LinkedIn and Self Branding – Creating your Digital Reputation

These days, everyone is a digital brand whether they want to be or not. A quick “vanity search” on Google will reveal where your digital footprint lies. However softly you have trodden there will still be marks all across the web. From hotel reviews to email addresses embedded in websites, from competition entries to corporate website profiles.

You can decide, once you have it set up, whether or not you want your LinkedIn profile to show in search results. If you do, then your LinkedIn profile page will come fairly high up the ranks in any name search of you.

This is a good thing. The next five to ten years will see digital reputation management become a hot topic. As with any kind of branding, you as brand guardian want to have final say in how the brand is managed. When the brand is you and your reputation is at stake then you will begin to realise how important pages like your LinkedIn profile are.

This page is your opportunity to define and display the essential selling points and characteristics of you to interested parties.

- You could update your status to show what your current project is at work and how well you are delivering it.
- You could share a link to news or piece of content that you have found useful.
- You could “like” someone else’s status or content thus showing yourself not just as participatory, but well learned.
- You could comment on discussions or news stories feeding through from groups you have joined.
- You could promote your blog feed via your LinkedIn. (Need we say that it should be an insightful business blog and not a “what I did this weekend” blog?)

All of these are great ways to promote “brand you” via LinkedIn. It is not just for current contacts or employers that building a strong self brand will be beneficial. It will be good for you to do for future opportunities.

As LinkedIn becomes more and more embedded in the business environment, employers are turning to it for information on potential employees. Whether it is for this job or the next, maintaining a smart LinkedIn presence will benefit your career and in the process be part of how you create a strong personal brand online.

Next time, we look at how you can use LinkedIn as a key networking tool. Nothing beats pressing the flesh but LinkedIn allows you to do this with a targeting you will never have come across before.