Tag Archives: LinkedIn

Personal Branding – How-to Avoid Brand Name Confusion

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 5 Comments

Personal Branding is all about earning your brand the attention it deserves; but what if your brand shares the spotlight with someone else? In other words, what if you have a common name?

If the next employer, or client, or contact googles your name up to learn more about you after that brief encounter at the business cocktail you attended last week, will they find you, or someone else with your name. What if that person they found has digital dirt, how does that affect the future of your relationship? You might lose the job, or the business, or that opportunity …

Let’s take an example … two of my students introduced themselves as Ahmed Kamal. I found 447 results on LinkedIn called Ahmed Kamal! Now what are the odds of anyone finding you amongst that list? Let’s just be optimistic and say VERY SLIM!

John Antonios - Brand Confusion - (Photographer: Astrid Challita)

You need to make sure your brand name is not confused with someone else’s and here’s how you go about doing that:

Change THE NAME

Chances are Ahmed Kamal won’t go to the official register and change his name … so that’s not the change I’m talking about here. I’m talking about adding uniqueness to your name. Here are some options:

Add a key identifying factor: Associate your name with a title, an adjective, a profession; for example: Ahmed Kamal, MD or Ahmed Kamal, The Painter or The Great Ahmed Kamal … ok maybe you shouldn’t consider that last option, it might be attributed to a narcissistic tendency, unless that’s how you’d like to brand yourself, then by all means, go ahead!
Nicknames: I never understood why everyone in Egypt had a nickname, but then I realized that this is the only way people can identify who they were referring to, since they all share very common first and last names. A tip on using a nickname though, make sure it’s not offensive in any circle. I have a friend that I’ve always known as Moë Ash – I recently tried to add him to my LinkedIn professional network, and I couldn’t find him. Then I discovered that his real name is Mohammed Reda … so when I conducted the search on that name on LinkedIn, as expected, I found one too many results. So my advice to him was to add his nickname to his real name, and introduce himself in any network as Mohammed Reda better known (or also known) as Moë Ash.
Mix it up with initials: Sometimes all you need to do is use initials – A great example on that front is my friend Christine L Bowen, who uses CLB as an acronym for her name and she also translates that into her brand attribute (Create, Live, Be).

COMMUNIcate the same brand name

Regardless of the option you end up choosing for making your brand unique, make sure you communicate that same brand name across all platforms, online and offline.

Own the name – or what I like to refer to as e-real-estate. Purchase your brand name url … www.yourbrandname.com
Social Networks synergy - use the same brand name on all your social networks – have a look at this free tool www.namechk.com – it allows you to check the dominance of your chosen brand name (which should be your username) on multiple networks.
Offline Material – be it your business card, your CV, or your signature, or any other kind of introduction (even an oral one) … make sure you communicate your brand name as you would like the receiver to remember it and search for it (for further reference)

drown the competition

You can never delete a search result from Google, but you can certainly drown it. In other words, you can make sure that result, which you want to hide, does not show up in the first three pages of Google. That can be achieved by owning your online brand name, as explained in the above section, and by being active in the different platforms and adding valuable content.

Here are some ways you can do that:

Blog & Share: if you want to get noticed by your next employer or client, you need to make you are share you knowledge, thoughts, reviews about the industry (brand or product) on your blog. You need to make sure that the keywords you wanted to be associated with are frequently used on your blog.
Needless to say, I’m talking about blogging, as a certain prerequisite to any online brand. Think of the blog as your main brand communication hub, which can be reached at www.yourbrandname.com
Commenting on high traffic blogs: A great way to get noticed in the online community is to leave smart comments on high traffic blogs. Notice, I said “smart” comments … you want to make sure the comments you leave behind arouse the interest of the reader enough from him or her to link back to you and check your profile, or blog … technically, you rank higher in Google when you have more incoming links. All comments will be signed off with your brand name
Brand it: sign everything you share online with your brand name. If you upload a picture or an infographic that you created, make sure your brand name is there on the image, and in the name of the file you upload.

