Team Post by Maggie Anderson   

If your answer is I don’t know, don’t have one, or don’t need one … could you give me just a minute?

You Do Have a Brand – You may not be aware of it, but how you are perceived in the business world is your personal brand. The thumbnail description people give when someone asks who you are, what you do or what you are like? The question is, are you in charge of that? Are you seen, described, thought of by colleagues, prospects and potential connectors to your next opportunity — the way you want to be?

What defines your brand? – The internet is playing a bigger and bigger role in defining your brand, in two ways. The first is that it has cultivated a very rapid “thumbs up or thumbs down” mentality – and now people apply the same rapid judgment to written materials and face-face meetings. The second is that so much can now be quickly checked. This story illustrates the challenge:

A gentleman who was starting a lucrative new venture called a few weeks back for my help. He was in the process of raising capital for this new project when he had the good fortune to have two keenly interested prospects tell him straight out why they were now deciding not to invest. After both investors found his product compelling they each went to the internet to vet him and his partners. Both easily located red flags about them and just as important, did not find solid recommendations to counteract those. The red flags turned out to be relatively minor issues, and could have easily been fixed or at least neutralized. The real point of the story is that many other keenly interested investors had mysteriously dropped out without saying anything – presumably because of these same issues.

Perception is Everything

Whether what is found out about you on the internet is true or false does not matter. What matters is the perception that it creates, and even though it sometimes seems like we are living in a wild, wild cyber-world, you do have some control over that perception if you take time to focus on your brand. If you are not on LinkedIn, with a sharp profile and crisp information, you are aging yourself. How strong and relevant is your network? Do you have powerful recommendations? Are you a member of professional organizations appropriate for the role you are seeking?

Inconsistencies can be Fatal

We are living in an era where quite a number of high profile leaders have been taken out of their role because of errors in their background: Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo; David Edmondson, CEO of Radio Shack; Kenneth Lonchar, CFO of Veritas; and Jeffrey Papows, CEO of Lotus are among the examples. Of course they claimed these were errors from way back that somehow got perpetrated. How it happened does not matter. With the abundance of candidates, anyone looking at you will drop you as a candidate like a hot potato if they find a discrepancy in your background. You may not have even put it there — but you are still responsible.

At ChapterTwo® we go even further. Of course we want everything to be accurate, but we also want it to support what you want to do next. The ultimate inconsistency is telling people you want to do one thing, yet having the internet tell a very different story about who you really are.

About the author:

Maggie Anderson

maggiea@chaptertwo.net

Maggie Anderson is a a 25-year veteran of personal and small business branding, with a niche in social networking.  Maggie works with our Clients to help shape their personal brand, then put that brand in the marketplace by determining which online tools to use and helping our clients adopt their use.