Personal Branding Tools & Resources to Deal With Unemployment

With unemployment and uncertainty on the rise, it is important now more than ever before, to build a strong personal brand. Personal branding is the process of clear and consistent communication of your unique skills and passions and how you use them to solve problems in unique ways. The idea is for you to be clear about your strengths and let everyone know what your unique problem solving skills are so you stand out as a distinct identity making valuable contributions instead of being invisible among the many employees of businesses.

Check your online presence and identity to see whether you are visible in meaningful and consistent ways.

Personal branding involves self-awareness, authentic differentiation, and effective communication and here are some tools and resources for each category.

1. Self awareness: Connecting with skills, passions, purpose, and experiences that make you unique.

•Finding inner purpose exercise

•Other ideas to connect with self

2 Authentic differentiation: Using your skills and passions to solve problems in unique ways.

•Learn from changing trends and your competition how you can contribute and solve problems in unique ways.

• Stay informed about changes in environment that are relevant to you by setting google alerts and set Twitter to listen to key words:
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://twitter.com/

3 Communicate and connect: Communicating your unique problem solving abilities in ways that are consistent, meaningful, and visible to your target audience.

• Find out how visible and meaningful your online identity is
• Create a free online resume using multi-media at visualcv.com
• Connect with companies and recruiters on Twitter using tweetmyjobs.com
• Create a google profile, LinkedIn, Blogs, etc and make sure they are integrated and consistent
• Prepare your elevator speech
• Create an authentic and strong presence by using your skills to Blog, teach, or speak. If you like to write, start a Blog; if you like to teach, hold workshops in your organization or in your community; if you are a good speaker, participate in panels.

Other resources
• Social media, marketing and mindfulness consultancy made affordable at iAM Business Consulting
• Perspectives on how the environment, your efforts, and your beliefs affect outcomes in your life.
•Cool article on How to find a job on Twitter
•Cool article on How to build the ultimate social media resume