Personal Branding 24/7: You're Always On

As the number of users exponentially grows on social networks, the demand for every single person to have their own “air time” increases. We will constantly have to work harder to become known and remembered now and in the future. If I don’t see your face online every day, then I forget about you when I’m looking to hire. Facebook is about to approach 500 million users, while Twitter has over 200 million, LinkedIn has over 70 million, and there are approximately 150 million blogs. If you add the amount of blog posts published per day, plus the amount of traditional news articles published, and then add social updates, your brain will start hurting. There is so much noise right now, so the competition for attention is becoming very challenging for most people. We are always on and have to always be out there promoting our brands.

The demise of one-off promotional campaigns

If a celebrity appears on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, they are there to promote their movie, their latest CD or even a book they just got published. No celebrity goes on that show without having something to sell.

When it comes to your career, you can’t afford to have these one-off promotional campaigns like celebrities do. You have to constantly be out there talking to people, showing your name and face, and adding some type of value to serve your audience. You simply can’t afford to be forgotten, especially in a world of endless choices.

What this means to you is that you have to consistently publish content through all of your distribution systems. That way, people will notice you, remember you, and when they have a business problem or an open position, you will be the top-of-mind brand.

Face time 2.0

In the workplace, “face time” means that your management sees your actual face in the office on a reoccurring basis. To management, this means that your not only present at work, but you’re being social at work, which is a skill that is praised in most political workplaces. Face time is quickly transitioning to the online medium, especially with the rise of remote workforces. The only difference is that the online world is public, so you can actually send the wrong message to management, without even thinking about it. If they see that you’re on Facebook for ten hours a day, you aren’t as social media specialist, then it looks bad.

The new Apple iPhone has the ability to do video conferencing between iPhone 4’s. Aside from Skype, UStream, and other available technologies, the new iPhone has broken geographic boundaries. Of course, if you’re physically in your managers presence, that will count more than seeing them through your phone. What these technologies do is to bring you closer to the people that control the fate of your career. By doing this, you have more career opportunities because your management will have a stronger connection to you.

Reputation management and privacy

I think Mark Zuckerberg may be right with his “end of privacy” announcement a while ago. To prove his hypothesis, a new research study just came out that says that 77% of American’s aren’t concerned about privacy. Also, very few people disabled their Facebook pages when they changed users settings without consent. Do we really care about privacy? Will we have a choice weather to care about it or not?

We need to be on 24/7 and our social stream has to be seen by our network.This does mean that you should be professional with every message you publish though. A lot of careless people have already been fired because of their online presence. Remember that if people don’t have access to your streams, they have access to other people’s streams, which means you suffer a competitive disadvantage.