Your Life Online

So much of our lives these days is recorded online, whether we want it to be or not. Of course if we are hoping to develop a marketable band online in order to get work or to build or maintain a career, it is important that our online identities (and our brands) are consistent with the professional messages we hope to send. This can pose a challenge given the permanence of Internet posts. Many young people—and even old people—today have posted to social media sites for years. Over that time, they may have uploaded thousands of photos, videos, and updates, some of a highly personal nature. While it is essential to separate your personal social media accounts from those you use professionally, it is also important to know that there is no real way to keep an online identity completely secret or inaccessible to those who may want to see it. Although we may change our privacy settings to ensure that only friends see what we post to Facebook, Facebook and other social media companies frequently change their privacy policies, and if someone can see what you post, you can assume that anyone can if they really want to.

According to a 2013 CareerBuilder survey, 39 percent of companies use social media to research job candidates. Of the hiring managers surveyed, 43 percent said they had found something a candidate had posted to social media that prevented them from hiring the candidate. Half of the posts in question were provocative or inappropriate photos or information; 48 percent of the posts in question referred to drinking or illegal drug use; and 33 percent of the posts involved the candidate making accusations about a former employer. Other red-flag posts involved discriminatory comments about sex, race or religion; lies about professional qualifications; and simply poor communication skills. At the same time, a thoughtfully created social media profile can also help improve a candidate’s chance of getting hired. Among the positives hiring managers surveyed identified in a candidate’s social media profiles were professionalism, creativity, a wide range of interests, a friendly personality, strong communication skills, and references for the candidate.³

Happily for job seekers, finding out how you appear online is as easy as searching for yourself online. Although several companies these days charge a fee to check and even improve the way you appear online, for most of us, a quick Google search is all it takes to determine how we appear online. If unprofessional images or posts by or about you appear in your search, you can either take them down or ask whoever posted them to remove them. But sometimes it can be more complicated than that. For those with lots of erroneous, misleading or just plain damaging information online, and for those with commercial sites that need constant monitoring, subscribing to a service like Reputation.com could save time in the long run. While companies can more easily resolve your online problems, they do not have any special access to your online information. They are simply more effective and efficient at resolving your online problems because they have more practice, time, and resources. You may not have hours to spend researching how you can get an online image of you removed from Facebook for good.

Build and Protect your Reputation

These days the key to success as an independent journalist is to build—and grow—a positive reputation. The only way to develop a reputation as a journalist is to get your work—and your byline—out there. Write for blogs, online news sites, and other publications. Use social media to build audiences of followers. Write and produce content regularly—both for others and for yourself. Make sure you have an online presence—and not just on social media. Build a professional website to showcase your work. And try to avoid creating brand confusion—and diminishing your reputation—by mixing your personal and professional lives online.

For instance, unless you are a columnist or critic whose personality is an important part of your reporting, do not use your personal Facebook or Twitter account to conduct research, make professional connections or promote stories. If you are a news reporter, you know that objectivity—along with fairness, balance, and accuracy—helps form the basis of your reputation. Because personal social media accounts are unlikely to exhibit this kind of professionalism, strongly consider limiting your communications to only the most neutral topics (and purging old posts that don’t exhibit the level of professionalism for which you would like to be known) or using privacy settings to limit access to only family and maybe your closest friends. Remember that all it takes is a single poorly worded comment to mar even the most well-established journalism career.

Because the barriers that once separated journalism from public relations have largely eroded in the era of Internet news, beginning journalists should not rule out opportunities to work and provide content for companies and organizations. These days it is not uncommon for journalism students to take internships that require them to write public relations or marketing content. If formal internships aren’t available, consider volunteering to write or provide other content for an organization you admire. The work you create will be a nice addition to your portfolio, plus your efforts could lead to a job.

Polish your Elevator Pitch

Elevator pitches have become a business cliché in recent years. While few entrepreneurs ever get the opportunity to pitch themselves or their product in an actual elevator, there are at least a couple essential lessons to be learned from the idea. First, it is essential to keep in mind that most people who are important enough to pitch are probably also too busy to stop and listen to a long, meandering pitch. No matter how good your idea may be, if you can’t express it in the span of a typical elevator ride (usually thirty to sixty seconds), you might as well not make it. Either your idea is not focused enough for potential backers to hear or you lack the communication skills to clearly explain it. The good news is that both problems can be remedied through additional consideration, planning, and practice presenting your ideas.

