This is the seventh of ten posts where we follow Marcos Salazar’s personal branding journey, as he uses the concepts and four-step process outlined in Me 2.0 for his own career.
Whenever I get a notification that someone is following me on Twitter, I visit their profile and take a look at their website. If they don’t have a personal website or simply link to their company site, I usually don’t follow them. Why not? Because their online presence is giving me the impression that they are most likely not going to contribute much to the conversation.
In my last post, I discussed how to use the techniques of narrative, being a purple cow, and understanding context to create a strong offline presence. These same principles can be used to create a powerful online presence as well and prevent incidents such as the one above from happening to you. Below is how I’ve learned to use these strategies to help differentiate my personal brand online and how you can use them to create a brand that grabs your audience’s attention and keeps it.
Using a “blogsite” to create a narrative
Whether we realize it or not, we are all creating a narrative about ourselves online. Everything we post, comment on, or upload is contributing to the story of who we are online – potentially to millions. And even if you don’t make a conscious effort to create an online presence, that too is a narrative because you are leaving your personal brand to chance.
This is why a blogsite – a hybrid of a blog and a website – is so essential to creating a strong online presence and is one of the main principles found in Me 2.0. By having a website that allows you to both blog and provide addition biographical information, you can take control of your online narrative and begin telling people the unique story of who you are and what you think within the field that interests you.
Before venturing on this personal branding journey, my blogsite focused on personal development for young professionals. However, if you visit my main website you’ll see that the focus of it has shifted due to what I’ve learned on my personal branding journey. Now my site is centered around being a Renaissance Worker, Career Adventurism, and Psychology Development for Young Professionals. And as time goes on I will be providing more and more content that not only benefits people within these topics, but also adds to my narrative and makes my brand stronger.
Being a purple cow online
One thing you always want to do is try to differentiate your blogsite in some way. Common strategies are covering unique topics or through unique site design. For example, a great title to your blog such as Matt Cheuvront’s site Life Without Pants can turn you into a purple cow and draw people in to ask why you named your site a certain way. Or you can create a memorable logo and display well known news outlets associated with your site such as the ones found on the Personal Branding Blog home page.
Another great technique is to have a unique picture on your website. Seth Godin’s image is a great example of this. He is well known for his bald head and if you go to his site, he has a picture displaying the top of his head front and center. It is not a loud or crazy image. It simple, shows his personality, and draws you in.
In redoing my blogsite, I decided to use a simple and easy to navigate design as well as have a fun and interesting image on the sidebar that provides a visual representation of being a Renaissance Worker capable of jumping from project to project. My friend Wendy Ploger originally took the photo for my website BoroThreads and I had her get a little creative and alter it a bit for my personal website. I have gotten some great feedback about the photo. Such images can add to your narrative by providing readers with a sense of your personality, creativity, and display a more human side of you that can increase interest and make visitors want to find out more about your personal brand.
Online social networks and context
In many ways, social networks are extensions of your main website and can fill in important details to the narrative you are trying to create for your personal brand. For example, your LinkedIn profile provides people with a detailed look at your professional life and allows other to give recommendations that can add rich information to the story of who you are. Flickr can provide a concrete view of things you are involved in such as events, trips, or project. And YouTube allows you to create content that gives your narrative human elements and lets people see more of your personality.
But in thinking about each social network, it’s important to keep context in mind. For example, you won’t want to post information that is too personal on LinkedIn because this is where your professional network resides and you don’t want to potentially damage your reputation. You may use Facebook more for keeping up with friends, so will not want to inundate them with lots of posts or updates about things happening within your field. Or on Twitter, where everything posted is on public display, you may not want to post highly personal information that can make you look unprofessional or damage your brand.
How does this impact my narrative?
When using these (or just about any strategy) in developing your personal brand, one thing to always keep in mind is that anything you post could have an impact on the narrative you are trying to create. So when forming a strategy, ask yourself, “How is this going to contribute to the story I want to tell?” Finding answers to this question will provide you with a good guide in developing a strong personal brand both on and offline.
Author:
Marcos Salazar is the author of The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide, which focuses on the psychology of life after college and what graduates go through as the make the transition from school to the working world. He writes a career adventurism and psychological development blog for young professionals at www.marcossalazar.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @marcossalazar.
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- My Personal Branding Journey Part 10 – Reflecting Back and Moving Forward This is the last post in our series where...
- My Personal Branding Journey Part 8: Communicate Your Brand with Good Blogger Relations & Twitter This is the eighth of ten posts where we...
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I agree with so much of what you say here and love the specific examples you give… but I am curious about your opening statement in regards to Twitter. When someone follows me, I look at what they contribute to Twitter as being most important in considering following back, not their website/blog. In fact, I follow many who add value with their tweets without even having a site. So, I’m curious why you’d judge what someone is likely to contribute to the conversation by going to other sites when you can see dozens to hundreds of examples of exactly what they do contribute already right on their profile page.
Hi Greg. Thanks for the great feedback! And yes, you make a good point and I may have not fully articulated what I was trying to get across (my posts are already long enough and I try to cut them down as much as possible to get to the point, but sometimes that may leave too much room for interpretation =>).
I actually do look at people’s tweets in addition to their website, and if they are contributing on both and have great posts on their website, it motivates me much more to follow them. So having both displays greater value versus only having a Twitter profile. Plus I love learning more about what people are doing and if they don’t have a website, then I either have to do some searching (which takes up time) or I can’t connect a face or personality with the tweets, and that doesn’t leave the best impression both consciously and subconsciously. If they had a site where I could find out more about them and what they are contributing, it would be a no brainer to follow them or not.
Now, if a close friend or someone I know doesn’t have a website and connects with me on Twitter, of course I will follow them because I already know who they are and what their narrative is. And it could just be a personal preference also. I love looking at people’s websites to understand their narrative and their life history. What having a website does is allow me to quickly see if I want to reach out in some way and see if I can help with what they are trying to achieve. I love connecting with people and not having a website makes that harder to do sometime. Yes, you can get a sense of who they are via what they tweet, but it is much harder and take a lot more time to do vs if they had a website to quickly scan. And the truth is that little Bio on twitter can only tell so much.
So to sum it up, judging based on whether they have a website or not can’t be the sole basis on who you choose to follow on Twitter, which I think is what you are getting at and I didn’t articulate well enough. But for me, having a website makes the decision a lot easier and quickly helps me decide if I want to start developing a connection with them. What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for the reply, Marcos. I agree it’s easier to get a fuller picture when there are links (and a bio, for that matter. Amazing how many folks don’t fill one in). For me, though, I make Twitter follow decisions based on Twitter actions… though I suspect that deeper, faster connections are made when more of the narrative is available to see.
All good food for thought, indeed.
I don’t agree with your comment about how you choose to follow someone on Twitter. Some of the people I follow and find very informative have their company website in their profile. I look more at their tweet stream to understand how they participate in the conversation and whether the conversation will be relevant to me.
Hi Gina – I think I answered your question in a reply to Greg…would love to hear your thoughts. =) Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for this post. I really liked your section on considering the content you would put on each social site.
LOVE what Wendy did to the photo of you. Great image to brand yourself with. It truly speaks a thousand words. So I’ll just say… Go Marcos!