Digital You: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age

Eighty percent of employers admit to googling potential employees before they hire them.

When LinkedIn was born in 2003, it was a service with incredible potential, but for the most part, it served two primary purposes: to provide a digital version of your resume, and to be a platform for virtual networking. Its key focus was job searching.

How do I translate the flesh-and-bones me into the bits-and-bytes me?

This is a qualitative measure. When someone googles you, they’re asking one of these questions: “Do I need to know this person?” or “Is this the person I thought they were?” Success in both areas requires that you be relevant and compelling to your stakeholders.

These are your signature strengths. What do you do better than anyone else? What skills do you possess that are rare?

3. Myopia. Ironically, the third reason some people think personal branding is dead is related to the rise of virtual employees. Companies, once reluctant to let their people work from home for fear that they would goof off, are now becoming proponents of remote work. They are encouraging their employees to keep away from the office; in a 2015 Gallup

People have become sophisticated searchers. They know that they need to refine the search when they see content that just doesn’t seem right. And refine it they will. That means they’ll put in a word or phrase to filter out the “un-you” content. The trick? You need to know the keywords they’ll use, and you need to make sure you include those distin

Although based in authenticity, your brand must position you for what’s next.

People with strong personal brands are explicit about who they are and who they’re not.