Figure 10.2 Branding expert Karen Kang’s highly focused elevator pitch worksheet. From brandingpays.com.

There are countless websites that offer tips for honing elevator pitches. Among the most common tips are recommendations to make the pitch quick and to the point (but not hurried), personalized to the audience’s needs and interests, and compelling but not complete. In other words, you want to pique the listeners’ interest enough that they want to hear more. Be confident but natural, and don’t come on so strong that the listener is turned off or will not be likely to follow up.

While most elevator pitches are about specific ideas such as requests for startup investment, an entrepreneurial journalist’s pitch may be more general. Instead of having a polished request for funding ready to recite at the first opportunity, the journalist may instead have a short pitch for themselves and the services they offer. This should not be delivered as a sales pitch. Rather, it should be a somewhat scripted but thoughtful response to the question: “What do you do?” or “What is your profession?” Particularly when you’re an entrepreneur, being asked what you do for a living is an opportunity for networking and free publicity. You can’t afford to miss an opportunity to get your brand message out there. The more clearly and quickly you can explain what you do while establishing or reinforcing your brand, the more memorable you will prove, and the greater the likelihood a simple chance encounter will lead to work.

Build your Online Portfolio

While general interest blogs now face more competition than ever and it can be challenging to attract readers to text-heavy content online, entrepreneurial journalists should have their own websites to serve as both their online calling card and a digital resume or CV. The form this website takes may differ depending on whether you have a full-time employer or plan to remain self-employed. Anyone who wants to work in the digital marketplace must make it easy for potential clients and employers to find them online. There are many options now available for building portfolio and resume sites. LinkedIn is the most popular professional network. It offers excellent exposure to your resume details, as well as opportunities to show off connections from which you may want to solicit professional endorsements.

The portfolio site VisualCV allows users to plug in resume text and drag and drop blocks of content within a template. Users can upload images and documents, and embed video. VisualCV also provides users with analytics so that they can track views and downloads of their CV, and determine how visitors are finding their site. VisualCV makes it easy to share your CV via social networks.

In Chapter 9, we discuss the basics of creating a WordPress site. Although WordPress is known as a blogging platform, it is also a great tool for creating websites. If you are comfortable with basic website creation (and you should be, although you don’t need to know HTML or advanced coding), you may consider simply creating a website to host your resume and professional portfolio. Regardless of what tool you use to build your online resume, there are a few basic items you want to make sure to include. In addition to resume basics such as contact information, education, and job history, you also want to include a professional headshot. You should include links to social media and sample professional projects that showcase your work. It is also a good idea to include a short personal video in which you introduce yourself to potential employers or clients.

Here are a few basics to keep in mind as you create your online resume:

• Remember your brand. Keep in mind that consistency is key. Make sure your online resume or CV, or your professional website, reflects your main branding statement. Include a brief bio statement that reinforces your brand. Try to distinguish yourself through memorable details that don’t diminish your professionalism. It can be a fine line.
• Focus on value. Although your primary motivation probably is to find work, remember that your audience is primarily interested in meeting their own needs. That means you need to focus on what value you can provide to your audience.
• Include links. Link to your professional websites, social media accounts, and professional organizations with which you are affiliated. As always, make sure any outside sites or platforms represent you in a professional way that is consistent with your branding message.
• Solicit testimonials. Ask former and current bosses and supervisors to write short recommendations or testimonials about your work. Also ask if you can feature their words on your website.
• Consider a professional blog. If you don’t already have a blog that is well focused on a specific topic on which you provide content that has value to a targeted audience, consider starting one. Are you an expert on branding? On social media? On making presentations? Bring value to your audiences by blogging instructional content on your area of expertise. Post polls, games, and other interactive content to boost engagement and promote interactivity. Encourage visitors to your site to sign up for your e-newsletter, let them decide how often they want to receive the newsletter, then send it out regularly with a catchy headline that aligns with your brand and one or two brief items that provide value for your readers. Host a poll on your website asking questions your readers would want to know, then distribute the results in your newsletter.
• Distribute a newsletter. No longer a black-and-white folded piece of desktop-published legal paper updating the latest happenings in your department, book club or sewing circle, today’s electronic newsletters can be created and distributed through free services
• such as Mail Chimp (mailchimp.com) and low-cost services such as Constant Contact (constantcontact.com). Mail Chimp’s free account allows users to create electronic mailing lists and create attractive newsletters using their templates, then distribute them to targeted subscriber lists. You can segment your subscribers to send different messages to different groups. You can also check Mail Chimp’s reports on the results of each campaign, which let you know who opened your newsletter, how many people clicked on links in the newsletter, and what countries they were from. These are all available with a free account. With a paid account, you can send automated emails customized for users who have subscribed to a newsletter, clicked or opened the newsletter or bought something through the newsletter.
• Share any presentations or original research you have conducted on the topic as well as links to other relevant research. Remember that Internet users love “Top Ten” (or “Top Five” or “Top Six” or “Top Eight”) lists. These terms are likely to get picked up by search engines and drive more traffic to your site. Never forget that readers have millions of choices when browsing the Web. You need to provide some value to make them want to visit your site, and to keep providing value if you want them to come back.

