By M Muneer: If you are into Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, make sure you use a consistent look, feel and content everywhere In this age of Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, everyone is into projecting their best face in the virtual space. But most have a poor presence on the web. Are you clear what you want to project yourself as online? If you do not know what you are, someone else will take that position. You need to look professional and consistent if you are a senior executive trying to project and image online as personal brand. Just as you do for your company and your products or services, personal branding too has a few core elements such as a brand statement, a unique proposition and the value systems around it. Let us first look at what the social media does to your business and personal brands this year. With the internet, we can do quick research on anyone any time and find out a whole lot of things about them. Whether by design or by default, all businesses or individuals have a brand image. And most of the times, businesses and individuals are building this brand image by default and not based on smart analysis and design. This brings up the issue of not having control on our branding and someone else taking control of that from us. Think what will happen to Dove as a brand if the branding is being controlled not by the brand head but by others online. To set things right, what one should do is to have a Google Alert for himself and his company so that every time he is mentioned on the internet, it comes to him. You can actually do more sophisticated analysis too, but this is the basic you must have. If you are into Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, make sure you use a consistent look, feel, tone, content and language everywhere. The other thing is that you must use the best practices of branding for these sites. Most people do not go beyond a logo, a tagline or some content. They never manage these sites as they do their business. Yet all of these people claim they have a brand. The question is if this is so, what is your brand proposition? What is unique about your brand? Why should people remember you from others? Ask also what your unique service is. Is it something only you have the IPR or you have great expertise on? Just as individuals in a company, everyone has a unique service to offer. By now you must be wondering how you can quickly do something to change the situation and improve your brand, right? One immediate thing you can do is giving a professional picture of yours that represents your brand. Then focus on a fully completed LinkedIn profile. This too should be done with a professional best practice. Very few people still do this. Acccording to a designer expert who helps many CEOs do personal branding, most CEOs shy away from doing much personal branding. Some of those who do not shy away, have an ego to spice up. Most critically, she looks at having a good photo and good content for LinkedIn. She does not advise much on Facebook as most CEOs say that is personal. Little do they realise that the online medium is something that does not distinguish your personal page from professional. When someone searches for the CEO, everything about the CEO will come up including Facebook pages. So if the CEO has any dubious friends in Facebook and his interests are inconsistent with that of his professional brand, his personal brand is indeed a mess. A recent survey of CEOs in social media reveals that more than three fourths of the people believe that executive leadership is improved when they have a good presence in social media. And more than two thirds said they would do business with a company whose top leaders communicate their values and leadership on social media. Clearly, being on social media is becoming more and more critical for both the personal brand and the company brand. With new and different apps such as SuperChat, SnapChat and many others in the pipeline, the tasks on driving personal branding online is becoming more complex. When we do not even do the basic stuff, how can we scale up to the next level? The right content will soon become key just as it is in business. People will want to engage more and more and that needs the right content. The content need not be words alone; it can be in pictures, video, podcast and so on. This is a good way for CEOs to establish themselves to the right audience. (The writer is CEO and managing director of CustomerLab Solutions) Source: mydigitalfc.com
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