Now go on, google your name? are you happy with the results? how many you’s are there? Does your name appear in the first 3 results? How many time does your brand name recur on the first 3 pages? now be honest, if you didn’t know you, could you tell which you is YOU? Confusing, I know, this is exactly how those seeking you out feel! Think About It!

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Posted in Branding, How-to, Personal Branding, Social Media Marketing

Tagged Brand, Brand Confusion, Egypt, Facebook, LinkedIn, Online and offline, personal brand, Personal Branding, Searching, Social network, Twitter

KLOUT – Measuring Your Personal Branding Influence & Style

Posted on January 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

There are thousands of Social Media monitoring tools out there that should certainly be used to measure the effectiveness of your branding activities. This here is the first in a series of posts that will be introducing how to make the best use of these tools. In today’s post, I’ll be talking about the benefits of Klout and why I believe it’s an indispensable personal branding monitoring tool.

PS. Before you go on with this post, make sure you signup for Klout using your twitter account, and have it open in a separate window, as I will be reverting to it several times during the course of this post.

What is Klout?

In short, Klout is tool used to measure and leverage your online influence based on your use of social media communication tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google+. Wherever you have an online presence, you have the opportunity to influence people by creating or sharing content that inspires actions such as likes, retweets, shares, comments and more. The more engagement your posts receive, the more influential you are. Tracking this influence overtime, allows you to understand your brand resonance further, and basically, highlights what you should continue you doing, and what you should refrain from exploring.

What does you Klout score measure?

Figure 1 - Klout Score

Klout gives your influence a score from 1 to 100. This score is calculated based the level of your social media engagement, so make sure you connect all your social networks and use them properly to score higher. Here are some attributes that go into the calculation of your score:

Facebook – likes, comments
Twitter – retweets, mentions
LinkedIn – comments, likes
Foursquare – tips, to-dos, done
Google+ – comments, re-shares, +1

It’s also important to mention that the average Klout score is 20 (not 50). The higher you score, the more difficult it becomes to add points to your score.

The score itself is not as important as the trend presented by the historical data. In Figure 1, you’ll notice that my current Klout score is approximately 56. The drops showcased in the graph highlight my period of extended inactivity. Note that this score is updated on a daily basis based on your activity. You should aim at having a positive sloped graph.

Having a large number of followers or likes or whatnot is not what counts towards your Klout score – it’s the level of engagement with your audience that matters. So basically, it’s not the size of your network, but how you use it to inflict action!

What are you influential about?

This feature of Klout is of utmost importance.

According to William Arruda, the 3Cs of Personal Branding are Clarity, Consistency, and Constancy. Being a Jack-of-all-trades is not exactly the best approach to personal branding – in fact, I’d highly advise against being one. Your aim is to be known for something not everything. Gone are the days where a generic approach is plausible; you should aim at developing a certain level of expertise, and target a specific audience!

Klout monitors your social media activity and analyzes what topics you’re most influential about. In Figure 2 – you’ll notice that I’m personally influential about Personal Branding and Social Media – this is perfectly aligned with Personal Brand objectives.

Figure 2 - Klout - Influential Topics

Have a look at your influential topics, are the top 5 topics analyzed by Klout representative of your brand? If the answer is “No”, then you might want to reconsider what you’re putting out there!

What is your Klout Style?

This is by far my favorite Klout feature!

Klout has developed a great matrix to help you understand your social networking style. This complex matrix measures your style of engagement (Listening, Participating, Sharing, and Creating) and your content (Broad, Focused, Consistent, and Casual). This in turn forms 16 different styles as depicted in Figure 3. For further description about each style, make sure you look at this interactive graph (just hover the different section of the matrix and learn about each style).

