If marketing is everywhere, then brand is everything, anything. So what does that mean for you or me? It means that you are a brand, just as I am a brand. From the day we were born, our unique brand started (contrast that to companies who have to ‘build’ a ‘unique’ brand). That’s powerful.
Just because you’re not an executive at a Fortune 500 company doesn’t mean you don’t have brand experience. Depending on your age, you have been in charge of managing a brand for quite some time. Your decisions may not always have been good, but guess what? Most executives make bad decisions for their companies, too.
The difference between how you manage your brand and the Fortune 500 manages theirs is that you can’t get fired. Or maybe the real difference is the strength or reach of the brand. The strength or reach is entirely up to us. The internet is a tremendously effective way to increase your reach.
The internet has changed the rules of the game, it’s a matter of learning to bring your offline identity online. It’s both as easy and as hard as you want to make it.
It used to be that only companies had the power to reach a mass audience and establish international brands, but today this power is available, at a very low cost, to anyone. And we savvy Gen Yers are in the perfect position to take advantage of it.
The Internet allows you to accomplish this. And a blog (or tumblr, Twitter, etc) is one of the best online tools for branding yourself. In fact, I would be willing to bet that any potential employer, or person, looking to connect with you will Google you before they meet you, which means if you’re not on Google, you don’t exist.
This is why every company should have a blog and why every individual should, too. A blog gives you great visibility on Google and acts as landing zone for your online identity.
Take me as an example: How many Nathan Snell’s do you think there are in the world? Quite a few. But if you Google them, I come up first. I’m not saying that to gloat (in fact, I’m miffed I still haven’t bumped my old blog out of the #1 spot). But this is just to show you that you can use a blog to control your online brand, just like I have (and i’m still trying to get better!).
At this point you may be wondering “How do I show up high in a Google search?” This is the wrong question to ask. First take advantage of one thing us Gen Yers do best- form relationshios. Focus on forming meaningful relationships online, and your Google rank will take care of itself.
It’s dangerous to not diversify your exposure. So pick a number of technologies to forge relationships with other people, and a few to focus on your Google efforts. For example, claim your blog on Technorati, use Google’s Webmaster Toolkit to force an index on your site (take a look at what else it can do, too!), and find the topic trends that are going on in your industry so you can blog using those keywords.
It’s important to realize that as we e-mail, instant message, or post on forums, something we do so frequently we don’t even think about it anymore, we have been building relationships. Once you’re aware of what you’re doing as you build relationships, using a blog or twitter purposefully is easy. When you make your brand about what comes naturally, the rest is cake.
Update: Julia Roy just wrote about why students MUST have blogs.
*Drawing by Hugh Macleod.
Nathan, I completely agree. There are a lot of Michael Lombardis out there. In the past few years, one small time actor named Michael Lombardi has picked up most of the top spots in search rankings. (Another Michael Lombardi, an executive in one of the NFL clubs, takes a lot of the spots with news articles mentioning him.) As 1 of the sea of Michael Lombardis I’m just trying to make sure that when I’m searched for, I’m found. Like you said, if I didn’t, it would be the same as not existing to the rest of the world. If you search my name and any of my employers or city, you’d find my LinkedIn profile or blog pretty quickly, although I don’t know I trust Google searchers to be quite that efficient at searching.
Hey Michael!
Thanks for taking the time to share!
It can be [very] difficult when building yourself up in Google rankings if what you’re trying to bump are social networking type sites. Likewise, going up against IMDB (or wikipedia) is a tough opponent to beat. SEO may help (eg: good use of nofollows is something i’ve recently been looking at).
Otherwise, I’d say if you can use LinkedIn as a means to drive people to your blog (i’ve had a few companies get in touch with me by hitting my LI profile and then going to my blog for my e-mail), it works. I haven’t played with whether or not there are things you can do to boost your LinkedIn profile’s google rank (update your LI Profile frequently, etc?). Worth looking into, though :)
Like your blog, btw
Thanks for stopping by Nathan.
I’m definitely going up against IMDB, with the actor (pretty sure he’s on FX’s Rescue Me). To my knowledge none of the Michael Lombardis are on Wikipedia. I would think they wouldn’t pass the sniff test on how well-known they are.
Playing with LinkedIn SEO is interesting though. I suppose, you could put your LinkedIn profile’s URL into the comments on blogs (as opposed to your blog’s URL). I’m not sure, but it’s certainly possible that search engines consider links in blog’s comment sections.
Nathan,
Funny how we should run into each other again. I found this post on Brazen Careerist and also clicked through from your comment. Anyways, I had this same talk today with a group of high school students. I tried to bring the point across to them that just because they are sophomores, junior’s what have you, that it doesn’t mean they can’t start branding themselves now. I encouraged them to blog, blog about something/anything. Make it interesting, be creative and start putting yourself out there in a positive light. When you Google your name you don’t want a YouTube video of you jumping off a roof, you want a YouTube video of you giving a presentation or running your class.
There is so much good to Social Media and it is up to the people who ave the power to teach and instill that into the youth or everyone for that matter.
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Good day!,