Thanks to Dan Schwabel’s blog – a new concept in promoting your personal brand online is Unvarnished. It builds on the recommendation idea from LinkedIn and could be the next logical step in online personal branding.
After all, reputation comes from the opinion of other people and those opinions often carry more weight than what you say about yourself.
Whether you are a freelancer or not, if you are looking for work there is a website which asks some interesting questions about the future job market. The great thing is that it empowers individuals to present their skills to a wide audience. People Per Hour allows you to register and quote for work at an hourly rate. Like LinkedIn and other social media sites, this site shows that the job market is changing fast. Have a look; it could add value to your personal brand and generate some income at the same time.
In the Sunday Telegraph today (11th July 2010), Emma Barnett writes about a survey published by Regus http://issuu.com/chris_at_regus/docs/social_success_ which found that…
…40pc of businesses around the world have successfully used social networks to win new customers. However, that falls to 33pc when applied to the UK market.
Much of the content around marketing and branding using twitter, blogging and other social networks is from US sources. My guess is if you took US figures out of the survey, the percentage would drop lower than 33pc. So in the UK we are not too bad at this new way of networking (the Sunday Telegraph is devoting column inches to this subject, so they think there is interest in the UK).
But not as good as our US friends, who are spreading the word about their businesses, building their personal brand and generally embracing social networking for commercial benefit more than we are in the UK.
We have come to love Facebook in the UK. Maybe we can learn from US business people about LinkedIn, blogging and tweeting to promote business in the way we seem to love promoting our personal lives, holidays, weddings and nights out on Facebook.
Chris,
Thanks for your comment. Your survey for Regus is very interesting to read in full; a pity the newspaper didn’t provide a link at the end of the article. What is clear is the “english language centric” bias of some commentaries (mine included). We all must be aware of the world wide possibilities when using social networking for business development.
The industry split is also interesting to see; plenty of scope for those in manufacturing, financial service and healthcare to develop new business using social networking.
Best regards,
Tim.
In the same week that Vince Cable made his depressing announcement
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10465119.stm
the BBC carried a story with some better news.
Jaguar Land Rover announces 1,000 new jobs will be created at its Halewood plant with the production of a new Range Rover.
So it’s not all doom and gloom after all.
It is not clear whether one of the thousand jobs is that of Victoria Beckham, who will be a design consultant on the new vehicle. As she already has at least one other job (sic), it would be 999 new ones created.
This story proves that jobs are out there for people willing to grab opportunities with both hands. Of course, this one probably came her way because of who she is. It doesn’t alter the fact she has reinvented herself several times over and made a career out of… well, whatever talents she has.
We could all learn something about personal branding from posh spice.
Maybe.
When job searching, try getting back to basics. For example: it’s a numbers game.
Write some letters.
The great thing about a letter is that it is personal. You can use a pen (for the signature if nothing else). The paper you use even tells the recipient about you; make it good quality paper. A good tip is to hand write the envelope and mark it “personal” (not private and confidential), because this will tend to only be opened by the addressee and not an assistant.
Yes, more and more business will be conducted via “social” media, LinkedIn and similar services in the future. Get on them and build your personal brand, but sometimes it will be equally effective to combine this with a more “old school” approach to job search.
You will have a chance to hit a wider audience with a good old fashioned mailing campaign (no “e” in mailing, by the way).
Try it out.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for reading the Sunday Telegraph article about the Regus social networking for business survey. The full survey can be viewed on the Issuu website here: http://issuu.com/chris_at_regus/docs/social_success_
You make an interesting point about the US usually being in the lead when it comes to new channels that can be used for new business. However, in the case of our research, it’s not the case. Only 35% of the US business people who responded to our survey said that they’d secured new customers via social media.
The world average of 40% is more to do with the successes of the business communities in India, Mexico and Spain. In each of those three countries, 50% or more reported new customer aquisition via social media.
Best wishes,
Chris