Personal Branding

Earlier this week, sister blog 10,000 Words wrote about a brand-new site that allows journalists to easily gather their clips in one place without any fuss, without having to know the first thing about coding, and without any design knowledge.

I got an invite code to check Pressfolios out (it’s currently in closed beta, but co-founder Marc Samson tells me that people aren’t having to wait too long to get their invite codes).

Here’s how it works (with help from Pressfolios’ own Tumblr).

After signing up, you can add stories simply by pasting their URLs into the site.

The site automatically determines the headline, news outlet, and image associated with the story. Ok, sometimes it gets the news outlet wrong. But it takes about five seconds to manually edit it. It also seemed to get the wrong photo or no photo for most of the stories I uploaded. But changing the photo is surprisingly easy–I did it in about three clicks without leaving the site. (I imagined I’d have to click on the article, download the image to my hard drive, and re-upload it to Pressfolios. Luckily, this isn’t the case.)

The site doesn’t yet get the date from the story, which is unfortunate, because it has to be manually entered each time. I assume this is on Pressfolio’s punch list of things to fix before the site goes into open beta.

Once you’ve added a few stories you can arrange them:

And you can tag them, which will create separate tabs on your main Portfolio page. You can also create an About page (which is also showing its beta-ness in that some of the fields that you can fill in on your profile don’t actually display anywhere on the public-facing site).

Here’s what it looks like when you’re done:

Neat, yeah?

If you’re logged in, you can also download a PDF of each clip from your Dashboard, a handy option.

So here’s what the site can’t do yet. It can’t batch-import clips. Freelance marketplace Contently, believe it or not, will find what it thinks are all of your clips from a given site in one go. (Contently’s mission is not to provide journalist portfolios–that’s just a side benefit of membership there–so it may not be surprising that for now, the visual appeal of Contently’s portfolios is a bit lacking.)

You also can’t change the layout of the portfolio. Everyone’s looks the same: square images, white background, etc. It doesn’t hurt that this is an attractive look, but design is one of the improvements Samson notes his company is working on. I’d like to see an array of pre-designed templates for users to choose from, as well as the option to change the colors of said templates. Best might be something that presented more text–though humans are a visual species, I suspect editors really do want to read a prospective journalist’s clips, not just look at how pretty they are.

So, okay, Pressfolios is clearly still a beta product.

BUT. With all that said. The old way of making a portfolio site sucked. Either you just pasted text links, as do most of my freelance colleagues, or you had to manually cut and paste headlines, blurbs, links, and possibly images. I’m not gonna lie. It didn’t take forever, even if you knew no HTML. But it wasn’t fun either.

If Pressfolios rockets out of beta with these minor issues fixed, it might not change the world. But it will make a lot of journalists’ lives easier. And isn’t that good enough?

Pressfolios is currently free; once out of beta, the core features will remain free, Samson says. Go sign up for an invite code and try it out for yourself.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Ok, kind of neat from a social media nerd perspective as well as a personal branding perspective. Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein participated in an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on the internet forum Reddit.com earlier today to promote a tool he developed that may or may not predict the upcoming presidential election.

Venturing into Reddit can be as dangerous as swimming in shark-infested waters with an open wound. As actor Woody Harrelson (or more likely, a Woody Harrelson flack) found out when he refused to answer any but the most self-promotional questions, do the wrong thing and you will face the wrath of the Internet. Klein seems to have gotten it, though, writing “And let me emphasize that you can ask me about non-model issues. I want to promote my project a bit. But I don’t want to bore people.”

And as promised, he answers all sorts of offbeat questions. Star Wars or Star Trek? “Comic books,” Klein replied. Another redditor asked, “Why does Rachel Maddow go without her glasses for her show, but with her glasses everywhere else?” Klein: “How do you know she’s the same person?”

As Poynter’s Mediawire points out that NYT columnist Paul Krugman is scheduled to do an AMA on May 1.

Klein is the most major media figure we can think of who’s done an AMA in recent months (though two months ago, Neil Strauss, author of The Game, did a successful one). If your industry/specialized knowledge appeals to a broad base of 20-something males, consider hopping over to the /r/iAMA forum and try your own hand at answering questions. We are talking a billion PVs a month here.

