Building an Online Brand in 3-Steps

More and more people are starting to realize the power of having a 'personal' online presence and building a personal brand. I have been asked a lot about how I built my brand so I thought I would repeat that conversation here on my blog. However in the context of marketing, I think we also need to spend more time with our executives and helping them to build their online brand which will only further the business relationships that they already have. There are a lot of things you can do to build an online brand but it doesn't need to be a cumbersome activity and ultimately I think there are three main steps that will make the biggest impact:

1. LinkedIn: I've been a LinkedIn user since 2000. But it wasn't until 2004 that I saw the the biggest benefit on how to leverage the site. Coming from the very fluid start-up environment and having changed bosses 3 times in one year and co-workers constantly I needed a way to capture recommendations from the people I worked with. I now manage this very closely; if I change positions or if someone I work closely with changes positions I will ask them to write a brief recommendation on my profile while their memory of working with me is still fresh. This helps build my brand with credible third party resources. It's also a great way to build and manage your professional network.

Another way to use LinkedIn to build a brand - although I haven't taken advantage of this - is to participate in the Answers forum. This allows you to provide your input on topics you have an expertise in and your 'answers' are tied back to your profile so you build on the credibility of your expertise overtime.

2. Blog: The biggest brand builder for me has come from my blogging efforts - but this is also the most time consuming. I started blogging just over a year ago in May 2007 and started seeing the benefits after just a few posts. Since I enjoy blogging and the topic I cover I don't consider it 'work' but that is how others view it. So, if you know you can't commit to writing and maintaining a blog don't bother, there are other options for you...

Blogging is about joining the conversation by having my own blog that just means at times I'm also starting a conversation but a lot of the time I am still reading and commenting on other blogs. You can still build a brand and expertise in your area by finding the appropriate blogs and joining the conversation by commenting. Usually when you comment on a blog you have the ability to add a cross link, if you have a blog yourself you obviously want to link to that but if you don't, your LinkedIn profile is a good place to link to so that people can learn about who you are and get a sense of your authority/expertise level.

3. Facebook: I haven't been on Facebook as long - I think it's just under a year now and to be honest I don't use FaceBook to it's full potential either. I do have my profile developed and I do use it to connect with my professional network and the nature of Facebook allows me to interact with my network at a more personal level. However there are many groups within Facebook that would allow me to build my brand further if I was an active participant in these communities - I choose not to participate because of lack of time and instead participate in the blogosphere conversations but again if you don't want to commit to blogging this is a less cumbersome way of joining the conversation and ultimately building your online brand.

Pulse on the Blogosphere

Here are a few recent posts that I think are worth sharing:

• Matt Dickerson tells you everything you need to know about personas in his post "Developing Personas for Marketing Strategy" - Cisco's Martin Hardee's gives a inside look at Cisco's approach to personas in this post "How we Design for Cisco.com"
  Charlene Li has an awesome post that every company should read about how to transition your traditional marketing group to a social media marketing group in her post "Turning radicals into revolutionaries: the key to kick-starting your social strategy"
• Tamar Weinberg has a collection of upcoming web 2.0 events on a single post - very useful - "Mashable’s Guide to Upcoming Web 2.0 Conferences and Events" (BTW - I plan on attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco April 22-25)
• Greg Verdino has a nice post "An Orgy of Infographics" which great visuals and interesting stats worth checking out.
• Jeremiah Owyang tells outlines his 'Essential Twitter Tools" - a must read for any Twitterer.