Figure 10.3 Another handout Karen Kang provides to help others articulate their personal brand. From brandingpays.com.

Personal Branding for Professionals

Just like sports drinks and magazines, entrepreneurial journalists need clear, consistent, powerful brands. Though the idea of branding a person may take some getting used to, it actually makes a lot of sense in the era of entrepreneurship. In fact, personal professional branding has always made sense. People simply didn’t think as much about it in the past, when careers and even jobs were more permanent, and employees didn’t feel the need to keep current resumes. These days, regardless of the field but particularly in journalism, people change jobs frequently. They even change careers. It is not uncommon to launch startups or do freelance or contract work. The mobility of today’s global job market underscores the need to not only keep your job skills current but to also maintain your contacts, create a strong professional identity, and learn how to effectively distinguish and promote that identity or brand.

Just like a product without a reputation or a clear brand identity, a person without a brand will likely get passed over for jobs in favor of people who know what special value they can offer potential employers. Since most people now use the Internet to apply for jobs, hiring managers can face a daunting task sifting through the applications of dozens, or maybe hundreds, or possibly even thousands of qualified applicants. Without a clear brand to distinguish her, even a highly qualified candidate could easily be overlooked.

I experienced this first-hand years ago when I served on a committee to select members of a student staff to work in the newsroom of a prominent journalism organization’s annual conference. It was a highly competitive selection process with hundreds of applications for just twenty newsroom spots. Selecting newsroom staff was particularly tough because there were so many qualified applicants. Most of the journalism students who applied demonstrated high competency in all the essential media skills. They could write. They could edit. They could shoot and edit photos and video. Many wrote blogs. Some had campus radio or TV shows. Several had served as interns at prestigious news organizations. Rare was the application that showed a clear lack of ability. Among the majority who were highly qualified, few were clearly distinct. One had interned at a news outlet in the Middle East. Another was an older student who’d had a long career in a different field. Still another had a minor in public relations, which was unusual for journalism students at the time.

After the newsroom staff was selected, one of those who did not make the final cut emailed to ask why. After all, she had earned high grades at an Ivy League university. She had skills and experience in all the key areas of multimedia journalism. She even had her own blog. In other words, she was an excellent candidate. And so were dozens of her peers. But despite her excellent credentials, there was nothing particular about this student that stood out. She had no brand, no distinguishing skills or specialties that helped her stand apart from her peers. In a global journalism marketplace, it is no longer good enough to merely have all the necessary skills. You need to bring something else to the table; you need a unique brand.

“Bake the cake, then ice it,”⁴ wrote branding expert Karen Kang, author of Branding Pays and a former journalist. By this, Kang meant that professionals need to deliver all their profession’s essential skills (the cake), but they also need a little something extra (the icing), things like personality, likeability, and communication skills that bring a potential employer or client more than just a competent employee or consultant. Kang, who helps individuals and companies improve their brands, outlines her entire strategy in Branding Pays, which you can learn more about on her website, brandingpays.com.

What is your Brand?