Okay, so you’ve plunked down a specific amount of money to wear a shiny nametag and hear interesting lectures but the key to getting the most bang at a conference is to work it: Meet people and leap outside your comfort zone.

For instance, with the upcoming American Society of Journalists and Authors conference in New York City, in addition to lectures themselves, time is well spent talking to editors in between lectures, lingering in the hallways, and chatting with new colleagues at the luncheon. Sure, valuable information may be absorbed during various talks but the people interaction can be downright stimulating for freelancers who are busy working with me, myself, and I around the clock.

That said, sometimes the most important nuggets of information and new contacts may be obtained by leaping outside your comfort zone. As pointed out recently in a Fast Company blog post, Emily Heyward attended SXSW and indicated “instead of feeling inspired, I just felt tired.” Although she attended relevant seminars, the information didn’t seem to be innovative.

Getting her game on, she stretched her brain and consequently her brand by seeking information that wasn’t relevant. She wrote in the post, “It was a total turnaround from my first couple of days at the conference, and it got me thinking about other ways that we can step outside our comfort zones to stimulate fresh thinking.”

To that point, Heyward recommends not specializing. At her branding and design consultancy, clients ask about what she’s done in their category. Considering she mentioned it’s more worthwhile and fun to spread work and talent across different scopes and processes, so, too could be attending a lecture at a conference about a topic that stretches your mind.

How many brands do you have? There’s your professional one for starters and then your personal one but that’s separate and different, right? Um, not exactly.

According to a piece published yesterday on PRWeek, Peter Shankman, small business evangelist at Vocus, makes the argument that everything we post online — whether we think it’s professional or personal — is personal. In the piece, he states:

“Every single day, someone directs me to their LinkedIn profile to learn more about them. You know what I do when they do that? I go right to Facebook and search on their name there. Why? Because I know they’re on their best behavior on LinkedIn, but on Facebook, they’re going to be “real.” Guess what? I’m not the only person who thinks this way.”

Shankman points out in his post that “every last photo, comment, and check-in” essentially encompasses the brand.

And although social media provides a vehicle to display ourselves down to each and every comment, technically offline we’re not disconnected to our authentic one and only selves. The work day is not confined by specific hours within a day or walls within an office. In essence, we’re never not “on.”

In the post he added, “Let’s face it: You don’t “shut off” at 5:30 p.m. If you’re a spokesperson for a company, what makes you any less that spokesperson simply because it’s 1:30 a.m. and you’ve had nine tequila shots? Nothing. You need to be smarter. I’m not saying don’t have fun – but I am saying you need to be aware that everything you do, both on the clock and off, affects your brand. And your brand is all you have.”

MJD Editor Rachel Kaufman’s Note: This post comes from a partnership with Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog where we syndicate content from the blog on a weekly basis. This post is from Oscar Del Santo (bio below).

Personal Branding lovers are in luck. The hottest and quickly rising new social network Pinterest is fast proving to be a much welcome and indeed attractive addition to our personal branding repertoire with endless possibilities yet to be explored.

We have reasons to believe that Pinterest is more than a passing fad and based on the evidence we can be reasonably confident that it is here to stay. According to a recent study by Maggie Georgieva from Hubspot, Pinterest has not only grown by more than 150% in one month (Jan 2012), but companies and bloggers alike are reporting significant increases in traffic and revenue thanks to the new social media rising star. That includes Hubspot itself, since it apparently drew more visits from Pinterest than Google+ to their blog last month by quite a significant margin. Lead generation, more attractive and fun social sharing and the clear marketing value to be derived from Pinterest are other irresistible bonus features accounting for its rapid success. Add Personal Branding to the mix and you’ve just found a social network it would be extremely ill-advised to underestimate… let alone ignore!

Here are seven hip, cool and trendy Pinterest uses for your personal branding that can be helpful, fun to create and at the same time highly beneficial to your greatest asset: your brand.