Why Everyone Should be on LinkedIn

I am participating in the WOMEN Unlimited leadership program and have found myself becoming a LinkedIn advocate. I think that everyone should have a profile on LinkedIn. People have asked me what the value is if they are not looking for a job. To that I simply tell them how I use LinkedIn:

• It's a convenient place to store my most current resume. I update it as my career changes so when I am ready for the next opportunity I don't have to go hunting in my folder list for the last doc I created.
• It's a great way to collect, track, and present referrals. When you are ready to make a move, your new position will typically ask for three references. Now I can also provide a link to my LinkedIn profile which includes a number of endorsements that I've collected throughout my career. I maintain this vigilantly - every time someone I work closely with moves out of my group or if I move to a new position I will ask for endorsements to keep my profile fresh.
• Networking is a key benefit. Just about everyone is on LinkedIn and when you live in the valley people are moving to new positions all the time. LinkedIn offers a convenient way to build and stay in touch with your professional network.
• If you're at all interested in building an online presence, LinkedIn is a good start since your information can be searchable. Plus you'll get a vanity link (ie. www.linkedin.com/in/lasandrabrill) that you can reference in bios or in your resume which also makes your personal brand that much more 2.0.

For more uses and benefits of LinkedIn check out Maureen Caplan Gray's post which also provides examples of how she leverages LinkedIn to build her business.

Cisco Connected Life Contest Benefits from the Social Web

This is me exhaling. The Connected Life Contest I wrote about in an earlier post is in it's final days and we've already exceeded our project goal by 250%. The social media tactics we used showed a steady flow of entries almost immediately. Next time I'd like to spend more time building an online personality for the character of the campaign and being more active in the social web.

Overall it's been a successful campaign and I am most proud of the blogger reactions to Cisco's first ever Social Media Release:

PR Squared
"The Cisco release is great – it’s straightforward, easy to understand, contains lotsa links to additional content (including a video featuring the band members from KISS!), a YouTube community site link, an RSS feed, a Digg This link, etc. "

Agency Next PR
This ought to tell you a couple of things about the new media era in which some of us now live. Cisco Systems — you know, that company that is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet — is having a contest to gather the best new connectivity ideas out there from ordinary, imaginative people in the big wide world.

Shel Holtz' Blog
The Cisco release hits most of the right notes with news highlights and facts, tags and keywords, links, quotes, multimedia, contact information, an RSS feed for all company news, a trackback URL and a link to the traditional version of the release. (Evidently, it wasn’t too time-consuming to produce both.) A purpose-build del.icio.us page would have been a nice addition, but overall, a very nice bit of work from Cisco Systems.

The Podcaster
What Cisco have done is allow the online community as well as the media to have access to a large array of additional information through the links. (I am not a journalist but I have Google Alerts and other tools helping me monitor the development of social media and online community marketing so I became aware of this).

Looks like Cisco is taking the red pill too and will be digging into the rabbit hole deeper with an announcement coming next week. I can't wait!

Building an Online Personality

When it comes to building an online personality we can all learn from the success of Amanda Congdon. This 'badass white girl' has her own daily 3-minute web-based newscast with an audience of more than 300K visitors per day (that's more viewers than some cable TV shows)!

How does she do it? I think the secret is a little bit of humor, a willingness to be edgy but most importantly, a candor that is more Daily Show than 20/20. This takes me back to the bible of social marketing where you can find validation here, “learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about 'listening to customers.' They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf."

This is where the younger generation trumps the older - they haven't been brainwashed with corporate talk and forced to go through an 'approval' process before anything leaves the corporate walls. Up until now we have all been trained to keep a zipped lip when it comes to any flaw or inaccuracy in our messaging but in a transparent world that simply doesn't work. The truth is coming out whether we want it to or not – better to be in that conversation than outside of it.


Adjusting to this new culture won't happen overnight but it will is happening. Denise Caruso, author of Intervention and speaker at Supernova says it best - 'social media is risky but it's riskier not to try.'

Who let the engineers out?

Going back to the Sun / Java FX example shared at Supernova where the product wasn't all that it was promised to be in the eyes of the developer community, Sun handled it right by letting the engineers join these conversations. They were able to admit that they agreed the product wasn't where it needed to be and were able to also share their roadmap and explain positioning. It soon went from a conversation between angry customers and a shifty vendor to a conversation between two people and miraculously the conversation became civil again - wow this stuff really works.

Do you think the rest of the corporate world can learn from that example and let loose like Sun did? I am still hopeful...