How Your Online Presence Increasingly Makes or Breaks Your Career
"Digital" isn't just a buzzword. It is the word.
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We will keep this short. If you are anyone and want to go anywhere in your career, you have to mind what happens when people you meet Google your name.
Do they stumble upon depictions of you retching in a bucket at a party or giving a lecture to aspiring students in your field of expertise?
Do they see some hateful Tweet you issued on a lazy Sunday morning about a politician you disprove of, or a piece of thought-leadership you published for a renowned magazine?
In short: do they see what you want them to see?
As much as you might relax on the couch with your significant other in pyjamas and a mayonnaise splotch on your shirt before getting dressed in a nice Suede shoe for work, we must also mind our appearance on the internet.
We are not here to philosophise. We are here to give you some easy-to-implement pointers as to how we and some of the industry’s top experts do it. Let's go get it!
It all starts with you Googling your own name. If nothing about you shows up on the first two pages of search results, you practically don't exist. Now, if that is what you desire, perfect. If you are looking to network or be seen as an expert in your field, this lack of digital footprint is something you must address.
The same goes for if you show up, but what you see is not what you want others to see. Here is what you do:
Vet the information Google spits out about you. Scan your social media presence and, and we cannot stress this enough, get rid of the nasty. Old Tweets that no longer correspond with your current thinking. Party pictures that really nobody cares about but could make you be taken less seriously.
As we are talking about careers here, build a LinkedIn profile and presence that is more than just a digital version of your CV. It is your pitch deck, your sales funnel, that which entices people to come into your world. Notably, pay attention to:
Your profile image. Make sure it is well lit, sharp, shows your head and your shoulders, has a tidy backdrop and a smile.
The broad banner at the top of your page. Make sure it resonates with who you are professionally. It is also a huge piece of digital real-estate that you can use for messaging. So think about what you are looking to achieve on LinkedIn in this moment, and be sure to include this message in the banner.
Your headline and current title, both are things you can modify. Ensure that without further reading, potentially interested parties can figure out exactly who you are and what you have to offer at a glance.
The "About" section. It is the only piece of information on your profile that Google has the ability to crawl, which is to say "ready" and suggest your profile to people looking for specific keywords that happen to be in your "About" segment. use this space, every last character of it. Also write in the third person so that your name rather than "I" gets associated with those keywords. E.g. Tom Zamzow is xyz.
LinkedIn will frequently suggest ways for you to improve and complete your profile. This means to say it is guiding you in how you can use all of its features, such as the "Skills" and "Recommendations" sections. Follow these instructions, because the program deciding who gets to see your content gives preferential treatment to profiles that have completed these steps. And at the end of the day, LinkedIn is all about being found.
Buy a website with the following formula: www.firstnamelastname.com. Then fill this website with the kind of content you want people to see about you. Your thoughts, perspective on matters of importance in your field in the form of a blog, your career journey and why you are a worth-while hire. This website is the only piece of digital real-estate you truly own. Information about you on social media, your followers, it is all in the hands of the company who owns the platform. If they for some reason stop to exist, as does the digital image of yourself you have created. If you are not a coder and the acronym HTML gives you the fear, Squarespace is an excellent option through which you can easily buy a domain and simply drag and drop your way way to a splendid looking site.
Once you have your website, become a guest writer. You want other organisations to place the link to your website on theirs, it will help you show up in search results when people Google your name. A great place to start are the universities at which you studied, who often have blogs or newsletters.
There is so much more magic to this than we can fit into this short article. If you are intrigued and are thinking "I might give this a shot", here are some things we suggest you might want to do:
Check out our episodes with James Moffat (click here) and Clair Marr (click here), both aficionados of online profile management.
Get in touch with us directly for HIGHER! Career Coaching, we would be delighted to help you achieve greatness!
Let's go get it,
Nikki and Tom