1. Showcase your work. Whether you are a photographer, a chef, a florist or a blogger, Pinterest is ideal to bring together your  output under one roof, showcase your work in a compelling way and make a name for yourself in the process. Real life example: Binita Patel.

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Poynter has a thoughtful piece up about what happens when a journalist’s brand clashes with a newsroom’s social media policy.

Example: CNN’s Roland Martin, whose homophobic Super Bowl tweets got him a suspension; Britain’s Sky News, which recently forbade its journalists from retweeting competitors (are you serious??), and many more.

Sometimes a newsroom is right to clamp down on a journalist (like in the case of CNN’s suspension of Martin), and sometimes a newsroom’s social media policy is just crazy (i.e. Sky news)

Another example is this post from social media editor Matthew Keys, who lasted only eight months at KGO-TV, owned by Disney-ABC. He was hired, he writes, due in part to his social media savvy, yet his bosses took issue with his use of social media. “There were several behind-closed-door discussions and back-and-forth emails about my Twitter methods, the sort of language I’d use in certain tweets, the frequency at which tweets went out and whether or not it was acceptable to mention or tweet competitors….I think the bureaucracy, mixed with stagnant progression on the perception of social media at Disney-ABC, led to a decline in influence by way of my personal brand on Twitter. That was definitely disappointing, as I had hoped it would be perceived as a benefit to the company and the station, not as a disturbance….In the end, we perceived things differently, and it just didn’t work out.” He talks a lot about Klout, but we’ll overlook that as this is definitely a post worth reading.

NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik tries to strike a balance in his Tweets: he follows the same guidelines he would if he were giving a speech in public. A personality, not an ideologue.

As journalists with personal brands (and personality) are more valuable to a news organization, it’d be wise for any news organization to embrace social media and put policies in place that leave breathing room for reporters and others to express themselves. But as digital media professor Sree Sreenivasan told Poynter, it’s still true that the best way to build a personal brand is “by knocking it out of the park at work every day.”

MJD Editor Rachel Kaufman’s Note: This post comes from a partnership with Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog where we syndicate content from the blog on a weekly basis. This one is from Heather Huhman.

Establishing a brand becomes increasingly difficult when you can’t be found online – and it’s a common scenario. When you type your name into a search engine, how many links that belong to you show up? If you’re lucky, you might find just one on the first page of results, while the rest belong to those doppelgangers who share your name and just happen to engage activities that are either irrelevant to your expertise or downright problematic.

An incident like the one described above is what happened to BrandYourself’s co-founder Pete Kistler, which in turn inspired him to team up with current co-founder and CEO of BrandYourself, Patrick Ambron. Together they created a free website that boosts your links with SEO to make you more visible in search results.

When you first sign into BrandYourself, using your email or through Facebook or Twitter, you are guided through a series of steps to improve your search ranking. Here are some of the key features:

Search Score:  Typing in your name, you’re presented with the first page of Google’s search results where you determine your search score. Your score, on a grading scale of A+ through F, is based on the likelihood people will find positive content on your first page versus negative or other people’s results.

Link Boosting: Don’t be discouraged if your score is poor, as BrandYourselfprovides SEO to bolster the links you want to be seen. Submitting your first three links is free – any more and you will have to upgrade to a premium account.

Track Progress: Whether your link is a social media profile or an article that mentions you, BrandYourself tracks both the rank on Google and percent it’s been boosted. Site stats are provided, as well as email alerts and real-time alerts when any results change.

Profile: Along with a listing your bio, education, and work, your profile hosts your boosted positive links – which helps improve their rank. You also have the option to submit your BrandYourself profile to improve its own visibility, making it an all-in-one place to focus on boosting your ranking if you have numerous links to share.​

Pros of BrandYourself:

• Sign up and basic features (as listed above) are free
• Easy to use
• Provides real-time and email alerts
• Open and transparent about how it works through steps and explanations
• Provides hotline and representative to contact for help or consultation

Cons of BrandYourself:

• Cannot erase negative results completely
• Other features, such as submitting unlimited links, tracking the first ten Google pages, and getting more in-depth stats require a paid membership
• Results are not immediate (taking from 2 – 6 weeks) and are not guaranteed(although paying members may receive a refund)

For those wanting to become more proactive about controlling which links surface when you’re being searched, BrandYourself is a great, free, and easy do-it-yourself tool.