Although it doesn’t necessarily need to appear anywhere in print, your personal brand is something you should be able to put into words—preferably a single sentence. This may be an easier process for those in other professions than it is for journalists, whose personalities are closely associated with their work. Although journalism has traditionally been about fading into the background while reporting facts, the Internet has helped lift the curtain a bit on journalists. In a world where audiences are accustomed to interacting with journalists, and many journalists have their own personal and professional websites and social media accounts, pretending they have no personal lives or opinions that could possibly skew their interpretation of events is not only naive, but it is also misleading. If the public didn’t believe it before, they certainly believe it now: Journalists are people, and their followers need to know who they are before they know how to interpret their stories.

How might a journalist brand herself today? Instead of using branding templates to create jargon-heavy sentences for the tops of resumes, journalists should consider what makes them unique in their field and what special something they can provide that few of their peers can. For instance, a reporter who works in south Texas might brand herself as a bilingual political reporter with connections on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. A reporter who once worked as a statistician or auditor might brand himself as a skilled data journalist. Likewise, a reporter who lived or worked in various countries might brand herself a specialist in global journalism. Journalists without such clear distinctions may distinguish themselves in smaller ways, by mastering specific skill sets such as audio or video editing, Web design or search engine optimization.

Interview: A Conversation with Karen Kang, Author of Branding Pays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand and Founder and CEO of Branding Pays LLC, a Corporate and Personal Branding Company

What is your journalism background?

I got my master’s in journalism from Boston University, and I worked as a newspaper journalist at the Oregonian in Portland, OR, as well as the South Middlesex News covering all the communities surrounding Boston.

Figure 10.4 Karen Kang.

How can journalists and other communication professionals work together in ways they might not have been able to previously?

Journalism and public relations used to be two separate areas. There’s a lot of blending now. It’s fine in that many of the PR specialists today have to be adept at social media, and the media are very content and engagement driven. The skills you learn in journalism are very applicable and needed in terms of social media. I have worked with a number of individuals employed by public relations firms, but actually their whole role is in social media and developing the online brand for companies they work for. But in order to have a following on social media—especially in a business setting—you have to have good content, and that content has to be focused so you’re known for something or so that brand is known for something. To become a domain expert and then be able to use marketing skills to focus that content so that it’s attractive and understandable to your target audience—that is really key. Truly, if you want to have a sustainable brand you need to deliver something of value. In this day and age, it’s either education content around that—education about your domain area—or entertainment.

How has the Internet changed the journalist’s role?

If you look at today’s bloggers who are well known, they generally have a point of view. When I was a newspaper journalist, we would always strive for objectivity and not insert our opinion into the story, but today part of bloggers’ appeal is that they’re human beings with personalities and a point of view. If you’re going to have a blog and it’s under your name, you’re pretty much required to find your own voice, understand what your personality is, understand what your market is and what they’re seeking from you. Write and blog and engage accordingly.

What about those who blog or write for companies or organizations?

It’s a special skill to be able to write for an organization and keep the organization’s core values and brand in mind as you blog, perhaps under your name but for that organization. You have to ascribe to the core values of the brand you’re representing, but still have your own individual personality. Very few people want to read vanilla blogs, corporate blogs, and the corporate voice. They want to hear an individual voice but they understand that that individual voice is still representing the company.

What skills should journalism graduates have as they enter the job market?

They should have strong social media skills. They should know how to navigate the various platforms and know which platforms are the best for what kind of content and what kind of engagement, and if they are going to go into business for themselves, they definitely need to know how to brand themselves. I very much encourage them to own their own real estate online and brand it with their name and be consistent in that name. Sometimes people use nicknames on one platform and their full name on another platform and their middle initial with their full name on another platform, and you don’t know if they’re all the same person. My advice to people is: Don’t make your audience work. Don’t make a person work who may want to advocate for you and is so mixed up because you have too many online properties with different names or different brands. Your name is your brand, so figure out what name you want to be using consistently and stick to it so people know how to find you. The other thing is your photo. Get a good professional photo. I’m not saying you have to be in a suit or anything. I’m just saying that it should be high quality, good resolution, good lighting… Put some thought into what you’re wearing if it’s more than just a head shot. If you’re going to be on Twitter, say, and there’s only a small avatar or picture that goes with your tweets, you need to have a close-cropped picture. I see people who don’t have any marketing sense at all. They have full-length pictures and their head looks the size of a pinhead.

