Boost Your Professional Profile And Personal Brand – Online.

This morning, I had the pleasure of being a special guest on ‘Your Career Catalyst‘ Blogtalkradio with hosts Annemarie Cross and Keith Keller from Advanced Employment Concepts.

Listen to the show here.

One of the more pleasurable aspects of my work is disseminating ideas about the online sphere and things like radio interviews (and another upcoming event is the Inspecht HR Futures Conference on 26 February 2009 in Melbourne. I will be one of the speakers in the (the panel discussion with Michael Specht) are a fantastic opportunity to do this.

The broad topic of the show was regulating your professional brand online.  Once upon a time, preening one’s image was a matter of ducking out and grabbing a new pair of shoes, having a haircut; you know, physical stuff.

With the prevalence of online communication, making sure your online profile is in tip top shape is also important.  Don’t publish photos of yourself on the P15S.  Don’t make ridiculous sexist or racist comments on your profiles in Facebook and MySpace.  And while we’re on that, don’t join Facebook groups whose views may prove politically unsavory.  Make comments on blog sites (especially mine).  This is an excellent and subtle way of building your reputation as a person of knowledge in your field.

Point is, each of us should take control of our online branding.  Here I’m reminded of the story about Steve Irwin.  When he died, he didn’t own SteveIrwin.com.au.  Someone else did.  But Steve Irwin was a man with a very successful publicity network.  Why didn’t he own himself virtually?  One of the reasons is it’s taken a long time for the Internet to shed its reputation as a shady medium dealing mainly in porn.

Like the suburb you all have in your states, in Melbourne, for instance, it’s St Kilda, that used to be a hub for dodgy enterprises like prostitution and drugs, but makes good due to an influx of investment, the net’s still being forced to prove itself as viable contender in the publicity stakes.  There are those who remain wary of walking its streets for fear of how they’d say “no thanks, but I appreciate the offer” to a hooker.

As a person who was hanging out in the net’s streets when it was a metropolis for the exploited and mentally unwell, I can assure you of its rise to blue chip status.  It is already the primary tool for communication and for personal promotion.  Get ye to a real estate office and make a down payment today.