You Inc. – Building Your Personal Brand Online

Last week I had the opportunity to be a guest speaker at Humber College in the Public Relations program on a topic that I believe is of growing importance in this day and age – your online personal brand.

Increasing Number of HR Professionals are Turning to Online Candidate Profiles

Anyone who is out there looking for work should be deeply concerned about their online brand. After all, the numbers indicate that 64% of HR managers believe that it’s appropriate to look at online profiles of candidates and 41% say that they’ve rejected people based on the results they found. In my opinion, that 64% figure is only going to move closer to 100% in the coming years. Online HR platforms such as Taleo will likely begin to scrape the web for information on candidates as soon as they submit their cover letter and resume to a job posting, eliminating the need for HR to even look around the web on their own.

Have You Googled Yourself?

During my presentation, I asked the class if they’ve ever Googled themselves, and if so, were they satisfied with the result? Surprised? Shocked? One hand was raised. Angie began to tell everyone how back in high school if you Googled her name, Angie Duz, a different result would appear with links to pornographic websites with a name that sounded exactly like hers! From then on, her friends would joke with her and call her angiedoes.com, a reference to the websites that would come up when you Googled her name. It’s pretty funny, but certainly doesn’t bode well for Angie. While I’m sure no recruiter or HR professional is going to think that Angie is an adult film star, it doesn’t showcase the real professional experience and talent that Angie has.

So How Do You Build Your Online Brand?

With the state of the social web, it’s easier then ever to create a professional and great looking website that allows you to tailor the message you want to convey to the outside world, avoiding the pitfalls that our friend Angie had!

First off, owning your domain is an absolute no brainer. Would you really want someone else owning yourname.com? I certainly wouldn’t. In an increasingly connected and wired world, the value of owning your online domain and address is only going to become more important. It’s even more relevant if you have a rather common name, as recruiters, colleagues and friends are likely to have difficulty navigating the web to find the real you.

I highlighted Flavors.me extensively during my presentation to the Humber students, and for good reason, it’s an excellent site to get started on building your personal brand online. Flavors.me allows you to organize all of your social profiles, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr, and more into one centralized online identity for yourself. I was asked by another girl in the class, “I’d get a website, but I don’t know how to build one, and I thought they cost thousands?” Not exactly! With Flavors.me you can build a great website in a matter of minutes, and they look great! While their free version offers plenty of features, I recommend upgrading to the premium version. For $20 annually, you can connect your Flavors.me website with your custom domain (which is much more professional), receive website analytics, connect with an unlimited number of social accounts, and more. (Disclaimer: No, I don’t work for Flavors.me! They’re service is simply awesome!)

Below, I’ve included my presentation for you to take a look at as well as the three guides I created for the Humber students to help them build their online brand with Flavors.me, visualCv.com. The students were also pretty interested in Twitter and I touched on TweetDeck because of it’s ease of use, and simplicity in monitoring any discussion that occurs on Twitter. TweetDeck also provides the option to integrate additional social profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, avoiding the need to check out each site.

A big thanks to the PR students at Humber for taking the time to hear me out, I look forward to seeing each of your websites, and don’t forget to give me a shout if you need any help.

Building ‘You Inc.’ Online – A Flavors.me How-To Guide

Building ‘You Inc.’ Online – A TweetDeck How-To Guide

Building ‘You Inc.’ Online -A VisualCV How-To Guide

You Inc. – Why Your Online Brand Matters and What You Should Do About It

Let me know your thoughts on how you create a strong personal brand online by dropping me a line in the comments below.

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