The Socialization of Your Personal Brand by Brian Solis

The Socialization of Your Personal Brand

By Brian Solis, blogger at PR 2.0 and principal of FutureWorksPR, Co- Author Putting the Public Back in Public Relationsand Now Is Gone

SourceIn the era of the Social Web, practically everything we create and share online isopen to public discovery, interpretation, and feedback – positive, neutral andnegative. It sounds sensational and perhaps a bit ominous, but it’s not meant toserve as a deterrent. It's only intended to introduce the subject and the context of this subject as well as raise awareness for the need to be proactive aboutcultivating and managing your brand and your reputation.Your digital identity defines who you are and in this genre of Web-savvy contentcreators and purveyors, your online reputation does indeed precede you. Thepictures and videos you upload, the bookmarks you share, the profile you defineon each social network, those you befriend, the comments you share on blogsand other profiles, the posts your publish, the tweets you send on Twitter,basically everything you contribute to the Social Web shapes and contributes to

your personal brand and how people will most likely perceive it. Hopefully in mostcases, it can promote and showcase your expertise, and sometimes, what’srepresentative online can and will be used against you.Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog posts and comments,basically every piece of content you generate collectively feed search results inGoogle, Yahoo, Ask, and all other search engines. All it takes is someone to“Google” aka search your name to begin the process of forming an opinion andperception based on the search results – usually without your knowledge anddefinitely without the opportunity to explain the results.Whether you’re a student, currently employed, seeking a new job, a brandambassador or the official community manager of a company’s social mediastrategy, your activities online contribute to and ultimately shape your identity andlay the foundation for your reputation.It’s been said that Google is the new resume. Truth be told, any search engine,whether social or traditional, is the resume – it’s the Wikipedia entry for the restof us. It’s no longer what we decide to curate onto a piece of paper or onto onetraditional one-page digital resume. It really is moot in a world when anyone canpractically piece together your story without the help of a document designed toshape and steer our perception.“Seventy-seven percent of recruiters report using search engines to findbackground data on candidates. Of that number, 35 percent eliminated acandidate because of what they found online.”-- Kevin Donline,Star Tribune Minneapolis, St. Paul, MinnesotaIndeed, there are many stories that fuel the urgency for everyone to take controlof their online persona. In one such case, a highly qualified candidate appeared

for a job interview and was confronted by the comments that he left on a series of older, unrelated blog posts that cast his opinion in a way that was questionable tothose making the hiring decision.In another such instance, a candidate was offered an interview, which was later rescinded due to several negative blog posts that portrayed him as anundesirable teammate.Did they do anything wrong? The only answer is that they weren’t proactive indefining, correcting, or steering their brand and underestimated the impact of social content on the job selection process. The same could be said for employers and employees.In four different cases involving DWI car crashes, the convicted defendantsreceived greater sentences because of the pictures on their profiles in Facebook,Myspace and other communities. In one case, a 20 year old was shown wearinga Halloween jailbird costume drinking and celebrating after seriously injuringsomeone. After viewing the pictures, the judge labeled the defendant depravedand extended his sentence.In another similar case, the defense lawyer recommended to his client that shedelete her Facebook profile prior to the trial. She refused and the pictures thatshe chose to share painted her in an unfavorable light and contributed to amaximum sentence.While these legal cases may be extreme, and certainly sharing pictures is notillegal, the idea here is that the content they chose to share online didn’t conveyremorse, instead visually demonstrating that important lessons weren’t learned.