Set a clear message, be professional, be consistent, be original.
These are a few tips I found on a PR blog about how to "brand yourself" online. In an increasingly digital world and competitive job market, people say it's more important than ever for millennials to establish a personal brand. There are a plethora of resources out there to help people build a brand and make it stand out against competitors. Career coach Lisa Quast gives this advice in a Forbes article called "Personal Branding 101" :
Your game plan should include more than just branding yourself in social media – it needs to include all aspects of you, as a product. Defining your plan needs to include the tangible and intangible characteristics of personal branding including attire, hair, makeup, behavior, verbal and non-verbal communication.
Sounds pretty overwhelming, huh? I certainly think it does. From the moment I set foot in the journalism school at Carolina, I've been hearing the word "branding." It's essential for marketing a product and distinguishing your company. But the idea of having to brand myself has always made me feel a little suffocated. What if some days I like to lay around in pajamas and binge on Netflix, but other days I like to wake up early and go on a 5-mile run? I'm not entirely a couch potato, but I'm not entirely a fitness guru either. Sometimes I like to use my social media accounts to post mindless humor, and other times I use them to speak on political issues I care about.
I think the growing need for millenials to brand ourselves puts a lot of pressure on us. Before we can even legally drink a beer, we're supposed to decide who we are, and then convey that across all our social media platforms and in our daily lives down to how we act and what we wear. My problem with all of this is that humans aren't shiny products to be marketed and tied up in a neat little bow. People are complex, multi-faceted, and often inconsistent. Our inconsistencies are what make us unique, and our goals are constantly changing in response to new discoveries. But yet, we're often told as students to establish our career goals now and maintain a consistent, professional brand to match.
To add even more pressure to ourselves, our brand must be original. The blog post I found on personal branding says, "Don't try to brand yourself as the next Martha Stewart... People love diversity. Plus, there's only room for one Martha in this world." Well, to all you people with a passion for recipes, crafts and home decor, guess you'd better find something else. Sometimes I think the pressure to be unique and stand out leads us to define ourselves in a way that doesn't totally encapsulate our personalities. We're so preoccupied with trying to paint the proper picture online that we risk losing the essence of who we really are. And then there's the fact that the things we put out on the internet don't just go away. If I was asked to brand myself several years ago, I might come up with something very different than the brand I'd use today. But the permanence of what we post on the internet implies that we should be constantly building upon one brand with a holistic, overarching goal.
Instead of declaring a "brand" for ourselves and monitoring all our behavior to match it, I think we should reverse the direction. Follow our passions, hone our unique skills, and let our personal brand emerge naturally. If we continue to be overly concerned about the perfect image to project to employers, we'll lose the little idiosyncrasies make us us. Even in a cut-throat job market, it's still about people connecting with people.
No comments:
Post a Comment