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Why Twitter is the Perfect Personal Branding Tool

There are lots of definitions of your personal brand, sometimes I think there are as many as there are personal branding coaches. The definition I like to use is that your personal brand is who you are and what you do. Keeping it simple in other words.

I also think that your personal brand (your true brand), is who you are and what you do at work, on the weekends, at the team building off-site day, with your stamp collecting club and with your kids. Basically, you only have one brand and this is a combination of your professional and personal lives.

When I give talks on social media to different audiences, most people will agree that Facebook is where you hang out with friends and family, you share photos, videos and socialize. So this isn’t really the place for your full personal brand as it doesn’t include your professional self.

LinkedIn is considered the virtual trade show of social networks, a place for professionals to meet and do business. Does this mean your personal brand will be fully represented on LinkedIn? Not really, most users fail to project any sort of personality on LinkedIn and see it more as a place to keep a professional identity.

Enter Twitter – this is where I think your real personal brand shines through. Everything you do on Twitter is out in the open (unless you have specifically locked down your account).

Let me explain.

1. Your bio

This is really the brand that you want to project. It has to be succinct and explain what you do in a couple of lines. Most people will include both job titles as well as what team they support or how proud they are to be a father of two. Then there’s the photo of course, on Twitter you want something that represents your whole brand if that makes sense.

2. The people you follow / that follow you

This demonstrates who you have connected with and whom you get inspiration from. This will typically be a combination of friends, industry leaders, celebrities, news sources and others. Looking at this I’d be able to get a snapshot of your brand, as defined by the people around you.

3. Your content

When I was a child, I wanted to read minds. Now when I have a Twitter account, I can. The fact is that most people love to put content out on Twitter for several reasons, it could be to promote your blog, to show that you read the Harvard Business Review, to just tell people what you had for breakfast. You will be judged by your content on Twitter, ideally you want to put out useful information sprinkled with a smaller dose of personal PR.

4. How you interact

How you interact with other users will say loads about your brand. For instance, do you say ‘thank you’ when you get a blog post retweeted? Do you reciprocate a #followfriday recommendation? Do you answer questions from users with 3 followers? You can learn a lot about someone by looking at how they treat others.

5. How much time you spend on there

If you are in a full-time job, let’s say you are an accountant, you probably don’t want to be tweeting every 5 minutes. If you’re a social media [insert title here], you can get away with it. As Twitter is wide open, a potential client or employer can have a quick look at your feed and they might just think you’re wasting precious time tweeting.

This is why I believe Twitter is the perfect personal branding tool; it is where your social and professional worlds meet. You could argue that Google Plus is another place for this, just not as prolific yet.

Do you use Twitter for personal branding? Please let me know in the comments!

This post was part of a blogathon over at Peter Sterlacci’s excellent blog.

photo by: Wonderlane

Filed Under: Personal Branding, Twitter Tagged With: personal brand, Twitter

My Top 15 Tweets of Last Year Based on Crowdbooster Stats

I was checking my Twitter stats on Crowdbooster today and found that some tweets were very popular in terms of retweets and replies. Why not list them here I thought, you might like one or two. One thing is for sure, humour goes a long way as does wit and wisdom.

Here goes my most popular tweets of 2011:

1. Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like. – Will Rogers

2. My most frequent lie: I’ve read and agree to the Terms and Conditions.

3. You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

4. Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

5. There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little. – Jackie French Koller

6. I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

7. A résumé should be like a skirt, long enough to cover the basics, short enough to keep them interested…

8. An Apple a day keeps Windows away.

9. Just read an ad: “Social Media Trainer – 20yrs experience”. Is that dog years?

10. I love traveling and have been to far-flung places like Sri Lanka, Brazil, South Africa, Malaysia and South London.

11. Too many Twitter bios include: “Opinions are my own” – well who else’s would they be?

12. Warning: Dates in calendar are closer than they appear.

13. So tomorrow is 11/11/11, or 11/11/11 if you’re American.

14. PR company emailed me to say their client is launching a ‘viral campaign’ How viral can it be if they need a PR to tell me about it?

15. This year will be remembered as the year we finally found a solution to every problem in the world: the INFOGRAPHIC.

Related and possibly overlapping: Top 25 One-Liner Jokes According to My Twitter Followers.