What do you think about BrandYourself’s features? How important is it to manage your search results for your personal brand?

Author:

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder & president of Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy for organizations with products that target job seekers and/or employers. She is also the author of Lies, Damned Lies & Internships (2011), #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), and writes career and recruiting advice for numerous outlets.

MJD Editor Rachel Kaufman’s Note: We’re beta-testing a partnership with Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog where we syndicate content from the blog on a weekly basis. This post is from headhunter Skip Freeman.

Do you have the “Sunday night blues”? You know, that growing sense of unease, that creeping feeling of dread, at the prospect of having to return on Monday morning to begin yet another week in a job you’ve come to loathe. Or, maybe, your feeling of dread is fueled by the fact that you’re still without a job and will have to start “beating the bushes” all over again on Monday looking for a new job. Well, let me tell you, you’ve certainly got a lot of company!

In addition to the 14 million unemployed people still looking for a new job, somewhere between 40% to 70% of the currently employed are also seeking new jobs because they have become so dissatisfied with their current ones. Depending upon which set of data you read and believe, that means that about 80 million people want a new job! The question then becomes: If you find yourself among these 80 million people, how is the best way for you to go about actually finding a new job? Why not consider the potential benefits of becoming a “purple squirrel” candidate? Let me explain what I mean by this term.

In “headhunting” circles we use the term “purple squirrel” to define a candidate who must meet a very narrowly defined set of criteria to be considered for a hiring company’s job opening. In fact, the criteria established by the hiring company is usually so narrowly defined that it’s nearly impossible to find a candidate who actually meets the job criteria! To be sure, one of the major challenges we “headhunters” face when dealing with a hiring company is to try and educate them on the realities of their job search criteria. Still, many companies continue their quest for the elusive “purple squirrel” candidate, i.e., a candidate who is an aggressively-sought-after candidate!

How do you go about learning how to brand yourself as a “purple squirrel” candidate? A good place to start is by picking up a copy of the recently published Purple Squirrel by Michael B. Junge, currently on Google’s executive recruiting team and formerly a very successful third-party and corporate recruiter. During his illustrious career, Mike has read thousands of résumés, interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people and has dissected what separates the top 25% of the talent pool from all of the rest.

“Most job seekers spend (countless) hours hunting for work and are lucky to receive even a handful of responses from interested employers,” Mike explains in his book. “Others update a few online profiles and magically the phone starts ringing.”

“Have you ever wondered why a given résumé compels instant interview requests, while others produce almost no response at all?” he asks. “Or why some people consistently convert interviews into job offers?”

About half of Purple Squirrel addresses the tactics for finding a job now. The book contains a plethora of proven executables and deliverables that, if implemented properly, will not only allow you to “up your game,” it will also enable you to stand out from the crowd, land interviews and get hired far more quickly than most.  The remaining half of the book is for those of you who may be suffering the “Sunday night blues” and want to explore other career opportunities. Mike literally walks you, the reader, through the process of what it takes to become what he calls an “opportunity magnet.”

“The real purpose of this book,” he says, “is to guide you to the point where you can stop being a job seeker and start being a sought-after resource.”

In other words, Mike shows you how to position yourself as the elusive “purple squirrel,” how to brand yourself as someone within the talent pool who is—or can become!—a highly-sought-after, quite rare species.

As a “headhunter” myself, someone who is in the job market each and every business day dealing with both candidates and hiring companies, I know what it takes for a candidate to succeed in today’s extremely competitive job market. It’s obvious from reading Mike Junge’s Purple Squirrel that he also knows what it takes to succeed in today’s job market, how a job seeker can go about successfully landing his or her dream job.

In addition to my own job hunting book, “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever!, I consistently recommend that serious job seekers have at least  these four excellent job hunting reference books in their libraries: What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles; Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters by Jay Conrad Levinson and David Perry; Snap Selling by Jill Konrath; and ME by Dan Schawbel. Today, I am recommending that they add a fifth “must-have” book: Purple Squirrel by Michael Junge.

