Kirsten Dixson, Personal Branding Strategist

Executive Summary vs. Objective on Resume

Welcome More readers!

Unless you are a recent college graduate, you should refrain from using an objective on your resume. The problem with most resume objectives is that they are often written to convey what you want to get out of the job rather than what you will contribute.

Here's an example of a decent objective:

Executive Director of a not-for-profit where I can contribute to the organization’s mission of smart growth, environmental sustainability, and/or resourceful residential architecture.

Now, check out an Executive Summary for the same goal (click image to view full size):

Isn't that so much more powerful? A well-written executive summary can convey your personal brand (unique value proposition) and will cause the balance of your resume to be more closely considered. It's also a place where you can pepper your resume with the keyword phrases that will help it to be retrieved from a database.

Personal Branding Templates: An Oxymoron?

Cross posted on The Personal Branding Blog

As an early thought leader in the area of managing your online brand for career and business success, I'm delighted to witness how this concept has been taking hold over the past several years. Web portfolio, profile and online reputation management companies are popping up more frequently. In a new business category, having "competition" is good news. So, what's the bad news?

Templates Are Not Congruent With Personal Branding
All of these companies - the do-it-yourself services - use templates to help you create a web page (or mini-site) designed to showcase your personal brand, experience and proof of performance. It's absolutely fine to use these services to develop a quick, low-budget Web presence or to add to your volume of on-brand Google results beyond your primary website or blog. Often, having something positive that comes up on page one when someone Googles your name is better than having nothing. But, think about it. Templates are cookie cutter, and you want to be distinctive if you are truly expressing your unique value to your target audience. Templates are like renting an apartment where you are not free to paint the walls and nail on your own artwork. Sites with custom designs are analogous to architecting your dream house that is an expression of how you live. As William Arruda teaches, your personal brand should be associated with superlatives: greatest, strongest, best! Don't you want to have a stand out Web presence that differentiates you from your peers and competitors? If you answered yes, then using a template "as is" is not the solution.

A Good Use of Templates
I'm not saying that you need to create a website from scratch. Of course, you will want an easy content management system to make updates yourself. In fact, templates can be a great starting point if they can be customized with your professionally designed banner and the fonts and colors are selected to exude your brand identity. We do this all the time using TypePad, and WordPress is another viable option.

Check out examples of branded TypePad sites for our clients:
www.williamarruda.com
www.edobrienhr.com
www.shipleymunson.com

The client's brand is primary, and the design of each of these sites looks quite different even though the application that we used (TypePad) is the same and not obvious.

Design is an opportunity to communicate your personal brand on a visual level. As a first impression, pictures really do speak louder than words, and a great design can grab a visitor's attention and keep him or her on your site.

Designing a Brand Identity System for Brand You
The critical first step in any online identity campaign is defining your authentic personal brand. Remember, this is not about spin or packaging. You must be clear about what you want to communicate before making a bunch of digital fingerprints that will be difficult to remove when you change your mind. To discover your brand, do the exercises in Career Distinction, join the Reach Branding Club or work with a Reach-Certified Personal Brand Strategist who specializes in your needs (just check out the contributors to this blog for starters).

Then, draft a design brief (there is an example on page 157 of Career Distinction) and share it with your designer for input. A design that you feel proud to represent your personal brand is usually the result of a collaborative effort among you, your personal brand coach and your designer.

The best way to illustrate this thoughtful process is to give you a concrete example. Read the bright idea behind my brand identity (Why Goldfish?) to see how my brand attributes, strengths and passions were translated into my brand identity system. If you like what you see, let's talk about creating your online identity campaign. Look for the relaunch of Brandego this fall.

The Expert Factor

Article by Kirsten Dixson, originally published on TheLadders.com.

Like it or not, emerging technology for social networking and job matching is going to impact your career. Employers are increasingly searching for the exact right fit, and they're using this technology to reach out to talent. Paul Copcutt, a Toronto-based recruiter, tells us, "Two years ago they might have settled for 8 or 9 off a list of 12 must-haves, now they are saying they want 10, 11 or even all 12. They know people are not going to stay with them forever, so if they are going to hire someone for a 'limited' amount of time, they want the best."

The ideal situation for every job seeker is that, instead of applying for jobs, employers find you. So, how do you position yourself to be the hunted rather than the hunter? Become known as an expert.

Take Control of Your Digital Resume

Article by Kirsten Dixson, originally published on TheLadders.com.

What do our technology choices say about us? With email now the standard method of resume distribution, a lot!

A professional-looking resume on paper is well and good, but digital resumes are a necessity. A resume garbled in transit brands you immediately as someone who isn't tech-savvy. A resume that looks impressive when emailed shows that you're current with the job market.

Search Engine Optimization for Web Portfolios & Blogs

Since we build websites and blogs for individuals to help them establish and control their online identities for career management, most often we are thinking about their search engine rankings when someone is looking for them by name.

If you have an uncommon or unusually spelled name, like Kirsten Dixson or Brandego, then you will probably get the results that you want organically — without a lot of effort and investment. If you also have a presence on a very popular site, then you might need to work a little harder to get your own site to rank higher.

If you do have a common name, like our client William Reed, then you will have to optimize for your name and your niche — for example, William Reed Healthcare Finance. Try Googling that. The results just aren't the same if you only type in William Reed. If he also consistently uses William F. Reed, and people know to look for him by that in the search engines, then he will come up near the top of page one in Google.

Here are 10 Search Engine Optimization tips from our fabulous personal branding client and the Search Marketing Insider, Jessica Bowman:

Blog Posting: How Much is Enough?

One of the questions that I'm asked frequently about blogging is, "How often do I need to post?" It's an understandable concern since we are all too busy to have one more thing to feed.

Blogging experts will tell you that three times a week is ideal. I'm finding that this is not practical for most people, however. I think that bloggers should aim to post once a week, and definitely not post less than twice a month.

As you can see, I'm not always heeding my own advice. But I do think that it is very beneficial to have and maintain a blog. I'm writing this in a Starbucks in Manhattan so that I can save face when I talk about blogging tonight at the New York chapter meeting of the Association of Career Professionals International.

Inactivity on a blog does two things:

1. It demonstrates that you are not serious about your blog.
2. It makes your blog less search-engine friendly.

Tips for posting more frequently:

• Be attuned to content all the time and have a system for jotting down your ideas so that when you go to post it's easy.
• Remember that blog posts, unlike articles, can be super short as long as they are useful. Sometimes, you can write a sentence and link to something you've found.
• When you have some extra time, you can set up posts to publish on a future date.

Flash Audio

I love Audio Acrobat. Even if you don't have a microphone, it's easy to add a welcome message or teleseminar recording to your website that is click and play. Your visitors won't have to download anything to listen because this technology is Flash based and the Macromedia Flash player is already installed on 98% of computers.

One of my favorite features of Audio Acrobat is the ability to record conference calls and teleseminars up to two hours. To use this feature, you just need to have three-way calling on your phone line. They provide a 30-day free trial and free training. Try it out.

You can download your recordings and edit them with Audacity - amazing free software for both PC and Mac.

Audio Acrobat now also supports video and you can upload most media files and publish with their Flash player. You no longer need to have both Windows Media Player and Quicktime versions of your media clips. It's very slick!

Websites, Blogs Can Boost Your Career

Our client Cindy Eng's experience with her Brandego Executive Portfolio was featured in this story by Kaja Whitehouse, Dow Jones Newswire.