Image credit FriiSpray

Filed Under: Monthly, Twitter Tagged With: Annual, Popular, Twitter

How Sodexo Deals with Negative Twitter Feedback

Over at the Link Humans blog we recently wrote a case study about Sodexo’s social recruiting success in the US. The piece was very well received, especially by Sodexo themselves who tweeted, commented and shared it. In case you don’t know of the company, Sodexo is a one of the largest food services and facilities management companies in the world, with 380,000 employees, representing 130 nationalities, present on 34,000 sites in 80 countries (thank you Jimmy Wales).

They are also very advanced on social media, particularly for employer branding and talent acquisition. So it’s perfectly normal to be tweeting with their VP for talent acquisition, who is Arie Ball.

On Twitter you have to expect the unexpected and when we were tweeting about how great Sodexo are, someone jumped into the conversation and tweeted: “I know people at Sodexo being treated like garbage. But it’s not the one with a degree ”.

I saw that and thought oooops, best to leave that conversation now. It obviously doesn’t look great and I was wondering if Sodexo would acknowledge the message which was public on Twitter.

Sure enough, about 12 hours later (reverse order in the screenshot here from Hootsuite) probably due to time zones, Arie Ball replies with “We value every one of our employees and would like to know more – please send us a note [email address]“. I translated that from texting language by the way.

I thought this was rather impressive, here you have a Vice President of a huge company taking their time to reply to a random Twitter user halfway across the world. Arie Ball’s reply looks very genuine and I don’t know what will happen next but judging by this response, I’d expect this to be dealt with properly.

The lesson here is that when you are a very transparent company and you have chosen to use public channels such as social media for your communications, you have to be ready to deal with the negatives. You open yourself to criticism but as long as you stay professional and actually take the time to listen to people you impress third party folks like myself. Indeed, by demonstrating this responsiveness and maturity, you even get a blog post written about it!

Has this ever happened to your company? How did you deal with it?

Image credit Mike Baird

Filed Under: Monthly, Social Recruiting, Twitter Tagged With: Twitter

Top 25 Oneliner Jokes According to My Twitter Followers

I love a short joke, oneliners are to jokes what haiku is to poetry. I like to tweet oneliners every now and then, if you follow me on Twitter you know this. Some of these tweets go down well and others get the tumbleweed response. This list is based on the oneliners that fared best on Twitter for me (most retweets and comments), so they have been tried and tested. Feel free to steal them and use yourself, just like I have stolen them from other people on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and everywhere else on the internet.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.
My most frequent lie: I’ve read and agree to the Terms and Conditions.
Nobody’s a virgin… Life screws us all.
Don’t marry a tennis player – love means nothing to them.
A jury consists of 12 people who determine which client has the better lawyer.
Late night TV is very educational. It teaches you that you should have gone to bed earlier.
If at first you don’t succeed, you’ll get a lot of free advice from folks who didn’t succeed either.
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.
Did you know that age is an issue of mind over matter? If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Dolphins are so smart that within a few weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand on the very edge of the pool and throw them fish.
A résumé should be like a skirt, long enough to cover the basics, short enough to keep them interested…
I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
A gym is not designed to make you feel instantly better about yourself. If it wanted to, it would be a bar.
An Apple a day keeps Windows away.
What do you call a chav in a box? Innit.
What do you call an eskimo chav? Innuit.
What the average man wants to get out of his new car is the kids.
Never go to bed angry, stay awake and plot your revenge.
Warning: Dates in calendar are closer than they appear.
Girls are like roads, more the curves, more the dangerous they are.
Before you insult a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you insult him, you’ll be a mile away, and have his shoes.
Did you ever notice that the evening news is where they begin with ‘Good evening’, and then proceed to tell you why it isn’t.
A word to the wise ain’t necessary – it’s the stupid ones that need the advice.
Give a man a fish and he has food for a day. Teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him for the entire weekend.

Do you have more oneliners to add to the list? Please let me know in the comments or just tweet me!

More wisdom over at the Top 10 Personal Branding Quotes from People Who Made It.

photo by: callie callie jump jump

Filed Under: Monthly, Twitter Tagged With: fun, gags, humor, jokes, one-liners, quotes, Twitter