Re-inventing/re-branding may be needed at any point, based on a job ceiling, boredom, a dislike of job functions, or other personal factors. It may also be needed if a person is dismissed from a job or does something to harm his/her reputation (see Brown, 2011). Re-positioning may mean a step back in one’s career ladder or a lateral move at lower compensation. Other times, especially if a person has been enhancing his or her skill set in a new direction, better opportunities may arise.
Clark (2011, p. 79) sums up personal re-branding quite well:
People re-invent themselves to take on a new challenge, shift into more-meaningful work, or rebut perceptions hindering career progress. Some changes are major (a financial services manager moves into retail). Some re-branding is subtle, as for an executive who wants to advance but needs to overcome the knock that he’s “not good with numbers.” Taking control of your personal brand may mean the difference between an unfulfilling job and a rewarding career. As Longfellow noted, “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” Your path may make perfect sense to you, but how can you persuade others to embrace your new brand–and take you seriously?
Creating and Sustaining an Online Self-Brand
As noted earlier, an online self-brand persona is affected by both content that we control and content about us (or our employer) that is uploaded by others. To monitor external content, a Google search of ourselves should be a regular occurrence. When we see negative content, we should put out positive information of our own and comment constructively at other sites, if such comments are allowed. This will reduce–but not eliminate–the effects of negative content.
As marketing professionals involved with our own self-branding, we must be able to more than satisfactorily answer this question: “What’s Your Personal Social Media Strategy?” Certainly, we need such a strategy (Dutta, 2010, p. 128):
Leaders must embrace social media. First, they provide a low-cost platform on which to build a personal brand, communicating within and outside your company. Second, they let you engage rapidly and simultaneously with peers, employees, customers, and the public, especially younger people, in the same transparent and direct way they expect from everyone in their lives. Third, they give you an opportunity to learn from instant information and unvarnished feedback. Active participation in social media can be the difference between leading effectively and ineffectively, and between advancing and faltering in pursuit of goals. You can be proactive or reactive.
There is a growing literature regarding online self-branding. Here is a cross-section: Sepp, Liljander, and Gummerus (2011); Chung and Ahn (2013); Waldman (2013b); Poeppelman and Blacksmith (2014); Edmiston (2014); Scott, Sinclair, Short, and Bruce (2014); and Shane (2015).
Figure 6 shows how self-branding communications have dramatically changed through three phases over the years–from pre-Internet to early Internet to today’s Internet.