(Personal) Brand Awareness

Successful brands have been balancing the line between print, web, and brick-and-mortar elements for decades. With the rapid adoption of social media, that trend has continued to the familiar social media tools we all use every day. The limitations of avatars, and sometimes little options for customization have forced us to be a little creative, but an uncompromising implementation of the brand is almost always possible.

Dell is one of those companies that has traversed the plethora of social media networks without compromising the integrity of the brand (which after-all, is the point). Support forums are easily recognizable with the Dell moniker, tweets carry the familiar Dell logo, the YouTube channel is heavily customized, and most importantly everything is consistent.

Now, you may be wondering why I put “Personal” in the title if we’re going to talk about Dell. The point here is that the same strategy of a major brand can also apply to your personal brand. There’s two schools of thought on personal brands: 1- branding is a big corporate term (so why should I care), and 2- there’s value in providing a consistent, recognizable, and professional image of yourself across multiple mediums. The first rule applies to those of you who are just casual users; you’re the people that use Facebook to just talk to family, Twitter to tell me that you and your BFF are going roller skating, and have no idea what LinkedIn is. For you, it doesn’t matter if your Facebook picture is a weekend snap of you drunk at a party, or your Twitter avatar is the default Twitter bird, because well, it just doesn’t matter. The second rule applies to anyone who uses a combination of these services in a professional capacity, such as selling a product, supporting a product, blogging, professional networking, or community involvement.

Now obviously Dell’s got a lot more time and money to throw into this endeavor than you, but a basic branding really doesn’t take much more than a few minutes of setting up each of your profiles similarly. In the social media world, the avatar rules–period. If there’s one thing you do to brand your profiles, it should be your avatar/profile picture; it should be the same on every one of your profiles, and there’s nothing wrong with updating it periodically but it shouldn’t change often. If you follow more than three people on Twitter you probably understand where I’m going with this. There’s so much traffic flying through my Twitter streams all day that I rarely look at the name on the top of the tweet; the avatar becomes the face of the person speaking. When you change your avatar, people stop recognizing your tweets (until a day or so later when we realize there’s an unfamiliar image there and wonder who the heck it is). If you frequently comment on other people’s blogs, sign up for a free account over at Gravatar. Many popular blog and forum applications have hooks into the Gravatar network, allowing your blog comments to easily display your avatar without having to manage them individually for each site.

The second piece to the puzzle is linking everything together. Social icons are great, they’re intuitive, people understand them, and they’re small enough to fit into just about any design (if you’re going the extreme customization route). Give all of your networks links back to your other networks, and avoid cross-posting content as much as (practically) possible. It makes little sense to publish a blog post on your blog, then copy the same content to a Facebook note, but you can easily share the content on Facebook by providing a link with a short description. This prevents you from having to manage the copy, comments, and feedback in multiple places, but still uses your Facebook network to draw attention and traffic to your blog. In a previous post I addressed setting up friendly social media URLs to make it easier for people to access your profiles, and make the linking between profiles cleaner.