Free Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know by Geoffrey James

in the social media in which you participate: your name (brand name), your photo (brand logo), and your profile information (corporate history).
    Here’s how to use social media to brand yourself:
1. UNDERSTAND THE REWARDS AND RISKS.
    Social media sites are fundamentally different from other forms of business communication. Conversations, voice mails, e-mails, and presentations are
narrowcast media
, meaning they are either one-to-one or one-to-few.
    Social networking, on the other hand, is broadcast media on steroids, which means it is one-to-many-to-many-to-many. While you can limit access to your profiles on some sites, these sites are intended to be seen by all and sundry. Because of this they can have an outsize effect on your career, for good or bad.
    Social networking is your primary vehicle for creating your brand and expanding awareness of it. However, like a corporation, you must protect your brand from becoming tarnished even as you work to establish it.
2. CREATE AN APPROPRIATE BRAND IMAGE.
    Since your photo is your brand logo, you want a profile photo—the same on all sites—that reinforces your brand in a way that helps rather than hinders your career. If you can afford it, hire a professional photographer to shoot publicity photos. No selfies.
    Meanwhile, try to expunge any online evidence of behavior that runs contrary to the image you’re trying to create. Scrub your old social networking pages; if your friends have posted stuff you’d prefer not be seen, ask them to delete it.
    Even unusual hobbies can throw employers and customers off, if you’re not well known enough in your own field to make such details irrelevant. Despite the pressure to meld your business and personal lives, I recommend keeping your private life private.
    Sometimes it’s not possible to scrub something questionable from your past. For example, if you’re arrested, your name and face can end up on a mug shot website and remain there even if you’re not charged. If so, you’ll need to change your name.
    Another element of brand image is your literacy or lack of same. Spelling and grammatical errors in your profile will make people think that you’re either stupid or careless, or both. If you’re not a strong writer, hire a copy editor to go over your profile.
3. MAKE YOUR RÉSUMÉ RELEVANT.
    For work purposes, the most important social media sites are the ones, such as LinkedIn, where you post your résumé. Most people make the dumb mistake of using that forum to post a generalized version of their employment history.
    Why is that dumb? Because your online résumé is useful for only two things: positioning you for a new job, or strengthening your ability to do your current job. A generalized résumé accomplishes neither of these tasks.
    If you are job hunting, you want your résumé to reflect whatever job you are currently pursuing. (I discuss this issue elsewhere in “Secret 25. How to Land a Job Interview.”) Therefore, during a job hunt, you must constantly tweak your résumé to match your efforts.
    If you are currently employed and not looking for another job, you want the people you work with (or sell to or buy from) to see you as qualified and authoritative in your current job. Therefore, scrub everything that’s irrelevant to your current job.
    In your résumé, describe only actions that you personally took, along with the specific, quantifiable effects of those actions. For example, if you work in public relations, nobody cares if your job title was “communications director.” However, they might very well take notice if you got your CEO on CNN and the stock rose by 10 percent.
4. GET REALISTIC RECOMMENDATIONS.
    Finally, LinkedIn allows other people to post recommendations. The problem with these endorsements is that everyone suspects you’ve simply queued up your best pals to be sock puppets that say nice things.
    Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to get some recommendations, but you want them to be