What advice do you have for people with personal social media accounts that aren’t very professional?

They need to clean up their act. If their current social media accounts are so far gone that there’s no cleanup act they can do, they might want to shut them down and start new ones. Choose some variation on their name, then make that their consistent brand. But if you don’t have too much bad stuff out there, maybe you can produce a certain amount of content that would be your current stuff that exemplifies the focus and maybe the professionalism you would want to have. You need to monitor these social platforms and streams, and if there are photos you’d rather not be tagged in, ask your friends to not tag you. You can also on Facebook just block that person from showing up on your wall or your Facebook timeline. There’s a number of things you can do. It’s very important for journalists just starting out—or anyone for that matter—to do a Google search on a regular basis. It’s a good idea to submit your name to Google Alerts so that anytime your name is mentioned, Google will send you an email and show you what’s being said about you. That’s a very low-cost way to figure out what’s out there. It is a good idea to do a search and see what shows up on the first-page results because 94 percent of people don’t go past the first page. There’s a number of things that can happen. One, you can not show up on the first-page results, which is not good because not being found on the Internet today means you don’t exist. Two, there can be a number of references to things that you just don’t want to be known for. Maybe it was the old way you positioned yourself. Let’s say you positioned yourself in a certain industry or subject area, and you don’t want to be known for that anymore. When you’re repositioning yourself, you need to be able to push those mentions off to the second, third, fourth page, and start populating what will show up in your Google search with current stuff that you want to be known for. Having a strong LinkedIn profile is really good for SEO, which is search engine optimization. You can start doing a blog and blogging regularly, and have that show up. Tweeting is good, because Twitter will show up. Pick a bunch of different platforms to be on, and soon you’ll have content out there that will push other stuff to later pages.

Should people have just one brand or can they have different brands for different audiences?

Theoretically, if we were all in silos and never crossed over, having more than one brand would be fine. But that just doesn’t work in today’s world. Everybody crosses over. Everything is melding now. Not only in different industries, but also in terms of your professional life versus your social life. If you’re on a platform that the whole world can see and access, that’s going to be really difficult. I have a Branding Pays page for my business and I do have a Karen Kang page that is more for friends and family. However I never post anything on the Karen Kang Facebook page that would reflect poorly on my professional brand. I do have some clients who are also friends of the Karen Kang Facebook page. I feel like I’m an authentic person, and how I show up personally and professionally—I’m the same person. I may be a little more buttoned down in a business setting than I am in a social setting with my friends, but I would never do something on my personal site that would make someone say, “Oh my goodness. Karen Kang, the Branding Pays author, how could she be doing that?”

Should a brand represent people’s skill sets? How specific should it be?

Let’s say you want to do business reporting. The umbrella of business is just huge. Do you want to talk about finance, leadership, marketing, global recruiting policies? There are all different ways to slice and dice subject matter. It doesn’t have to just be subject matter. Let’s say you started blogging, and you started doing a lot of little surveys. So you were sending out these online surveys to people, and each blog entry would be looking at those surveys and doing analysis and talking to experts and writing a whole story about it. You would start to be known as the journalist or blogger who does social research or analytics. Maybe you had infographics or data visualization. You would become known as a blogger who had those skills and the ability to take some really interesting topics and weave a story around them. It’s that kind of stuff. It doesn’t have to be one particular topic, but it can also embody the skill set around it and how you approach collecting information and reporting on it, and how you engage with the ecosystem, how you talk to thought leaders. You could help people along in demonstrating a specific skill set. Let’s say you have a Twitter profile, and one of the things you have in your profile is that you’re a data-loving something something blogger. Give people a few words, a few qualifiers so that people say, “oh yeah” and put you in a certain category.

How can people with very similar resumes differentiate themselves?