Skip Freeman is the author of “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever!, where it has consistently been ranked in the “top 100” in the job hunting genre on Amazon.Com. “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets outlines in detail what the NEW rules of the hiring game are, as well as provides job-seekers with step-by-step, from beginning-to-end instructions and guidance on how to use these NEW rules to their advantage and effectively apply the winning tactics and strategies he uses everyday as a “headhunter” to successfully place people in a turbulent job market and dynamic global economy.Skip is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The HTW Group (Hire to Win), an Atlanta, GA, Metropolitan Area Executive Search Firm. In that capacity, he is consistently among the top executive recruiters in the nation, on the basis of total candidate placements. Over the last seven years, he has successfully completed more than 300 executive search assignments. Specializing in the placement of sales, engineering, manufacturing and R&D professionals, he has developed powerful techniques that help companies hire the best and help the best get hired.

MJD Editor Rachel Kaufman’s Note: We’re beta-testing a partnership with Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog where we syndicate content from the blog on a weekly basis. This post is from Nance Rosen, a business communications expert.

These 20 questions cover five key areas that are critical to your accurately evaluating how well you’re doing at work. Your answers (or score) predict whether you’re likely to be promoted, fired or kept simmering in the same spot for years to come.

Score each question on a scale of 1-10 (10 = AWESOME). Add up your total score in each category. If you are totally awesome, you’ll have a total of 200 points. If you score below 30 points in any category, it’s time to take remedial action.

JOB MASTERY

How well do I?

1. Exhibit expertise of the particular knowledge and skills that make me a uniquely valuable employee

2. Continue to get educated to update my knowledge and skills for my position and the positions I desire to hold in the future

3. Understand the metrics by which I am evaluated as well as those that my department is judged, and work to excel at those measured behaviors

4. Manage my tasks and actions to contribute to the performance outcomes set for my department and company

COMMUNICATION WITH MY BOSS

How well do I?

5. Understand and articulate my boss’ top priorities and reasons for them, and approach my work in that manner

6. Know which is of greater consequence to my superior: people, projects or principles

7. Appreciate my boss’ sense of balancing the need to a) gather information and b) take action

8. Show that I understand and support my superiors’ professional aspirations

RELATING TO OTHERS AND GAINING VISIBILITY

How well do I?

9. Seek to create significant, lasting connections with everyone in my company

10. Communicate using all opportunities to strengthen my ties throughout the organization

11. Manage my intentions and actions to appropriaately compete and collaborate with my peers

12. Project my desire to be a resource to others as well as a willingness to be assisted by them

CULTURAL SENSIBILITY, BELIEF AND BELONGING

How well do I?

13. Keep a clear picture of the formal and informal reporting lines in my company

14. Like my company’s overall approach to business, people and the marketplace

15. Believe that I can contribute to the larger goals and vision of my organization

16. See that opportunities exist for me to grow and gain greater responsibility and authority in my company

GOOD JUDGMENT AND RESOURCEFULNESS

How well do I?

17.  Imagine I would be able to step up and fill in for my boss or another superior, if needed

18. Seek opportunities to be increasingly effective and efficient with the tools, workspace and funds allocated to me

19. Build relationships outside of the company that can be leveraged for its benefit

20. Relate to people who have the capacity to mentor me and widen my scope of influence

There’s a wealth of free and low-cost resources to get you back on track. Let me know if there are any areas you’d like to drill down on, and I’ll be happy to send you a list to kick-start your career. Email: Nance@NanceRosen.com

Nance is the author of Speak Up! & Succeed, and an expert on business communication who teaches at UCLA Extension, and speaks all around the world to audiences on social media and career trends. Nance is a former marketing executive at The Coca-Cola Company and currently is CEO of NanceSpeaks and executive publisher at PegasusMediaWorld. She has appeared on CNBC and regularly contributes to media outlets including the New York Times, ABC, CBS radio, Investors Business Daily, MediaPost and the San Francisco Chronicle.