Taking it Personally: Revealing the Real you Through Personal Branding

I’m Christina Capadona-Schmitz with Oswald Companies and Christina CS Media, and I’m here today to talk about taking it personally, revealing the real you for personal branding. You know the saying, “It’s who you know.”

Well, I like to say it’s who know you. Personal branding through digital and social media, it gives you the chance for people to know you before they ever meet you, and it also reinforces your leadership and influence that you have in real life.

With millennials now taking over as the largest population in today’s workforce at about 55% and growing, this is a digitally born and bred generations. How are you engaging? How are you reaching potential buyers, prospects, even future employees? The answer is personal branding online, but it’s not about sharing what you had for lunch or funny memes or photos. It’s about visibly demonstrating your thought leadership and influence that you have.

So many people I talk to are so focused on how their personal profile photo looks or having a really impressive description or bio on their social media. These things are important when people are getting the first impression of you online, but what I really try to have them focus on is what are you going to do to demonstrate and communicate your thought-leadership online, what actions are you going to take.

This could come in the form of personal blogging. You could be communicating about your events that you are either speaking at or attending, taking photos, something that really shares the personal side of what you do in and out each day. A lot of times it’s just simply login on and making sure that you’re following, liking, commenting, sharing other people’s content that you find valuable, and it demonstrates the things that you care about and the topics that are important to you.

The only real personal branding strategy that’s going to work is the one that’s going to keep you log in on each day, participating, and engaging. You can hire somebody to get you there and coach you along the way, but at the end of the day, to get real meaningful results, it needs to be the authentic you sharing and guiding people online, and you also might learn something along the way, and it can be fun when done in the right way.

I encourage you to take the tasks seriously and the commitment personally to ensure that you are one of the who is who for the generations to come.