It's Time to Turn Heads to YOU!

The Six Step Strategy:
 developing your personal brand online (based from SOCIAL MEDIA PR 2.0—THE NEXT GENERATION)

Step 1: Determine your objective: (this may include)

• Improve customer service

• Drive traffic to a site

• Crowdsourcing

• Audience feedback

• Announce a new campaign

• Drive brand awareness

• Introduce a new product

Step 2: Determine your audience’s aptitude:  “Sync up and listen very carefully to how they talk and what they’re interested in".  Because that’s how you’re going to reach them through social media marketing.”

Step 3: Carefully select your platforms and tools.  Don't be everything all at once; keep it simple...

Such as using Twitter for microblogging, photo sharing on Flickr, video sharing on YouTube and Vimeo. Widgets are wonderful—embeddable pieces of code that you create once, and people can pick it up and put it on their blog.  Also, pay special attention to iPhone apps, as they are increasingly being adopted by a wide range of  demographics.  "Choose what works for you and your audience.” 

Step 4: Avoid content overload—curate the most interesting pieces.  Creating your brand voice online, make sure to trim it all down. Oversaturating your audiences with information could cause them to shut you out altogether.  This means: selecting what’s best, most interesting and most useful in terms of business value.

Step 5: Empower your employees to build their personal brand.  If you don’t empower your staff and employees, no one is going to have any enthusiasm for the initiative.” Encourage your staff to become the face behind the business website’s official blogs, and, behind the business's website’s official blogs, and, more recently, Facebook page.  Blogs can be created for the website’s information on law, business and consulting careers, among others.

Step 6: Measure the initiative’ssuccess against your objectives.  Make sure you're not waisting your time on something that isn't working out as anticipated.  Building your brand is a working progress.  You learn from your mistakes, and the key is to keep growing in the right direction.

Remeber, the key to success is to always be the best in whatever it is you do!  Second most important thing is using the available resources around you...

Lidia Yadlos