November 26, 2008

Personal Branding and the Channels to Convey your Brand

A number of friends I've known over my 20 years in media technology have recently lost their jobs due either to the economy or to fears about the economy (there is a difference). Companies like Time Inc, Hearst Corporation, Nielsen Business Media, Rodale and many others have let go of talented and capable technologists who are now facing an uphill battle to find work in the next 6-12 months. This makes me concerned for them, but I know that ultimately things will turn around and they'll find work.

In some cases I'm having a few people do some consulting for me on projects. For instance, Christian Evans, who was a technology executive at Nielsen for a number of years, is working with me directly on an interesting project for a customer of ours. I'm trying to find other ways to use other friends as well, but obviously there's only so much one can do.

In any event, I've been thinking a great deal about how people find work in this day and age, and it occurred to me that sending a resume is a somewhat old-fashioned way of going about it. A resume is a document with discreet pieces of content within it -- 'chunks' of information that then get denormalized or 'flattened' into a string of text that is either printed on paper or viewed in a PDF or MS Word file.

The problem with a resume is that it is probably the worst way for an individual to represent the depth of their brand. If you consider that most bright people that you would want to work for in this modern day do not think in a denormalized way but are looking for links, associations, or a Web of context, a resume constrains that person's way of thinking about you as a possible resource or team member. Of the tens of thousands of people in technology that are out of work, the resumes are flying around the Internet and the only way anyone who would be looking for a candidate is through the use of keywords/keyphrases.

The problem is, most people write their resumes wiith those keywords/keyphrases in them, so poor quality candidates become undifferentiated from top quality people. That has the overall effect of diffusing the marketplace and making the resume (we assume digital at this point and posted on one of the major sourcing sites) a poor way of searching.

At the end of the day, the resume is -- or should be -- an expression of an individual's brand. However, it is perhaps the worst way to do so because it is flat and stale information that doesn't allow the individual a way to express their unique selling proposition as a potential employee or team member.

Now lets talk about Shaquille O'Neal.

I never liked Shaq. I've been a die-hard Knicks fan for my whole life, having held season tickets for a number of years (until this year when I let them go. But thats another story). I didn't care for Shaq's bravado or for the way he manhandled my aging team and my hero, Patrick Ewing, back in the day when Shaq first came into the league. To me he was the opposite of what a big man should be -- a bully, brash, egomaniacal, threatening. I'm a big guy (not that big, but at 6'4" big enough) and I was taught at a VERY early age that the big man should be calm, gentle, and to be careful of coming across as threatening, since that could naturally be someone's feeling of a big person.

I also never liked Twitter -- at least not for some time. I disparaged it for some time in public and private. I didn't like the name -- it sounded too frou frou to me, too self-involved with all these hundreds of thousands of people telling each other what they ate for breakfast, where they were going shopping that afternoon, and what happened in their dates the night before.

Whenever I have a spontaneous negative reaction to something, I question that response. I grew up in a household where first impressions about things lasted -- if my parents pronounced something was bad, then it had to be without question. As an adult, I've made the decision that if I have a similar reaction, I try to look inward to determine what that reaction was about, and then look again at the object of my reaction.

So I went back to look at Twitter. And who did I find: Shaquille O'Neal (but not immediately).

First, the reason I went back to twitter was at the insistence of a couple of my friends. I got from the conversation that the quality of the 'conversation', or ongoing dialog that happens 24/7 on twitter, is directly related to the people that one becomes linked to. The fact that I can follow the Web page viewings of or 'listen to' the musings of Tim O'Reilly -- a titan in my eyes in my industry, or Guy Kawasaki, who has been another hero of mine for 20 years -- at any point in the day or night is just unprecedented. Being able to be in touch instantly with hundreds of other people I know and work with throughout the World, all broadcasting interesting news or Websites or thoughts in 140 character 'tweets', is a powerful new tool that is bringing people together more than ever before.

In fact, after two tweets, one or two follow-up emails, and one phone conversation, I hired a person -- all within a 72 hour period. My post after I had done so on twitter.com: http://twitter.com/joebachana/statuses/1023489753. Allow me to tie this back to where I started this long blog post, since you may find this helpful if you are looking for work.

I found the gentleman I hired through some keyphrase searches on topics that I regularly do research on. Semantic technologies, Drupal, Web content management, and so forth. I have dozens of them and they are terms I use whenever I have downtime to do research and mull over concepts and trends. In any event, the fellow's name kept coming up on a number of posts, and I was able to click past the posts to work he had done on the Web as well as see that he was connected with important people in the industry and those I respect.

The fellow did send me his resume, but I had already made my mind up about him before even viewing it. In essence, I knew a good deal of the body of his work by looking at it on various sites across the Web, had already 'heard' his voice by tracking back on his twitter posts and his blog, and already knew what people were saying about him.

Discovery of the resource, validation of the person's capabilities, and 'reference' check.

I'm not saying I didn't phone screen or do other kinds of checks to ascertain that he wasn't a mass murderer (which he or anyone might be that you hire, by the way -- you certainly wouldn't see that factoid on a resume either). But from start to finish I was able to find out more about this person than I ever could from any resume I have ever gotten, and the exact cost of my sourcing him was $0.00.

What does that resource have that some of my buddies I refer to in paragraph 1 may not have: A personal brand that is being expressed widely over the World Wide Web.

The characteristics of a personal brand:

1. a Twitter account that is active and helpful and linked to hundreds if not thousands of other active and helpful people

2. a blog that is active and helpful

3. reference work throughout the Web, or minimally on a personal brand site

4. Active posts across the Web by the individual that demonstrate how he/she thinks on a wide range of subjects

I am quite sure there are numerous other factors to building a personal brand on the Web, and I am really hoping that some of the readers of this blog add their thoughts below in the comments section.

Now about Shaq. As it turns out, the Big Guy is also twittering. In the 3 weeks that I've been reading his tweets, I now realize that I had him all wrong. Shaq is bold and audacious, that is true. But as it turns out he shares the same life view as me, seize life and live it to its fullest. He is living large in many ways. Shaq is an immensely generous man. He has been tweeting, for instance, about a wildly whimsical African relief project he is working on to send millions of jars of peanut butter to the needy in that continent. So consider, he's not sending a pile of money, or satchels of food. He is trying to bring joy to millions of people who may have never had that first, wonderful experience of tasting peanut butter.

Shaq tweets about trying to convince Steve Nash to join twitter, about his comical distaste for his arch-enemy Kobe Bryant, about helping a guy push a car that stalled out, and about his interactions with other twitter users. In one case, he even called a stranger he met on twitter just to chat with him.

Shaq loves his fans and likes to reach out to them.

In the end, Shaq has a global brand that will last for decades beyond any of us are still on this Earth. However, what Shaq is doing by communicating using twitter.com is his 'voice' -- his thoughts, the way he views life, and what matters to him. The people that know Shaq personally surely knew all this already, but for the rest of us that will never meet him, this aspect of his persona IS what makes the Shaq 'brand' so unique and wonderful -- he is an authentic American hero.

So to the friends that are scrapping out there for work -- none of us are titans like Shaq, but we can be like him by expressing ourselves early and often on social networking platforms like twitter. By doing so, our voices might be heard, our authenticity and 'value' might be picked up, and when that happens, good things may come in the way of employment or other opportunities.

Posted at 10:40 am by Joseph Bachana

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