How portable is your personal brand? You are responsible to manage your career. The portability of your personal brand is going to become more important and more of an asset as the workplace changes and we become more hyper-connected. Let’s first define the meaning of a portable personal brand.
Definition
Portable Personal Brand: It is the ability to take your online personal brand assets with you when you move from company-to-company, change careers, change positions, or transition to being an entrepreneur. Essentially the digital characteristics and assets of your personal brand move wherever you go.
Why is this important? The number of times a person changes careers is about 5-7 from the research that I have done. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn’t provide data on career changes but on the number of jobs a person holds in his/her lifetime (which is 10.8 jobs from ages 18 to 42.) So it is not a matter of if but when you are going to change careers and/or change companies. It is critical that you keep your personal brand portable.
Tips for Portability of your Personal Brand
- Personal Branded Social URLs: Always maintain separate personal branded accounts. Your personal social network account URLs should not be tied to the company accounts as the only accounts you have or manage. When you leave a company your accounts should come with you no questions asked, but this can only happen if you own the accounts. In an ideal world you want to bring your pre-existing accounts with you to your place of employment if they are relevant.
- Own Your Network: If the contacts in your network are housed only in the social network there is an inherent risk if your account gets comprised or the terms of service changes. Your network will become more of an asset in the workplace, not necessarily because of numbers but become of influence. Create your own personal database from your social network contacts, you need to own your contact list. Download and import your contacts into a personal list that you own and manage (Note: If you are tweeting from company accounts legally you don’t own the contact list. Everyone knows there is a difference between contact names and relationships.)
- Set-up Linkedin Profiles Properly: Set up your Linkedin accounts with your own personal email address (i.e. Gmail account). There have been situations where people have been locked out of their accounts because the account was set-up with a corporate email address.
- Own Your Hub (Don’t just rent): Every professional should own the online hub of their personal brand (the online destination/dotcom.) Make sure your dot com isn’t linked to your current job (i.e. www.HajjFlemingsNike.com.)
Case Study: Frank Eliason v. Comcast Cares
The new poster child of portable personal branding is Frank Elisaon who most of us have known online as @Comcastcares. Frank recently changed companies and is no longer the Comcast Cares guy, like LeBron he has decided to take his talents elsewhere (Note: There was no TV special and Frank left on good terms with Comcast from what I can tell).
Franks former Twitter handle @ComcastCares is obviously not portable and will be maintained by Comcast. Let’s be clear both Comcast and Frank have mutually benefited from the work that was done. Has Frank lost the total value of his personal brand or the work he has done? Absolutely not! There are something’s he will have to start from scratch on and build awareness of his new portable personal brand. If you look at the web location on his Twitter account it is linked to: www.frankeliason.com. Also you can follow Frank on Twitter at @FrankEliason to date he has about 1,700 followers.
@ComcastCares
@FrankEliason
Benefits
One of the major benefits of having a portable personal brand that it can create a unique opportunity for a portable career. What do I mean by a portable career? Portable careers are job situations that don’t depend on location with flexible work environments that allow you to do your job remotely for the most part. With the development of technology: Skype, WI-FI, and other technologies that allow you to work remotely these types of opportunities are starting to increase. Portable careers will grow in popularity in the future as work changes. The forerunner to this is alternative work arrangements which companies have become more comfortable with as a way to provide a benefit to the company and cut cost when they can’t pay an employee more money.
When is this critical? Portability of your personal brand will come into play the most when you are executing a career change or moving to a new employer.
How Portable is your Personal Brand?
