Personal Brand Management for the Cubicle Warrior

Personal Brand In the world of work, company loyalty towards the employee left the building a long time ago. I don’t think, with isolated exceptions, that anyone would disagree with that.

This also means that there is a need for Cubicle Warriors to establish good relationships with people both inside and outside the company so as to have a good information network about jobs, positions, and projects that could be worked. Some are better than others on this task and, while everyone agrees that they should be maintaining their relationships, I would suggest that there is a vast gap between what is needed and what is being done.

The need for networking got extended a bit with the concept of “Personal Brand Management.” Personal Brand Management essentially says that each of us, as business professionals, need to have a personal brand: what we uniquely bring to the marketplace of available work. And let’s face it: since each of us are competing to be the best person for a particular gig with everyone else on the planet, it makes good sense to have some sort of presence on the Internet that can uniquely explain all of this to potential employers.

Strategy is great, but execution is better for me. How does one go about portraying a personal brand on the Internet? I have a Scot Herrick (http://scotherrick NULL.com) personal page, but right now it simply points people to this blog and two others that I write for. It doesn’t really provide “Personal Brand Management.” However, that’s the site that should have the brand management baked into the site.

So I’ve been looking for some examples of how to build a personal brand page or two on the Internet. I hit the jackpot when Jason Alba over at JibberJobber (http://www NULL.jibberjobber NULL.com/blog/) posted his monthly You Get It (http://www NULL.jibberjobber NULL.com/blog/archives/354) awards for the month of January. In it, he profiles what a good number of people laid off at Jobster have for their personal branding out on the Internet. I’ve visited their sites and am now in the process of figuring out what to do with mine.

In an age of virtual everything, being able to speak with a potential employer and point to a personal branding site makes a lot of sense. Especially since I Google everyone I’m potentially going to hire. Wouldn’t you want that search to hit your personal branding site?

Me too.

Scot