How to Build your Online Brand

Online branding has passed out of the Early Adopter stage. I knew that when I saw a LinkedIn invitation from my dad, who's in his eighties.

We all need an online brand these days. I shouldn't say need one - we don't need one. It's just that we have one, whether we want to or not. You'll see that instantly if you Google your own name.

You're out there, unless you've been living in a cave. You have an online presence. It might represent you. It might not.

A guy wrote to us to ask"How much publishing do you do?"

"Tons," we wrote back. "We're a publishing company. Can you be more specific?"

The guy wrote "I meant publishing your research in academic journals." He was selling a service aimed at academics. The guy thought I was a full-time professor. I asked him where he got that idea.

Turns out a conference-giving company has a bio of me on their site that labels me a professor of marketing at the B-school where I teach a class in branding and professional development. Where did the company get the idea that I'm a full-time professor, when my LinkedIn profile and website and close to ten thousand columns say differently? Beats me.

They probably saw the academic credential - the professional development class - and jumped on it. We love to put people into little boxes.

If you don't want people to put you into a little box when they encounter your online brand, construct a new box for yourself and put yourself into it. That's what an online brand is - it's a frame to help people who don't already know you understand who you are and how you roll.

It's hard to describe yourself in words. It's frustrating. We've been taught for years to use cliches like "Motivated self-starter," "Proven track record of success" (in case there's such a thing as a track record of failure - or an unproven track record) and "Experienced with cross-functional teams" in our branding.

Even if we want to step outside the standard personal-branding frame, we have a problem. We don't know what else to say.

We've never been taught to brand ourselves. That's a failure of our educational system. We should be talking about purpose and identity with kids from the time they are tiny. We should be de-mystifying the murky, scary world of grown-up jobs and livelihoods for kids as they grow up.

University career services teams push a rock uphill every day in most institutions. Their classes are seldom required for graduation, and in some colleges they're not even allowed to email kids to tell them about upcoming career events. Career education is considered nice-to-have rather than an essential part of a kid's education.

I know of one school, DeVry Institute, that requires career development for every student at every point in his or her program. That should be built into the curriculum at every college. Don't we owe our kids that much?

We don't teach students to brand themselves for the working world, so we must learn how on our own. Here are ideas to build your online brand without sinking to the zombie-branding level of "High-achieving Business Professional with excellent communication skills."

Soundtrack for this post: Hallelujah!

Start with a simple, short statement about what you do professionally and, if you feel like sharing, why you do it. That's your Bumper Sticker, a one-line branding statement.

Your short statement can serve as your LinkedIn headline and your Twitter self-description. A short declaration is so much stronger than the lists most Twitter users write, like this:

Blogger, writer, speaker, social media maven, creative person

Lists are seldom strong branding choices, because they have no emotional power. When we read a list, we get no sense of the person it represents. I understand why people brand themselves via lists, though - we've learned since childhood that the left-brained Godzilla world adores lists of any kind.

People are whole. They don't split down into disembodied tasks and functions. As you work on your online branding, I want you to get rid of any list-type branding that may be cluttering up your online persona.

When you create your online brand, eighty percent of your time and effort will be invested before you decide on the words for your brand. That reality has tripped up many a new LinkedIn user who sat, transfixed in horror and helplessness, as s/he wrote a LinkedIn profile for the first time.

Two hundred million LinkedIn users have stressed over the creation of their profiles for hours - let's say an average of two hours per person. That's 400 million hours of angst - 45,000 years of collective online-branding pain - expended on one website!

If we're willing to sound like ourselves instead of the corporatespeak zombies that old-school branding describes, we can avoid the angst. We can simply tell our stories instead.

Let's start with your short Bumper Sticker. Here are few ideas to get your brain moving:

• Not-for-profit marketer with a sideline in videography
• CIO in mid-market manufacturing
• HR VP passionate about bring humanity into work
• Retail Operations Manager looking for my next challenge

You don't need to say you're dedicated or loyal or smart. Like the zombie language and the lists of tasks we denounced earlier, self-praising adjectives are awful branding choices. They say "Please believe me when I say that I'm clever, hard-working and bright." Why would anyone believe you about things like that? Talk is cheap.

These people, the ones encountering you online, don't know you yet. You have no credibility with them. Worse, groveling to praise yourself shows a lack of self-awareness. If you're good at what you do -- and I'm certain you are -- other people will say so. You don't need to. Just tell us the story -- don't stand outside it, giving yourself blue ribbons.

Getting your headline/Bumper Sticker on paper is a great start. Next, you'll need a LinkedIn Summary paragraph.

That paragraph may take you a bit longer to write than your short one-line statement did. This is the meat of your brand -- who you are behind the business card. It requires serious reflection.

Here's a branding paragraph that tells a human story.

I was a research librarian for twenty years before realizing that my passion for information-sleuthing could become a business. Now I'm an independent researcher whose corporate, startup and institutional clients want to know a lot about a subject fast -- or need to know only what's relevant to them, and hire me to separate wheat from chaff.

Your branding isn't meant to reach or resonate with everyone. Most visitors may click away from your LinkedIn profile in a heartbeat, and that's fine. The last thing you want your online brand to do is to pull in people you have no time for.

Is there anything more frustrating than to get a call from a headhunter or prospective client who's dying to talk to you -- and then learn that they were actually looking for someone completely different? You can't waste your time and mojo on interactions like that.

Your brand must pull in the right people quickly and push the rest away with equal force.

Your brand is a magnet with two poles. Some people will stick. Some will fly into outer space. God bless them all!

Your first task is to decide what you're after. What do you want for yourself and your career in 2014? What sorts of conversations with which sorts of people will get you there?

It takes almost no time to set up social media accounts and start using them. It takes time to manage them - that's another reason to understand from the get what you want from your online branding. Why tweet to the world and claim every Facebook friend ever born if you don't have a clue why you're doing those things?

It is a new day in personal branding -- and company branding, and employer branding. Your human side is the only part of you that resonates beyond the page and the screen. The Human Workplace is already here. Every day more people add a human voice to their LinkedIn profiles and their branding on other platforms.

Every day they bring more and more of the normally-left-at-home side of themselves to work and the online community.

Look at us right now, for instance -- gazillions of awesome and charged-up people from more countries than I could name on a bet, gathered here on LinkedIn to help one another make a living, find our passion and create a better world to leave to our children.

What a force we are!

Our work and our branding don't have to be staid and formal anymore. We are shaking off the old, dusty belief that being Professional means being less than ourselves. We chafe more and more at the gray, stuffy versions of ourselves that our jobs often require us to be.That grayness and stuffiness isn't good for business. It doesn't help us.

The working world wants to see the wickedly cool and funny person that you are when you're connected to your power source.Your customers want to see it. Your company's shareholders need that side of you in the mix!

Your online brand can reflect who you are behind the resume, and it must. If we get to redefine the word Professional to mean "true to yourself at all times in all places" -- and most assuredly we do -- then your humanized online brand can only burnish your professional flame.

Our 12-week virtual coaching group Build Your Online Brand starts on November 23rd. Build your brand and your flame with us!

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people. You can join us as a free Friend or paid Individual member, join our LinkedIn group, LIKE us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter (@humanworkplace) and listen to our podcasts.

You can hire us to deliver a lunchtime Human Workplace Lunch Hour webinar, or host a Human Workplace launch event with us! Human Workplace is an international movement. Our site launched a year ago and we have 50,000 members so far, from 160 countries. Rock on, humans! If you want to partner with us to bring Human Workplace to your part of the world, get in touch with us here.

Want some inspiration as you work on your online brand? Check out our Pinterest page to get into the human-voiced mindset!

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