If you followed the advice in my previous article Personal Branding: Some Simple First Steps, you should now have a decent photograph of yourself, an e-mail address with your name in it, an about me statement or better yet a statement of purpose, and an account on Linkedin. Everywhere you go online with your personal brand you should have a consistent display of your name, photograph, and purpose.
Next you should set up an account in Facebook. Facebook has surpassed Myspace in terms of number of users, and it is a much better platform for your personal brand. It is also a very misused social media site.
When you create your page at http://www.facebook.com/ make sure to use the vanity URL, which puts your name in your Facebook address. My Facebook address is http://www.facebook.com/bretsimmons
Use the same photo you used at your Linkedin account as your profile photo in Facebook. Right below your photo, insert your statement of purpose or a short about me statement. This is the essence of your personal brand and to be effective it needs to be consistent on all your accounts.
Set up your “info” page as if you were having a conversation with someone at a meeting of your local Chamber of Commerce. You don’t want to give out your phone number or e-mail address, but almost anything else you can share on this page could potentially come up as a topic of casual conversation at any in-person networking function, so tell us something about yourself. Include the link to your business if you own one, your blog when you get one, and your Linkedin page (which everyone should have by now).
I think Facebook is the perfect place to be both professional and personal at the same time. A lot of folks will tell you that you should keep these parts of your life separate online by creating multiple identifies or sorting your contacts on Facebook so that not everyone can see everything about you. I think that is terrible advice. As I’ve said before in my article The Google Background Check, the sooner you accept the fact that you have no privacy online the sooner you can learn how to be professionally personal and develop your personal brand with social networking sites much more effectively.
By using your real name, a recent photo, and some facts about you in the info section, you are being personal. The photo section of Facebook can be used to be even more personal, which I would encourage you to do, but this is also the section where people make the most mistakes. Use the photo section to show people the breadth or your interests and activities. If you run, show us some pictures of your recent events. If you travel, show us some photos from your favorite trips. If you love animals, show us a few pictures of your animals. You do NOT have to include your face or the face of any of your friends and family if you are not comfortable. If you take a trip to Tahoe, post some pictures of your favorite spots on the lake and include a caption that says something like “my family really loved this spot.” Now we know you have a family and you love Tahoe.
Post pictures of yourself having fun, but not being stupid. I’m sorry, but you have to practice some professional judgment here if you want to use Facebook to build your personal brand. Get rid of all those pictures of you and your friends in swimming suits drinking like fish. Your friends were there to see you do it in person – they got the real thing and the rest of us won’t know or care what we missed. If you want to use Facebook to help you build an effective personal brand, you must always put your best foot forward. If you have a picture of you and your friends where you were too drunk to find your feet, don’t post it on Facebook.
If I post a comment to that picture of you scantily clad in a bird cage at Burning Man, everyone in MY friends list will be able to see your ENTIRE photo album. So much for privacy.
Speaking of friends, don’t buy the Facebook lie that this site is only for your “friends.” As I said in my article The Google Background Check, you should set your site up in such a way that you have nothing to hide and you have no reason to ever deny someone’s request to connect to you. You can always hide any status updates on your home page if they bother you too much, and as a last resort, you can always disconnect with (unfriend) anyone does really stupid things in Facebook.
NEVER participate in any of those silly games your friends will send you that ask you stuff like what superhero are you or which small farm animal you are most like. When you are on Facebook for personal branding, always remember that it is a tool and not a toy. You are going to get all kinds of invitations to participate in a variety of goofy things – just ignore them.
For now, you should also ignore that little box at the top that says “What’s on your mind?” Please realize that no one really cares. That box is called a status update and in professional branding, it should be used to consistently contribute value associated with your personal brand. I’ll talk about how you can do that via Twitter in another post soon, so stay tuned!
Related Posts:
Personal Branding: Some Simple First Steps
You should follow me on twitter here.
Dr. Bret, you lay out organized, mature guidelines that should enable just about anybody to start the process of personal branding. In reading the related posts you eluded to a course you are going to teach entitled
“Google is your new business card: Building a valuable personal brand.”
I did not see any mention of search engine optimization practices and was wondering how important, or not this practice should be in creating searchable content.
[Reply]
Mario, glad you found my course! Here is what I will say about SEO. I hired a professional to design my site and take care of the “behind the curtain” aspects of SEO. When this site launched in June, I expected it to be at the top of a google page. But there is another Bret Simmons, and he had the top spot until recently. What I did was to blog almost every day, link to my own posts in my blog, and comment on a lot of other websites. This is the process side of SEO and it worked. Now if you google Bret Simmons, this site is #1. Of course if you google Bret L Simmons, I have all the spots for several pages. That’s my brand. Thanks for the question! Bret
[Reply]