Figure 3 - Klout Style Matrix

You want to completely avoid being in the lower left quadrant! If your personal brand lies in that corner of the Klout matrix, you should start engaging with your social network and be more active. Depending on your brand attributes, you might choose to go towards the right of this graph by being more focused in terms of topics discussed, and consistent in delivering it. Or you may choose to move vertically up if you are more in the spirit of sharing information you come across with your followers. Finally, you may choose to move diagonally upwards, which more often than not requires of you to have an pre-existing imposing brand (like a celebrity would). People like Lady Gaga & Barak Obama occupy the celebrity corner – basically, what this entails is an audience that hangs on every word and probably retweets the hell out of anything they post, but they (Gaga & Obama) rarely (more like never) make it a two-way conversation.

However, I strongly recommend you focus on having your personal brand in the lower right quadrant of the Klout matrix. Being a specialist means that within your area of expertise your opinion is second to none. Your provide focused content around a specific topic or industry and share it with a highly engaged audience. This is the kind of fame you need to attract towards your brand – “earned fame” not a bought one!

Additional klout features

Aside from all the great features discussed above, Klout scores your:

Amplification – how much you influence people
True Reach – the number of people you influence, both within your immediate network, and across their extended networks.
Network – how influential is your network

Klout also allows you to compare your different scores – this feature allows you to benchmark your social media engagement against your competition and therefore enhance your online performance.

This brings us to the end of our Klout discussion for this post. Whatever you are doing to communicate your brand, make sure you are measuring your progress and setting goals, otherwise, your efforts might go unnoticed, and that would be a shame. Think About It!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I will be publishing a series of articles to help you better manage your personal brand – so make sure you subscribe to my blog or to my RSS feed (http://johnantonios.com/feed) to your favorite reader (eg. Google Reader)

Do you use other tools to monitor your personal brand? If so, why don’t you share them in the comment section below …

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Posted in Branding, How-to, Monitoring Tools, Personal Branding, Social Media Marketing

Tagged Facebook, Foursquare, Google, how-to, Klout, LinkedIn, Measuring your personal brand, personal brand, Personal Brand Assessment, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social network, Twitter, Your Brand Influence

The Fall of CVs & The Rise of Personal Branding

Posted on September 16, 2010 | 16 Comments

The title of this post was inspired from an old book I read by Ries & Ries entitled “The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR“. This book was published in 2002, I think with Social Media in full throttle today, this book makes more sense than ever! I highly recommend reading this book.

Anyway, I wanted to start today’s post with a trivia question to test our general knowledge

Q: What do these words have in common?

Arfaj (Ryanterium Epapposum)
Basking Shark
CV/Resume

A: They are all on the verge of EXTINCTION

The main difference; however, is that there is no hope in saving the last one! Yes, you heard me. I am telling you that CVs are on the verge of extinction and the process is irreversible. My prediction is that in a short couple of years, the traditional CV will cease to exist and the only people that will be mourning that day are those who have not developed their personal brand.

The Fall of CVs

Let us look at the typical format of a CV: Name, Contact Details, Work Experience, Education, and Extracurricular Activities. More often than not, the Work Experience is literally the Job Description you received when you applied to the vacancy in the first place; rarely do you see achievement based CVs. So basically, if you and I were to work for the same company and have the same job title, let’s say account manager, chances have it that this particular part of our CV will be identical – hopefully, you’ll have a typo, which gives me an advantage of you (uh, yeah!)

Having said that, imagine this highly probable scenario: two business school graduates from the same university that had their internships in very well established enterprises are applying for the same job vacancy. You are the HR manager of this company, whom do you choose? The more appropriate question in this case is how do you choose? You might have to resort to rolling the dice, or playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe … that seems quite fair, let’s leave it all to chance! (You can read more about this in an earlier post entitled Personal Branding is For You!)

