Old self portrait

That’s one of the whole points of me starting up this blog.

I’ve read many cases for personal branding using all that new media has to offer. It’s a way to put yourself out there, and can act as an online resume and as a showcase of what you’re capable of. It can both display your achievements, as well as highlight the skills and personality traits that you can’t quantify in a standard resume. In today’s competitive job markets, having an easily accessible online profile will give you an extra edge. Plus, it is becoming more and more common for employers to Google potential employees, just to check up on the kind of person they are.

Reputation is become a massive commodity, and the whole practice of Personal Branding is an attempt to control that commodity.

These are among all the many reasons and many ways new media and career coaches will give for a person to start a blog, join Facebook and Twitter, as well as one of the many social networking services. And I’m sure that in your online travels, you have heard about the need for personal branding at least once.

But what are my own reasons for personal branding?

Of course, keeping an attractive online profile in order to give myself an edge in the job market is an important reason for me. I am working at my current firm on a flexible basis, and whilst the workload I’m getting is steadily increasing, I am also open to new opportunities that will help me grow and take me to that next step in my career.

I want to freelance as a writer, and I need to take time out soon to sort that out. But I understand that as a freelancer, having an online point of contact isn’t just useful; it’s necessary in today’s world.

But to me, personal branding is not just something to try out because it’s “cool” and the “next in thing”. I’ve been blogging since 2004 under the pseudonyms Cynical-Idealist and Atlasya, and over the course of five or so years, I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with people from all walks of life online. I’ve watched online trends come and go, and have hopped on countless bandwagons since my foray into the big blue nowhere.

I have become a net native.

And like most people my age, social media and social media has almost become second nature to us. It is what we grew up with, and it’s what we have come to accept as the norm. In the olden days, there were pubs and clubs for networking. And in our current generation, these offline networking places have integrated with the online, connected world. Networking (another word for making friends and mutually beneficial relationships imo) has always been the norm for people since time immemorial. “Social media” and “new media” is where and how we do it, right here, right now, in our very time.

The next big thing, not

While Twitter and Facebook have constantly been in the media as the next big thing, I won’t hold my breath on them, for they are just some of many that come and go. What determines whether or not they stay or go is how they will manage to stay relevant to us in the coming years.

And the same is true for any brand, whether they be corporate or personal.

How can we stay relevant to the people we’re targeting? How can we put ourselves out there? How can we slowly grow our online reputation?

This blog and everything else that goes hand in hand in it is going to my own personal experiment in personal branding. In today’s working world, it has almost become essential to have your own personal brand, both to sell your skills to find work, as well as to keep work.

How am I going to do it?

What I intend to do is to update here regularly, have good and relevant content, and to just be myself. I have my interests and my niches; it’s just a matter of finding the words to put them down.

On top of that, I’ve integrated my Facebook and Twitter, so it so saves me the hassle of double posting. I don’t join enough social networks to warrant the use of a social networking client just yet, because I don’t believe in hopping onto a service unless I absolutely have to. That gives me less unnecessary online clutter to deal with.

I want to be a good writer, and I have been quite out of practise lately. This blog is also a massive practise run for me as well. I need to get myself to the point where my words have much clarity again, and where every single sentence is a means to the entire end that I’ve crafted my piece towards. My writing is not there yet today, but given time, one day I might actually write something here that I can sit back and be amazed at.

At the same time, this is also my journey in self-discovery. I have a pretty good idea of what I’m good at to date, but with every new job and challenge that I undertake, I discover something new about my limits and capabilities. And writing this blog will be no different.

So the gist of my personal branding exercise will be to identify my strengths, and then to package it well to the world.

Personally, I believe that if I have good content and if I have enough energy to maintain and grow what little I have online, this will be a successful experiment. But until then, I shall have to keep at it and do all the basics of personal branding, and watch and wait to see how it all pans out.

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