When I starting my personal-branding business eight years ago, virtually no one had even heard of personal branding, let alone considered buying some of it—hence a rocky start to an eventually burgeoning business.
But interest in personal branding has grown tremendously, the term has become a part of the careers industry vernacular, and personal-branding consultants have set up shop around the globe. When I launched my company (Reach), there were five other consultants providing personal branding services—and I knew all of them. Now, there are thousands, from New York to New Delhi.
Personal branding is something that every career-minded professional needs to be thinking about—every day, and with everything they do.
And for professionals working in the field of marketing, the bar is higher. Personal branding needs to be part of what you do to manage your career and reach your goals. With the recession growing in severity and marketing budgets being cut, now is the time for you to be thinking about your personal brand—before your name lands on the layoff list.
Here are my predictions for how personal branding will evolve in the coming year.
1. Video as Primary Personal Branding Tool
As video phones and cameras become even more widespread, network bandwidth increases, and tools for converting and uploading video become more plentiful and easier to use, many more professionals will use video as a personal branding tool. It's a great medium, because it allows you to clearly communicate your message while showcasing your personality and creativity. Look at the popularity of YouTube, and you can see how video will become an even more important element in your personal media plan.
2. Consolidation of Professional Networking Sites
In case you haven't noticed, there are a lot of networking sites out there (LinkedIn, Ryze, ecademy, Spoke, Ziki, Naymz, Ziggs, etc.). It's too much work to use all of these sites to stay connected. Although many of us have profiles on several of these sites, we typically use the networking functions of just one or two. Expect there to be some consolidation, reducing the number of sites while increasing the services available on the sites that remain.
3. Increased Personal Googling
When the economy goes south, there are many more qualified candidates for each open position. That means hiring managers and executive recruiters need finer filters to eliminate candidates. After all, they can't interview everyone. Google to the rescue. A Google search has already replaced the reference check in many hiring situations. Now, it will become a more-integral part in the vetting process.
According to an ExecuNet study, 87% of executive recruiters google candidates before deciding whether to bring them in. If your candidature looks good on paper, but you don't show up on Google, your resume won't make it into the short-list folder. So a powerful digital identity will go from a "nice to have" to a "must have" resource for managing your career (measure your online ID with this tool: www.onlineidcalculator.com).
4. More One-of-a-Kind Children's Names
If your name is John Smith or Sue Jones, you know what this is about. Owning your domain name—so you can build your own home on the World Wide Web—is becoming more and more important.
Gen Xers and Yers are buying up their personal domains or becoming frustrated when their name has been taken by someone else. To ensure that doesn't happen to their offspring, they will google the names they are considering or invent unique names to ensure that they can own the domain name. (Welcome to the world, Eltrinia Johnson!)
5. Movement Into High Schools
Personal branding has already become big on college campuses. I have done work with at least a dozen universities this year and I know of several MBA programs that are using personal branding as a differentiator. Now, personal branding will move into high school guidance counselors' offices.
As the competition for getting into your preferred university increases, personal branding will become a tool to give some students to edge. It will be one more element in students' college application packages that they will need to be think about if they want to get that acceptance letter from the schools that top their list.
6. Integration Among Social-Networking Sites
Not only are there too many social/professional networking sites (see number 2, above), they are also not connected, making it that much more difficult and time-consuming to manage your online identity. Tools will become available that will allow you to update your content once and have it show up on multiple sites. Those tools will make it easier to build and maintain your personal brand online and ensure that your content is up-to-date and consistent throughout the various networking sites.
7. More Personal-Branding Specialists
As the field grows, the applications for personal branding will increase. Reach has certified over 300 people in its personal branding methodology, and no two of them do exactly the same thing for the same target audience. The applications for personal branding will increase tremendously in the coming year. We'll see personal branding for dating, stay-at-home moms, high school students (see number 5, above), and grandparents.
8. More Widespread Adoption of the Term "Personal Brand"
"Personal brand" will be standard term inside companies to describe colleagues—as in "he's always late, that's part of his personal brand," and on an annual review: "your personal-brand attributes of 'creative' and 'clever' make you an exceptionally valuable part of the team." Now that personal branding has become a part of the talent-development curriculum at many companies, the term has taken on a life of its own. Expect your manager or teammates to be referring to your personal brand this coming year.
9. Personal Web-Site Services
It will become easier to have your own real estate (or virtual estate, in this case) on the World Wide Web as new services become available to help you build and manage your Web site. You'll be able to customize a site so that it reflects your brand. These services will follow the "Fremium" model; that is, many of them will have free offerings, with opportunities to upgrade for advanced functionality. Startups like Nombray will get you a domain name and build you a Web site.
At the same time, established professional and social-networking sites will enable you to customize the look and feel of your profile so that it is branded and reflects your unique promise of value. Personal-branding services will become a part of the offerings for all of these sites as they look to extend their lines, differentiate their offerings, and attract new members.
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So there you have it, just some of the changes we can expect in the coming year in the world of personal branding. Have you been working on your brand? What are you waiting for?
