After we had worked on interviewing strategies and my transformational resume, Paloma’s next advice to me was to identify my brand—and to professionalize and unify my blog, social networking profiles and all my public and professional communications.
Identifying my brand was not too difficult. People from all over the world, including Paloma, had emailed me telling me that they admired my creativity, bravery and integrity—so that became my identifiable brand. I began infusing all my communications with creativity, bravery, and integrity.
Unifying and professionalizing my blog, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles did not require a tremendous amount of effort either.
I had started my blog in order to keep in touch with people from all over the world, document my job search and post my resume. I was not exactly sure in which direction I was ultimately going to take it, but I knew I wanted it to help me find a job.
It did not take much effort to be sensitive and professional about what I posted—and to keep the site focused on my job-hunting efforts.
I had signed onto Facebook when my children had invited me to be their friend. How could I refuse? I had not considered it a public forum or a platform for finding or preventing me from finding a job, but with Paloma’s advice, I started to regard Facebook not only as a personal site for keeping up with my children or as a free-for-all social networking site—as most people seemed to regard it—but as part of my professional platform.
I certainly regarded LinkedIn as a professional platform, but I did not have a complete profile and did not fully understand how to best utilize it to find a job or enhance my career.
As I cleaned up and unified my profiles and online communications, I always kept in mind that my main goal was to find a job. Anything that would interfere with my chances of finding a job was not good and was omitted or deleted, and anything that added to my chances of finding a job was posted and retained.
One of the simplest techniques I used to give my new resume, blog and social networking profiles a professional and cohesive look was to post the same business-like photograph on all of them. My profile pictures had been too casual.
My wife Cindy is a photographer, so getting a high-quality digital portrait was easy. Otherwise, I would have gone to the nearest passport photo service which could supply me with an electronic image.
Once I had streamlined my online presence and had instilled my personal brand of creativity, bravery, and integrity in all my public communications, I felt as though I had an effective marketing campaign working in my favor. My professional image was sharpened, and I was transformed into an easily recognizable brand.
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