So back to the initial question, why are CVs dying out? Below is a list of options to choose from:

It is static
It is boring (maybe that’s not very scientific, but it still presents a plausible argument)
It lacks any personalization
It says nothing about your character
It is biased – you wrote it!
It only shows one side of you

I’d like to rephrase the earlier statement claiming that this an option list to choose from, in my opinion CV are all that and more …

The Rise of Personal Branding

What makes you unique? Who are you? What is so special about you? What do people think about you? All these questions are answered in Personal Branding. Creating your personal brand allows you to promote a 360 degrees view of yourself.

Based on a recent study entitled Reputation Management & Social Media conducted by Pew Research Center, 57% of all adult Internet users in the US have used a search engine to conduct their ego surf -this number is up from a figure of 22% in 2001. Activities pertaining to setting up an online profile on a social networking site have also gone up to 46% in 2009, from just 22% in 2006. Similarly, seven in ten adults have conducted an online search for information about other people – 44% of online adults have dug online for information regarding someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity. In his book, Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel notes that, more than ever before, people’s first interaction with the brand is happening at the search box. He continues to say that the first page of search results defines you (your brand).

Hypothetically, as an HR Manager, I would want to know more about you based on more tangible proof than what you claim in your CV. If I read your blog, I would understand your train of thought, what you are passionate about, how you interact with people’s criticism … and much more. If I need to look at your resume, I can always seek out your profile on LinkedIn, and look at recommendations you have from previous employers, clients, and colleagues. I can also get a chance to see the kind of books you like to read, how your network is built …etc. The holistic view provided by a well-developed Personal Brand allows my choice (as HR manager) to be more scientific!

The New CV

Here is a quick format of the new CV:

Blog: This is where you express your passion in any format (writing, podcasts, or video) – content is a key ingredient when it comes to building your brand. People want to know how you think, what value can you add to them, why should they get to know you better – blogging is definitely the ultimate expression platform!
LinkedIn: This is where you layout your work experience / education / contact details. It is also, where you build your professional network. Seek out recommendations from your professors, colleagues, and clients.
Twitter: Think of twitter as the ultimate middleman, or your elevator pitch (in this case 140 characters pitch) – you’re in cocktail party and you want to earn the attention of people with similar interests. This attention is then diverted to more lengthy conversations and discussions over on your blog, or on Skype …

Other platforms can be used to build your personal brand; it all depends on the audience you would like to attract. If you were in Egypt for example, and you would like to attract 18 to 30 years old graduate with a middle-to-upper income level, then you definitely should tackle Facebook.

When someone asks me for my CV, I ask him or her to look me up online. I am not trying to be arrogant; in fact, I am exposing myself completely. I am giving them a real chance to get to know me without feeding them mere “job descriptions” on my CV. When you finish your post, run a vanity search. The first 3 to 4 results are what an HR Manager will be looking at when he or she googles your name. Are you satisfied with the results? Think About It!

One last thing:

After the success of the “Personal Branding – Your Avatar is Important – Stick to It!”post – we have been presented with a lot of questions that have led us to develop this interesting survey (results of which will be shared upon completion). Thank you for taking 2 min of your time to help us out. Click here to take survey

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Posted in Personal Branding

Tagged CV, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mitch Joel, personal brand, Personal Branding, Pew Research Center, Resume, Social Media, Twitter, Work Experience

How-to add Icons in Your Signature

Posted on January 10, 2010 | 14 Comments

A great source for blog posts is questions you encounter in your daily life – in your business, in a conversation with your friends, in an article, even in an email from a friend. This post in an answer the could have been simply sent in a reply email, but since everyone can benefit from it, i decided to respond to it publicly.

I was asked by a friend how to incorporate icons in my email signature when using webmail clients like Gmail or Yahoo. In theory, in order to have any image appear in your email it should be in html format – but if the only language you speak my language, I would assume you know about html as much as i know about osteology! I did my research and found a plugin that works on Google Chrome (web browser) – Autopen. The trick is that you must be running Google Chrome – by the way, I’ve tried all browser and I highly recommend Chrome – it’s light, fast, and practical. I personally love it.

