Personal Branding Trend # 11 - Google Gatekeeper

William Arruda from Reach personal branding shares his personal branding trends for in 2011.  This trend – Google Gatekeeper – College admissions officers are using Google to decide who gets in. Will your google results help or hurt your prospects of getting into your university of choice?

Good grades and high SAT scores won’t be enough to get you into your college of choice. In fact, according to a November 2010 study by Kaplan, 9% of business schools, 15% of law schools, and 14% of medical schools are already using social networking sites to help evaluate students during the admissions process.

Digital dirt or a lackluster online brand may close the ivy-covered gates where there’s fierce competition for limited enrollment. This trend will increase in the coming years, making online personal branding almost as important as academics to those aspiring to attend college.

With Google – the new reference check – being part of admissions process, high school guidance counselors will have to get up-to-speed on personal branding and all things Web 2.0. There will be courses to help them understand how to build stellar online profiles and special services focused on this market to ensure students’ online brands support their higher education aspirations.

If you are currently filling out college applications (or your children are), time spent building your brand in bits and bytes may reap the ultimate reward – an acceptance letter from your school of choice.

Working with Vizibility.com can position your Top 5 Google preferences, as well as purchase your name in Google, I would also take the time to update your Google profile, here is mine as an example:

Personal Branding Trend #7 - 3-D PB by William Arruda

As blended search becomes the norm and web researchers demand more multi-media content,having images, video and real-time content will become more and more important to those who are researching you. People who look you up on the web can get a true 3-D view of who you are and what you have to offer through the power of multi-media. That means Flickr, YouTube and Twitter will become even more important. And new tools that integrate all forms of media will become available.
Career-minded professionals will be more likely to take photos and shoot video at meetings, events and conferences. Documenting what you do and making it available on the web will become a part of your job.
For personal branding, multi-media is critical. It provides the opportunity to build emotional connections with people who are making decisions about you. A picture is worth a thousand words and video delivers a complete communication. Those who make the most of this will stand out from their peers.

This trend – 3-D PB. Text-only content on the web is no longer good enough. To build your personal brand on the web, you need to create a 3-D image of you – multi-media content – including images video and real-time content.
What have you done for your brand today? It is important to build your communications plan and an editorial schedule for delivering your messages.

Personal Branding Trend #3 - VIDmail by William Arruda

Email is so last decade. Good riddance because email is one of our weakest forms of expression. Words only account for about 7% of a communication and words are pretty much all we have to work with email. As video becomes easier to create and distribute, it will eventually replace the ubiquitous text-based email that we’ve been using for about 30 years.

Look for changes to existing email software and new products to support this evolution from text to video.

VideoBIO currently allows you to put your videoBIO in your email signature. And there are new companies and offerings springing up such as Talk Fusion that make it possible to easily build and send video email, or VIDmail. Look for more of these services and emails integrated with text, images and video.

Traditional email will be enhanced with video. Are you ready to send video email that best represents your personal brand?

Robin Recommends:

I have scheduled my videoBIO for February and although I know that it is just a talking head, it is the beginning of my video creation plans. I also think video podcasts and audio clips will be winners over text, as I prefer to see and hear over reading long text.

Cheers,

Robin

Social Media Marketing By the Numbers by Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot

Ever wonder how much was being spent on social media marketing? Or maybe which social sites the money was going to? Check out the Social Media Marketing by the Numbers infographic to answer these questions and more.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/8594/Social-Media-Marketing-By-The-Numbers-Infographic.aspx#ixzz1BrD7r2dA

Personal Branding Trend #6 - Web Purity by William Arruda

Do you have a common name? Is it clear which google results are about you?

Combine the growth of online social networks, the ease of creating your own Blog and omnipresent internet connectivity, with the pressure to be online looking for jobs, connecting with friends and available to collegues and you can see that the web has become a really crowded and noisy place.

Watch Williams video for more on Web Purity


I have wrestled with my google results over the last year as I began to look at what was showing up when I checked online for my name Robin Bramman. I have learned that you can and should be working with reputation management companies to position your most relevent information at the top of the list. I agree with William in using companies like vizibility.com.

I would also take the time to update your google profile, here is mine as an example:

Personal Branding Trend #2 Homecasting by William Arruda

Homecasting is about making your home office a ready-to-broadcast studio from which you can communicate with colleagues and clients wherever they live and work.

In real estate listings, it has become common to see ‘HO’ for home office as a selling feature. In 2011, look for this abbreviation to grow to “HOS” for Home Office Studio. As more and more of us work from home at least part of the time, a separate home office has become almost as important as a bathroom!

And with the move to all things video, the home office will now become a ‘set,’ giving new meaning to the real estate term home staging. Home offices will be equipped with video equipment designed to ensure high quality audio and professional looking backgrounds for synchronous and asynchronous video communications.

Skype has been the basic mode of video connections for a long time. Recently, Cisco announced the more robust Telepresence for the home – called UMI. Homecasting systems will become less expensive, higher quality and more pervasive, highlighting the inferiority of email and telephone calls for communications of all kinds.

Home Set Home!

via thepersonalbrandingblog 

I like to add a little Robin view on each of these trends.    I must say that this one is a no brainer, especially to my Partner Don at SteelID.  He is the developer, designer,  photographer and video podcaster lead on Project Fifty Two,a year long pursuit of commercial photography excellence.  Link on over to watch a fully integrated video/webcast by Don. 

Personal Branding Trend #8 - Personal Portals by William Arruda

As many of you are aware, I have been certified through Reach Personal Branding and now I have the benefits of a Preferred Strategist to share with you William Arruda's 11 Top Trends for Personal Branding in 2011.

As a teaser, I will provide the trends over the next 11 days by presenting each one individually with more detail. I start with Trend #8 - Personal Portals, and have included Williams video for more clarity on the subject.

An excerpt from Williams trend files:

"Many of you have spent time in the past several years creating a LinkedIn profile, building a Blog, creating a Twitter bio, friending on Facebook, etc. This has fractured your brand to various sites all over the web. There‘s the Facebook you, the YouTube you and the Twitter you, etc. Each person who connects with you via one of these sites, sees only one facet of the gem that is your brand. This has made it challenging to provide the complete story about who you are and what you do."

Enter personal portals......

Personal portals, such as about.me and flavors.me are a new category of online tools that allows you to link all the different facets of your brand in one place. They let you create one customizable web page that connects all your profiles from various social networks.

Watch Williams video to learn more.

I presented this trend first as I have recently developed my Personal Portal with the help of my brilliant Partner Don at SteelID. Don not only took a cool photo of me behind our studio, but he took the time to design my About.Me/RobinBramman page to include my brand attributes and presented it with coolness.

I show you the before and after below to outline how important it is to work with a professional integrated designer to present your brand online.  Many people go for the DIY (Do It Yourself) and end up placing their brand at risk.  

Before

After                                                                     

Stay tuned for more trends to follow and share your trends by commenting below.


Cheers,
Robin

Seth Godin on the Tribes We lead

Video from TED.com
I share video's that wake me up, make me think, and get my creative juices flowing.View only if you dare to wake up, think big and get creative!

About this talk
Seth Godin argues the internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.

About Seth Godin
Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age. His newest interest: the tribes we lead.

Robin's video take away: Be a Tribe Leader - Create a Movement - Be known for your Niche!

100 Things to Watch in 2011

This is an interesting presentation, spanning the globe, and intertwined
with both global and personal branding implications:

JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence.