential candidates, the candidates themselves don't seem to have realized that their online brand can be as potent a weapon in their job search kit as a killer resume. Beginning now to manage your online brand will give you a leg up over others vying for the same job.
3. A strong online brand can also be a form of passive job search. In an uncertain, unstable economy, it's always a good idea to keep your options open and some feelers out for potential opportunities. A strong online identity can help market you to potential employers who may meet you in other venues, Google you back at the office, and find out how truly amazing you are.
4. The process of developing your online visibility is actually a potent form of networking that can give you access to people and opportunities unavailable or inaccessible in the "real world." As you'll see in subsequent posts, many of the strategies for developing your online identity and personal brand involve connecting to others online. Because of the Web's global reach and the nature of many online activities, you will find yourself connecting to people and projects that are just not available in the real world. This is particularly important for women, who may find themselves shut out of many real world networks.

In some career areas, the notion of online personal branding is already deeply embedded--creative types and web geeks have been forging strong online identities for a few years now. These approaches are bleeding over into other professional realms, though, as more and more employers find new ways to use the web for recruitment. If you want to move your career forward, it's critically important that you begin to understand and do something about your own personal brand.

The Tools of Personal Branding
If you accept that developing an online identity is important, the next issue is how you can go about creating your own online brand.  Google, the most widely-used search engine, weighs social media tools and activities particularly high in establishing rankings. This means that participating in the blogosphere, using tools like Linked In, etc. will do quite a bit to establish and build your online brand.

The tools I've found to be most useful in establishing an online identity are:

• Maintaining a blog, which includes not only writing my own blog, but reading and commenting on other people's blogs.
• Developing a Linked In Profile
• Developing an Online Portfolio
• Using tools like Slideshare to share content I've created with others. When the content is good, then other users will vote on it and this has given added credibility to my efforts.

The other thing that's been critical is using these tools to highlight my strengths and passions and to send a consistently positive message about who I am and what I stand for. Although pushing up my Google rank is important because it gives me added online credibility, equally if not more critical is the need for me to ensure that these various pieces of my online identity communicate consistent, strong messages about me to a potential audience.

What's Next?
Over the next few weeks we're going to take a closer look at using the tools I've mentioned above to begin establishing your online brand. Where possible, I'm also going to try to show you some examples of how to use these tools most effectively.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. What tools of personal branding have YOU been using and how have they worked for you?

What's Your Online Identity Score and What Does it Say About You?

Here's a little experiment for you to run:

• Type your name (with quotes) into Google.

• Look at the first three pages of results--how many of these references are about you?

• How many of those results would convey the right message to a future employer or client?

In an age where Google is the first place we go to get information on just about anything or anyone, our online identities are becoming increasingly important.

The other day I used a handy tool from Career Distinction to calculate my "online identity score." What I found was that I have a strong web presence--I show up as the top "Michele Martin" and about 16 of the entries on the first three pages are both about me and convey the messages I want to convey about myself.

Even more interesting, though, was the discovery that what has boosted my online identity has been mostly content that I've created myself, including:

• My Bamboo Project blog where I've been writing for over a year on various issues related to technology, organizational/professional development, learning and nonprofits.
• My LinkedIn profile
• A Slideshare presentation on Online Portfolios that I developed (a post for another day)
• My profile page from the Building a Better Blog social network I created about a month ago.

I also have several references from other bloggers who have linked to me.

All of this means that I'm having a huge amount of control over the quality of information that's available about me online. I can build buzz for myself through my interactions and the information I post, which in turn can mean that when I'm "googled" I create greater credibility with potential employers or clients.

Seeing this has made me more aware of the issue of personal branding and online identities. What would it say, for example, if someone typed in my name and there were no references to me at all online? What about having a "mixed bag" of references, with some that conveyed the "right" message, but then other information that didn't?

What I realize is that the more information about myself that I keep online, the better off I am when it comes to developing my personal brand. It's also critical that I use my real identity--not a pseudonym or just my first name. At one point I'd considered blogging using only my first name in my blog, etc. Now I'm incredibly glad that I took the plunge and have begun using my full name just about everywhere on the web. At no point has it hurt me--no identity theft or stalkers--and it's allowing me to claim my personal online identity.

So what's your online identity score?  What can you do to boost it?