After installing Google Chrome and the plugin Autopen – an icon will be added to your Chrome toolbar – click on that icon – From here you can add signatures using the rich text editor or switch to the html view for more power and control. Once you have added a signature set it to default and it will get inserted automatically when you compose, reply or forward a message from you Gmail or Yahoo account.

Here’s where it starts getting tricky – a small lesson in HTML coding – in laymen terms! I won’t worry about you when it comes to writing your name and contact info – but how do we insert an icon. Switch to HTML tab view on your Autopen panel – why? because you need to do two things: 1- enter the code to locate the icon images, 2-enter the code to link the images to your desired destination.

Upload the icon files onto your wordpress image library (What this does is give you a permanent online location of the image so you can add it to the HTML code)
Access your wordpress image library and get the URL address of that image (I recommend that you do that to all the icons – copy and paste the URL addresses onto a notepad or word for easier access)

HTML coding

HREF indicates the URL being linked to - replace the URL code underlined in red by the location of your Twitter account (or Facebook, etc …)
IMG SRC indicates the URL image source - replace the URL code underlined in green by the URL of the image you uploaded to your wordpress image library
now copy the whole completed code and paste it in the Autopen panel (HTML view)

Let me know if you found this post helpful. If you need any additional help, let me know!

Social Media is all about networking – so you have to make sure you are leveraging every opportunity to connect with others – and your email signature is one way. Think About It!

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Posted in How-to, Social Media Marketing

Tagged email signature, Facebook, icons, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter

Social Media FRENZY

Posted on December 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

We are all greedy! Before you roll your eyes in discontent, try to be honest with yourself and think about it – we want success, we want money, we want to fancy cars, we want love, we want attention, we always want more time, we want trips to the Mauritius Islands and the Bahamas, we want our partners to be smart, beautiful, independent, loving, caring, wild and timid, angelic and devilish … let’s face it we want it all – we are greedy!

Ironically, this greed can also be observed in the relatively new social media environment – individuals and companies want to be on every possible SM site out there – and trust me there’s a lot out there – some are general, others are niche sites catered to a certain target, some are global, others are more regional, etc … but that doesn’t stop us from wanting to be on every single one of them – take a second to reflect on how many SM sites you are on. Personally, I am on 10 or 12 … or maybe 14 …!!! WOW … I don’t know!

The main purpose of social media is to expand your network and touch a wider audience base – but let’s not forget the basics when it comes to relationship management – you always have to follow through otherwise you will lose the customer, future referrals. and above all you risk losing your credibility. How you manage your social media presence is very critical for your business success … and my advice is if you’re not ready for the commitment don’t ride the wave just yet – it’s better to be dubbed as not In (~ the zone) than be dubbed as Out (~ of business).

“Gotta get me some of that New Marketing. Bring me blogs, email, Youtube videos, Myspace pages, Google AdWords … i don’t care, as long as it’s shiny and new” – this is a quote from Seth Godin’s book entitled Meatball Sundae. He writes about trying to match the the boring brands (“meatballs”) with the new tools in marketing that seem irresistible (“the sundae”) – you end up getting is a Meatball Sundae, which will most certainly give you an indigestion!

Before you venture in the world of social media and fall victim to this FRENZY, be sure you have all the right tools for the job. Do not be fooled by the “FREE” signage hanging at it’s gates – you ought to know by now there’s always a catch attached to that word!

I might have sounded like I’m pushing people away from social media; to the contrary, I am an advocate of social media marketing. By all means, ride the wave of social media, but know when to ride it and which one to ride! You don’t have to be on all the social media sites – look for the ones that will benefit you and you business most and manage those effectively. And as Godin mentions in his book, make sure your business is ready for this new wave and if it’s not, it might be time for a makeover. Think About It!