You might have seen the press release from last week, LinkedIn Europe have kicked off a Personal Branding initiative called the BrandYou campaign. LinkedIn has created a BrandYou ‘board’ from a number of thought leaders in this field to support the project. This includes Andrzej Moyseowicz, media and innovation director at Saatchi & Saatchi and John Woodward, global planning director at Publicis Worldwide.
Personal branding and LinkedIn
At Link Humans, we have experienced a surge in demand for personal branding on LinkedIn, particularly from small business owners and salespeople that know that their online reputation is vital to attracting and retaining customers. Most people have realized that LinkedIn is the first place you get checked out by people in their industry.
The facts
Personal branding is obviously not new but the fact that LinkedIn have clocked on to it is important as all users of the 85 million strong network (18 million in Europe) will be made aware of the benefits of personal branding and how it will help your career and business. The average UK user on LinkedIn makes £63,000 ($110,000) per year, which I think is a testament to the influence of its users and their strong brands.
What’s in it for LinkedIn?
Campaigns like these obviously stimulate more interest from passive users, I think we all know people (sometimes very intimately) that need to spruce up their profiles, connect with more folks and getting recommendations. The more active users LinkedIn can muster, the higher that company valuation will be for the planned IPO next year.
Is there a dedicated LinkedIn group for this?
We are all encouraged to join the BrandYou LinkedIn group which has a couple of thousand members at the moment, not too many live discussions going on but I expect there to be juicy debates coming up. There are plenty of other personal branding groups on LinkedIn, I find the Personal Brand Network to be the best at the moment.