Curations & Musings Towards Building Influential Brands To Influence The World.
By way of @sparkbranding, this Personal Brand Pyramid is a helpful way to understand which level you are at when it comes to another’s perception of you and/or your personal brand. Starting at the lowest, people typically recognize you for what you can do (i.e. your skills), but – and how amazing would this be – the highest level of branding is when people recognize you for your values – the bedrock of your integrity, i.e. what you will never compromise on.
In this pervasively digital age, is the traditional “paper” resume obsolete?
I started thinking about this question when I stumbled upon some articles introducing the “visual resume”. What is a “visual resume”, you may ask? Essentially, with the advent of user-friendly design software, free images, a creative approach and good ol’ Powerpoint, you can set up a visual representation of your resume – which may be more impactful in helping you stand out from among a plethora of other potential job candidates.
My initial reaction to this idea was one of wonder: “Wow! What a great idea! I’m done with boring paper resumes – this is the future!” But as I thought about it further, I also realised: contrary to common misconceptions that it’s “out with the old and in with the new” especially when it comes to digital media, digital media merely expands the channels for communications rather than replaces them (hrm… something to expand on in another post).
Still, the idea of visual resumes are quite compelling and this is the presentation that set me off on them:
Over at 10,000 Words, Mark S. Luckie shares 5 lessons he’s learned on Personal Branding. I appreciated how he brought the discussion from talking about tools, brand assets both offline and online to being more “personal” – the whole point of managing your “personal brand.”
I especially appreciated this (under-appreciated and often overlooked) thought:
A successful “personal” brand requires you to be a “person”
With this as the starting point, here are Mark’s 5 lessons:
I think it should go without saying that you need to manage your brand online these days, whether you’re doing it for yourself or your brand. You should realize that, these days, customers, professors, potential employers – all of them turn to Google, Facebook and other online avenues to find out more about you before they even encounter you.
So what can you do to manage your brand online? Here are 5 steps, which I’ve reworded and summarized for my own application from this great article:
Since I’ve been thinking about job titles today (here and here), I thought I’d share these really great examples of several truly worst. job. titles. ever.
Here’s a list of 30 worst job titles for 2010, via Examiner.com. The winner for 2010: Erection Engineer.
Here are a few of my other favourites: