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What is happening in Business Networking land? The number of clicks per page of the top business networking platforms is rising dramatically. Here is the background: There are six main business networking platforms.

There are others to mention such as FastPitchNetworking, ClaimID, Konnects and ConnectU, but please correct me if I’m wrong but these are at noise level in comparison to the above mentioned list.

The trick is that for a biznet to be effective, you need to have a critical mass of memberships to make it interesting. Also, people don’t want to be bothered with request after auto generated request for joining this or that platform. This abuse of your network results in people not taking you seriously and makes you a business networking pariah.

But what is most interesting is the changes over the last four months. Using the industry standard Alexa ranking system, Linkedin have moved up 83 places in their global ranking, from 190 to 107. Ecademy have move up over 5,500 places up to 6,569. Xing moved up to 249 from 953. If this were the stock exchange, then this would be making front page news and investors would be flocking to the market segment to invest.

The fact is that the world has woken up to Personal Branding in a BIG way and are starting to take the platforms seriously. What is more frightening is that if you don’t then you risk being left out in the cold. This means that in this economic climate you are going to be frozen out. Take my advice - start cleaning up you personal brand now and come in from the cold!

Failing to look after your personal brand will leave you out in the cold.

Andi Elam is a leading business coach and personal branding expert available via: andi@your-brand-image.com and andi@winproposal.com.

AdminBlog Personal Branding brand image, branding, career, cold, history, people, reputation, web 2.0

Will a bad networking profile cost you a new job?

Q - Why is it urgent that you look after your personal brand now?

A - Servers all over the world are going to start saving your present image and allow people in the future to look back in time and check your profile.

This is indeed a brave new world - but facts are facts. Servers are already storing images of web sites going back in time to take a snap shot of what they looked like a number of years ago. The website called “The Wayback Machine” allows you to enter a URL and then select a date to see a capture of what the site looked like anything up to fifteen years ago. Check out the following link: Wayback Machine Website

Screen Capture of the Wayback Machine Website

Clicking upon one of Google’s dates in 1999 shows the following page…

This is what Google looked like in 1999

Imagine what this will mean when the servers are starting to store your old Hyves, MySpace or Facebook pages?

Andi Elam is a leading business coach and personal branding expert available via: andi@your-brand-image.com and andi@winproposal.com

AdminBlog Personal Branding brand image, branding, bry branding brand image your-brand-image, career, people, Personal Branding, personalbranding, reputation, web 2.0

There is revolution that has been silently taking place in personal branding. If you are looking for job today, before you get to be interviewed you are Googled. If you go to a meeting, the savvy people Google you in advance to work out if you really can offer what you promise or how to take advantage of you if they are selling to you. If you start a new relationship, the first thing someone does before making the next date is a web search.

Everyone is doing something with personal branding. But very few are looking after his or her profiles. People join some networks, forget about others and generally pay lip service to maintaining their brand image. Very few people take any care in looking after they way they look on the Internet. Do you go to work in your pyjamas? Have you disconnected your phone? Or even worse someone that you do not know answers it for you?

The personal branding revolution has already happened. The Dutch population is 16.5million people. More than 8million of them have an account on Hyves. It is suggested that there are more than 300million accounts on MySpace, they certainly had their 100 millionth user signup in 2006! Whatever the real number, it’s big, very big. Internet World Stats say that there are over 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide. Most if them use some form of social or business networking.

So we know that everyone is doing it – but they aren’t doing it with thought and some kind of plan. This is where Your Brand Image brings order to the chaos.

You need to find ways to look after yourself and your future. If you don’t then your personal branding profile could be irreparably damaged for ever.

Andi Elam is a leading business coach and personal branding expert available via: andi@your-brand-image.com and andi@winproposal.com

AdminBlog Personal Branding brand image, branding, career, people, Personal Branding, personalbranding, reputation, web 2.0