Accidentally in Code

Tag: linkedin

  • Discovering the Value of Personal Branding

    BrandBox 01
    Credit: flickr / daveelf

    Last month, Patti Church and Treena Grevatt came in and gave a talk on Personal Branding for WISE. Patti’s one of the people behind WhyHire.me so it was great to have her come and speak to us.

    I was in a complete panic because they were going to use me as an example, and I thought having a personal brand meant you had a website. And at the time, my website had been “under construction” for longer than I care to remember and I “just” had a blog. So I built my website. Luckily my neighbor is a web-dev genius and I take care of his cat when he’s away and make dinner for him from time to time, so he fixed some little CSS things that were making me nuts.

    Actually, I don’t think I knew was a personal brand was, until all of a sudden I had one. Not so long ago I just had Facebook, and then I added LinkedIn, but didn’t use it much. Then I started using Twitter, and started blogging about my research (and being a grad student in general). Finally I had a website. And that’s when I thought I had a personal brand.

    However my personal brand is more than that. Google me – the whole first page of results is me and what I’m about. You’ll find my website (top hit!), my Twitter, my LinkedIn, my Brazen Careerist, my slideshare presentations, a course I’ve taken and my lender profile on Kiva.

    This is when I realized – a personal brand means people can know who you are, by looking online. And I’d built one without even realizing that’s what I was doing. It meant that Patti could literally tell me what my “key words” are – because they’re on my LinkedIn, but having seen the rest of what I’m about she could tell me the others I should add. And she could say, you should meet Kelly because you two will really like each other. She was right, I did like Kelly when I got to meet her, and she gave me the nicest #FollowFriday ever, so I think it was mutual.

    Actually, Kelly came across my Conversation Networks via yet another person and connected with me on Twitter. So, next realization, a personal brand means that people find you and connect with you if they’re interested in the kinds of things you’re interested in. That’s really cool.

    A lot of grad students research fascinating things, but they don’t put it out there – they don’t blog, they just write it up in papers that only academics read and ultimately into a thesis that’s often read only by their committee and their mother. There’s all this value that gets lost in academia because it’s not put out there in a format and a language that non-academics will read. A personal brand allows you to share what you’re making, and is a place to continue discussion. The other day a guy (older, professional) came up to me at an event and asked for my card because he wanted to see more about what I’m working on. Isn’t that awesome? It would have been even more awesome if my cards had arrived by then, but that’s by the by.

    “Personal Branding” is scary because it sounds like marketing speak, and most of us aren’t marketers. Why do we have to market ourselves? Shouldn’t the work we do speak for us? For me, at least, my personal brand is the work I do speaking for me. Personal branding pretty much consists of putting it out there and organizing it. It doesn’t feel fake, it feels like sharing, like being part of a conversation.

    If you read my blog, maybe you feel like you know me. In a way, you do. If you were looking to hire me, you could find out from my brand what inspires me, what winds me up. You could discover a lot of my skills in what I write about and what I work on. You could probably get a good impression of whether I would fit in with your company. You’d probably know if I wouldn’t, as well, and that’s OK – better to find that out sooner rather than later. I’m OK with people feeling like they know me from my online persona, because it’s just the spell-checked version of my actual persona. I consider what I put out there, but I think authenticity wins. How about you?

  • Do We Need Traditional Resumes?

    I just ordered some business cards. They don’t have email addresses on them, I’m trying this first 50 as an experiment in that. What they do have is a link to my website, from which you can find my LinkedIn and Brazen Careerist profiles – which should tell you anything you want to know about me professionally.

    (As I’m getting some people baffled by the email thing – perhaps it’s worth explaining briefly. 1. I hate email. 2. The card does have my Google Wave address on it, so you can work out my gmail address from that. 3. I can always write my email address on if I want someone to have it, but in general I don’t want to encourage people to email me, because of point 1.)

    I’ve been talking to people this week and getting feedback on what they think about my website. A lot of it I’m taking on board and you can expect some minor changes in the next couple of days (thanks to everyone who took time to comment), but there’s one piece of advice I’m consciously not taking.

    My resume is not on my website, you have to go to another website (LinkedIn or Brazen Careerist) to see it. If I could embed one of these, I might, but I don’t mind if people leave my website to go to another – I’m not trying to monetize their attention with advertisements etc. If they want to come back, they will. If they don’t, that’s fine too.

    In general I’m wondering – is there any need for us to have a resume anymore?

    Brazen Careerist are dynamic and more easily updated. On Brazen Careerist you can see that I’ve recently had a featured post (or 3!), on LinkedIn you can see that colleagues have taken the time to recommend me. Compared to a pdf – there’s no competition.

    The end for my masters is in sight, and soon I’ll start job-hunting. For the kind of company I want to work for, I wonder if I’ll even need a paper resume at all. I hope that networking in person, contributing to projects, and having a good online presence will be sufficient.

    What do you think?