Personal Branding on High Octane

As I was preparing a recent teleclass on Personal Branding for Career Directors International, a professional association of careers industry folks, I googled the terms "branding" and "personal branding". Was I in for a surprise! "Branding" had an astounding 125 million hits and the more niche term "personal branding" had 25 million hits.

You may be asking, "What's the big deal?" Well, personal branding is taking the careers industry AND the corporate world by storm. For an eye-opening blog posting and article from William Arruda, the guru of personal branding, read "People Are the Brand". William's article incisively distills the value of the individual to a company's brand.

What this means is that each of us can have a personal brand that also contributes to a company's brand in unique and distinctive ways. What better way to distinguish ourselves from the thundering herd at work, especially if job retention and/or career promotion are in your sights?

Even in a job search mode, you can use personal branding methods, such as authoring a highly focused job-targeting blog highlighting your personal attributes and potential contributions, to land the job of your dreams. Don't believe me? Check out Carolynn Duncan's blog that used to be called "WhyProvoLabsWantstoHireCarolynnDuncann" to "WhyProvoLabsIsHiringCarolynnDuncan" featured in Recruiting.com's blog posting "Using a Blog to get a Job".

Now that's personal branding with pizzaz!