Читать книгу Personal Branding with Social Media - Michael Ph.D. Reynolds - Страница 5

Your personal brand is influenced by many things, including how you dress and speak. Your brand is especially affected by how you communicate. Before the age of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, communication was more limited. It was more difficult to get content in front of lots of people. Now, we are able to self-publish all sorts of information in real time and reach a much wider audience. This can be both good and bad.

Let's start with the bad. We already know about the stories of people losing their jobs over something posted on Facebook. Since we are in an age of much greater transparency, we must remember to be careful about what we do online. Your personal brand is affected by the things you say online, the photos you post, the comments you make, and anything else that you contribute on a social network. Negative comments, edgy photos, and heated public debates can all negatively affect your personal brand.

On the flip side, just the opposite is also true. Your personal brand is positively affected when you contribute to the community by answering questions. Writing valuable content and posting it on your blog helps others and positions you as an expert. How you communicate with others on networks like Twitter also influences how others perceive you.

This is not new. We have always made judgments about others based how how they treat others and how they communicate. Social media simply allows us to enhance the scope of that judgment by opening the box and publishing it for the world to see. Sounds scary? It can be, but it can also be an incredibly powerful way to gain a competitive advantage in business.