Marketing yourself (part 2). Your approach to market

This is a follow on to an earlier post Marketing Yourself, the A, B, Cs that focused on what I described as Part One of the A, B, C's of marketing yourself. Today I want to chime in on Part Two which is YOUR APPROACH TO MARKET. Individuals looking for their next position or looking to bolster their profile and build their networks can draw from the fundamentals followed by companies launching new products or brands into the market. You need to understand what your brand is and then you need to manage that brand impression in every media-- when meeting someone for the first time at a cocktail party, when in a meeting or on a conference call, when promoting yourself on your bio, resume or speaking at a conference, when managing your professional profile online. It all matters and it requires a plan and ongoing management and maintenance. Every interaction is an opportunity to make a great or an average impression (let's hope not a bad impression!).

To start you need to think about your goals. Are you in launch mode, build mode or sustain mode? Typically if you are at the early stage of your career you are in launch or build mode. If you are at a mid career stage but are shifting careers you will drop back to launch mode.

For online you will want to ask yourself how much of your profile do you want to be publicly available online? This will dictate your online, professional networking strategy with sites like http://www.linkedin.com/ and http://www.videobio.com/ . Do you want a video to add a level of personalization to your brand? Are you an entrepreneur who is constantly promoting something and seeking new networking connections? You may want to look at http://www.twitter.com/ for sharing daily updates on what you are up. Think carefully about how you use http://www.facebook.com/ as a professional networking tool as it is most commonly used for social / personal networking and it is important to keep your personal and professinal brands separate.

Stay tuned for more marketing yourself a, b, c's.