What is Personal Branding?

“Personal branding describes the process by which individuals and entrepreneurs differentiate themselves and stand out from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leverage it across platforms with a consistent message and image to achieve a specifi c goal. In this way, individuals can enhance their recognition as experts in their fi eld, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confi dence.”

- Dan Schawbel, Me 2.0: Building a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

Personal Branding with Social Media (for Journalism Students)

There are a lot of ways you can develop and monitor your personal brand using social media.

1. Find yourself online by searching for your name in quotations using different search engines. Don’t just use Google. Try Yahoo! and Bing too.

2. Track your identity using tools like Google Alert to alert you when your name shows up online.

3. Mark which name references are you and which are not you by using ClaimID.

4. Remember your digital footprint also includes your YouTube account, emails and any community boards that you comment on. Make sure that these are professional or if you don’t want them to be professional, change the privacy settings or don’t use your full name.

5. Create profiles on the following sites:

A) LinkedIn—It’s the best way to professionally network with recruiters and other journalists. You can send messages, post your experience and ask people to write recommendations for you.

B) Twitter—Yes, you should be on Twitter. Why? It has high search engine results and it’s great to build brand recognition. It’s also insanely addictive.

C) Publish2—This is a relatively new tool to help you easily save and organize links on the web. It’s a great time saver for not only when you are sharing links with other journalists but also with readers. It saves you a lot of time when you are doing online research too.

D) UWire—The site compiles news articles from affiliated college publications. It has a good internship/job board. You can create a profile with your resume and portfolio.

E) ScribD—This is a social publishing site where people share documents. You should use this to upload your print clips to the web. (if not in print, use Flickr or Vimeo)

6.   Post resume on sites like JournalismNext.com and JournalismJobs.com.

7. Visit GoDaddy.com and buy a domain with your name.

8. Create a simple WordPress blog to upload your resume and portfolio too.

9. Include your site address on your resume and business cards.

10.  Comment on other people’s blogs and actively participate in social networks.

Favorite examples:

Julie Turkewitz – Julie is a true multimedia journalist. She can write. She can shoot photos. She can film and edit. Plus, she speaks Spanish. Her Squarespace site displays all her skills in a very visual site. One of my favorite features is her “Resume Snapshot” that declares her personal brand statement. She also has a blog that she regularly updates and solicits contributions from other young journalists.

Andrew Dunn – Andrew has created a following of journalism students, professors and professionals at his site. He does a great job staying authentic and discussing issues that he is going through. One of my favorite features is his “Online Tools” section which can be a continual resource for students trying to learn more about computer assisted reporting.

Daniel Bachhuber – Daniel has a Twitter account, Google profile, Publish2, LinkedIn, Uwire along with several other social network profiles. His blog is simplistic but original.