Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep52: Personal branding online and offline.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.meiping.com. This is Mei Ping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hi everyone, this is Mei Ping and welcome back to a brand new episode of my God of Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about your corporate career. So welcome everybody.

Starting point is 00:00:40 In today's episode, I actually want to talk about personal branding and specifically for you as a corporate professional, how you can utilize personal branding in your career. And when I mean apply personal branding in your career, I don't mean it in the context of what social media marketers or personal branding gurus and basically the sales and marketing folks will tell you but more from a perspective of for somebody who is serious about their corporate career you don't want to lose out you want to get ahead but at the same time you're not really sure what is this whole personal branding thing and whether you would be comfortable to follow a lot of advice that you see out there on, you know, gaining visibility and potentially advice asking you guys to try out things that you may not feel as comfortable as a corporate professional to actually do. So this is something that makes a lot of sense to me because I used to work in the corporate world for many years and personal branding or rather you can call it executive presence, you can call it leadership qualities, whatever terminology that you want to call it at the end of the day, it's about your professional reputation. So if you are somebody who is working

Starting point is 00:02:07 in corporate, then my perspective that I want to share with you today is think about personal branding as your professional reputation. I think that is the easiest way to think about what is right for you to do and what I guess is not so suitable for you to do if you take on this perspective. So I've been getting a lot of messages from connections, people and clients asking me if, oh, you know, this whole personal branding thing is like such a big deal right now. So what can I do and what would still be suitable for me to try out and get out there if i'm also somebody who is actively building my corporate career so like i said right the perspective to really share with you is that if you think about it from and you treat it like your

Starting point is 00:02:58 professional reputation then how would you go about it what are some of the things that you would be comfortable to do online and how does this match things that you would be comfortable doing at your workplace at your office because when i do a lot of my talks i always tell my students and participants that your online branding personal branding whatever terminology I said, you want to call it, it's about, it's just an extension of your professional reputation. So as employees, as valuable team members, that we have a certain reputation at our workplace, right? Whether it's good or bad, right? It would depend, of course, how you do at work. But each and every one of us have a professional reputation.

Starting point is 00:03:52 So for those of you who are kind of like in leadership positions, maybe the other terminology that you hear a lot is executive presence. But think about your online branding yeah be on LinkedIn or different social media it's just an extension of that professional reputation so if you want to be known as a certain person or certain quality that you bring right in your corporate job then how are you translating that online is it consistent is Is it aligned? And can I comfortably get to know you as a professional,

Starting point is 00:04:30 whether I meet you at the office, I meet you at the workplace, or if I come across some of your comments and your content online, am I still talking to the same person? I guess is the main point that I'm trying to make here. And this is actually a mistake that I see a lot in probably younger professionals a lot more, where in the midst of building their personal branding, what they have forgotten is that if you're currently employed in a corporate job, you do represent your company to a certain extent. So in my personal belief, there is no clear, you know, I built my own personal branding and then

Starting point is 00:05:11 I'm just going to ignore my company even though I'm employed, even though I have already signed the employment contract. So personally, I don't really think this makes sense. But of course these things is up for debate right so my view always is if LinkedIn if other social medias are additional platforms that you could get on then you could get exposed then you just want to make sure that your reputation and whatever quality that you're trying to portray remains consistent across any platform so sometimes it's quite confusing when I meet people and they portray themselves a certain way, maybe online. And when I meet them maybe face-to-face or in separate conversations, I find that they're actually very different people. And this is very confusing from a professional reputation standpoint, especially for those

Starting point is 00:06:04 of you who are ambitious, right? You want to climb the corporate ladder, you want to have better job opportunities, better career opportunities down the road. Just make sure that you understand the point that people do try to get to know you across different platforms. So it can create a lot of confusion if you're portraying yourself in a very different way across different platforms. So the big tip here is that if you really want to be your fluffy self,

Starting point is 00:06:40 then of course, privacy is one thing. You can always go for like private mode and a lot of my clients actually do that on facebook instagram and so forth but if you choose to put yourself out there then just make sure that you understand that people are looking at what you say people are looking at what you do and they are making judgments whether you like it or not and for me um as a former hiring manager even before we interview candidates we tend to go on linkedin and go on google just to google the candidate and then we just see stuff that they may have said right the way that they behaved online

Starting point is 00:07:17 and maybe some other previous um i guess history previous yeah i guess the word is history and at certain points we do make judgment calls on whether you know we would feel comfortable even meeting the potential candidate and even for even at the workplace there were also instances where I mean I have not just seen but but personally experienced as well, where certain people at work, right, they are not exactly delivering, rather, you know, they're not exactly meeting the quality standards, right, meeting the actual deliverables from their boss

Starting point is 00:07:56 or their manager, but we see a lot of activity from that staff on LinkedIn, particularly, and, you know, it comes comes across whether rightly or wrongly comes across that okay this stuff is not focused on the actual work that needs to be done because the quality is poor but this stuff is apparently very free to spend a lot of time on linkedin and commenting and like just being really really active building his personal brand so let me remind you guys that if this is happening to you or this is happening to your peers or people around you then just just a quick you know realization for you is that um if you go down that path in in the journey of

Starting point is 00:08:41 building your personal brand as what the social media marketers will tell you, you are immediately destroying your professional reputation. So back to that example that I shared earlier, for that one staff, maybe on LinkedIn and different platforms, he or she is gaining popularity because clearly he or she is spending a lot of their working hours on this platform trying to engage, network, and friends whatever that whatever that is but guess what the actual people around this person is not happy with his or her job and do you actually think that this person

Starting point is 00:09:18 will get any referrals in the future if the people working around him or her already knows that you know he or she's unreliable and like just spends a lot of time trying to build this form over actual competence so just like i said right just it's not that like personal branding is bad but just recognize that it is part of your professional reputation and if you don't want people to see you a certain way then make sure that you actively manage that the other thing also is that make sure that there is always alignment between who you are and I guess who you're portraying yourself as as a professional online as well as offline so that's why i always say that um even in this a lot of the stuff that i do it's about if you want to grow your career make sure that you're aligning

Starting point is 00:10:09 right online offline growing your career both online offline because if you take the concept correctly you are actually able to move forward faster but if you're trying like very very hard online but offline you're totally neglecting your competence you're totally neglecting your work right in the favor of like getting more attention online it will backfire immediately if the other way around is also not good right you you can all have like a really good professional reputation at work but if you don't have an online brand or, you know, people are totally not aware of like who you are, then you will be you will actually miss out on career opportunities as well. So it's really a balance, I'd say, between between the two. And just always make sure that you guys you guys take note of that.

Starting point is 00:11:02 OK, so this is actually a really quick podcast episode i just want to really talk about our professional reputation but i hope that you guys find the the short episodes helpful and going forward i will definitely be recording the live sessions of my careers podcast that will go live every thursday and this will only be short episodes short episodes so that you guys can take note of the main point that I'm sharing and have a really clear takeaway so that's why I'm actually going back to my original format of having only 10 to 12 minutes of short podcast episodes but really really packed with a really key point that you can take away and just yeah think about it

Starting point is 00:11:43 over the next couple of days so with that I will see you guys in the next episode next thursday see you guys

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep52: Personal branding online and offline.

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