I’m working with a lot of sales professionals right now at this very large company, and when I see their resumes, they look very similar. They all have won achievement awards, they all are good at communication skills, sales, relationship building, and stuff like that. To help differentiate them, I went way into their backgrounds. For instance there’s one guy who was a Division I college athlete. He was a catcher. The catcher is really the leader of a baseball team. He was the only one who had full field vision and could then direct what people should be doing, work on the strategy with the pitcher, really understand what they needed to do in a game, and be able to turn on a dime and adapt the game plan depending on how things were happening. We used that background for his LinkedIn profile, to set him apart so that beyond all the other good stuff he had at his company, he brought this background where he was a natural-born leader, very inspirational and motivational. He mentored people because he understood team dynamics. We were able to roll all that stuff into a catcher metaphor. A lot of times people have some very interesting things that they’ve done but they discount it because it happened so long ago. No. You can use it. Dust off things. Go back and put together your personal back story and find where the gems are.

What are the most important skills journalists need to be sustainable?

The greatest skill people can have if they want to have longevity in their career is the ability to look out on the horizon and see trends and which way things are going—whether they’re technology, business trends, social trends, whatever—and when things are happening. Basically the only constant today is change. Change represents fear for some people and excitement and opportunity for others. If you can embrace the opportunity part of change, you’ll be so much better off.

You embraced change in your own career years ago.

I saw a long time ago that traditional journalism jobs were going to be disappearing over time and that new media and new ways of doing things would be coming online. Even with my own consulting, I saw how important social media were going to be a long time ago. I got my domain name in 1994. I’m one of a million or so Kangs in the world, and I have the Kang.com domain. Being able to jump on new things and being able to run with them is very important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rebranded myself for new opportunities. You have to do that or you become a dinosaur.

What would you say to journalists who might not be comfortable with the idea and ethics of personal branding?

Personal branding done right is totally ethical and authentic. If you do things that are not ethical and are not authentic, you will not have a sustainable brand. People have this idea that self-promotion is a vice and it’s bad. I would like to dissuade people from thinking that because it’s the wrong way to think about it. Personal branding is not so much promotion. It is really about education and engagement.

What is the value of branding for journalists?

Unless you’re the Kardashians, you really do need to be adding value to the world. If you want to add value to the world, what is that area of value you are representing? That should be what your brand is all about, at least in a career context or a professional context. If you get away from this notion of “me,” “me,” “me,” and shift to the attitude of “we,” you’ll do a much better job of branding yourself and having people understand what your value is in the world. The whole reason that people should be known is so they can have influence and have a voice and the audience that they desire in order to spread the word. But you won’t have that opportunity if you’re not known. Everyone needs to do the job of branding themselves, and the world will be a better place.

Professionalism Checklist

Summary

Although it may not come naturally to traditional journalists, all journalists today need to understand the importance of personal branding. Despite some historically negative associations with the first-person point of view throughout journalism, personal branding is not only acceptable in the current online news marketplace, it is essential. Without a strong brand and the means to promote it, a journalist’s message may get lost within a crowded online marketplace of ideas, analysis, and opinion. Journalists also need to be aware of how they appear online by regularly conducting searches of their name and working to remove or bury any old or unfavorable content.

Journalists who have traditionally avoided the spotlight should keep in mind that branding is not about self-promotion or egotism. It is not, as branding expert Karen Kang reminds us, about “me,” “me,” “me.” Rather, it is about “we” and serving the target audience or community with rich, relevant content that is valuable for its focus and relevance. We hear numerous times throughout this text that to establish and maintain their value to the community they serve, journalists need to deliver highly specialized content that people want or need. Unlike celebrities, journalists in the digital era need more than just a strong or interesting personality or voice to attract readers or followers. They have to fulfill an audience need. Successful branding will help them convey their specific expertise or niche to their target audience.

Journalists who can quickly and easily describe what they do and how what they do is different from what other entrepreneurial journalists and communication professionals can offer are at a distinct advantage over those who lack clear branding. Although chances may be slim that you will soon find yourself alone in an elevator with a potential funder who has the time and focus to field your pitch, having a pitch at the ready will come in tremendously handy when you are asked for more information about what you do for a living or what your long- and short-term goals may be. Consider your elevator pitch your in-person calling card.

Journalist’s Toolkit

Entrepreneurial journalists can brand themselves online by creating simple, clear, distinctive identities on social media and the Web. They can develop their reputations for expertise in a particular subject area by offering relevant educational content. They can also build or reinforce a brand defined by a certain skill set by actively demonstrating those skills (for conducting research as one example) through their online “real estate.”