Personal Branding Trends 2016 -William Arruda-

If you don't know William Arruda I'll tell you it's one of the references in Personal and Executive Branding worldwide. Creator of Reach Personal Branding, Arruda is among the few professionals that accredits certification itself. Author of the book "Career Distinction", is regarded by many American media outlets as the "guru" of Personal Branding. True to your quote every year, published its trends in personal branding to 2016 in the magazine Forbes. As I think the content is revealing, I have dared to translate it so that I can reach anyone interested in the matter and, not happy about it, I've added two bonus tracks at the end about other trends that I personally consider important: big data and value management.

As it's a long article, you can also download or view it from Slideshare. I hope it brings you as much as I do.. Here I leave the tag cloud to give you an idea of ​​the contents:

Personal Branding Trends 2016

Working on personal brand management is really interesting. It's a permanent opportunity to align who we are with what we do. True to my annual appointment, I've identified some trends that will impact how we manage our brand. Let's value how it will influence our personal brand plan for the 2016 and later.

1. Integrated applications Personal Branding

Personal brand management can be seen as an isolated task – separated from our day-to-day activities. Let's get ready to manage an endless number of apps that will integrate personal brand activities into our daily routine. One of the best apps is Refresh (acquired by Linkedin), that combines our calendar information with Internet and LinkedIn data to send us a "short" of people with those we've scheduled meetings. It's like having a personal research assistant who travels the Web to extract information about people from our calendar and prepares a chop about each of them to study them quickly before you meet them.

It is acquired by Linkedin, Refresh will work both as an individual application and integrated into the professional network. Using Refresh before any meeting will impress our interlocutors. And this doesn't end here., more and more Apps related to Personal Branding and our daily tasks will appear, facilitating our efforts to networking and virtual work.

2. The video: From the static to the dynamic

Anyone who has read me before knows that I am a great defender of the video. It's the future of the personal brand. Why? For three reasons:

First of all, personal brand management is decanted towards the online environment, an area that makes video the main tool we can use to get to know and relate to others. Thanks to the Internet, people form first impressions about us just by searching for our name on Google.

Secondly,, the virtual workplace (Teleworking) is growing. Many of my clients no longer have an office in their company. They either work in co-working centers or from home. That means we need to find other ways to be visible to our stakeholders. And we won't get that with tools like email anymore., instant messaging or texting.

Video is a powerful vehicle for generating emotional connections when we can't be there in person. We can communicate with our audience and interact. True, real-time video is as close as possible plus a face-to-face meeting. applications videoBIO (a secret: videoBIO is a partner of my company, Reach Personal Branding), VideoCraft, VidMob And Vizzywig make it very easy to create and edit video content to reinforce our brand. They appear new video applications that will allow us to edit virtually effortless. Video is also a powerful SEO tool on Google. In fact, Forrester Research states that the video has some 50 times more likely to appear on our first page of results than any other text content.

Third, habits change. Our hunger for video is growing. In 2015, digital video was put at the forefront of social media. We know that users spend nearly two hours a day watching digital video on networks. According to a recent A-articleWalgrove commands, video will become our most common form of communication in the future. Are we ready?

3. Leadership consultants

Executive Branding has consolidated (translator's note: in Spain and LATAM not yet) as an important strategy for companies as more and more customers seek personal connections with organizations. A new type of service is emerging to help business experts communicate about relevant aspects of their services and products to their target audiences. And these opinion leaders come from all areas of a company – not just senior management. A good example of this lies in the growth of Influence & Co, a company that provides content creation that are made possible by technology and relationships with generalist and specialized online publishers. These new leadership consultants simplify and streamline the process of gathering knowledge from internal leaders and turn that information into high-quality content – both for means of payment and "publicity". Influence & Co. and other similar organizations are filling the gap between traditional PR and communication companies and online marketing companies.

Subject matter experts are valuable resources for organizations that want to increase their visibility and grow their brands, and companies are going to invest in those opinion leaders, providing them with external resources to develop content. They're going to work with a personal communications expert to help make your message more persuasive. Traditional communication agencies focus on company content and working with all media. But new types of communicators will work with specific individuals in the company and focus on their relationships with online publications to improve visibility.

4. Our location is part of our brand

With the consolidation of virtual jobs professionals will have many more opportunities to choose where to live. We're not going to have to move anymore because work requires it.; we move because we will have found a place compatible with our lifestyle. Companies are accelerating this step towards virtual business as a formula to increase their profitability. Several of the companies I work with are encouraging their employees to work in virtual environments if they are in the office less than 60% of his time. According to the report World at Work, The 67% companies offer job flexibility for all or most of their employees. Our geographic location will speak for itself about our brand, as it will reflect our choice, not our company's. This is great news for professionals looking for a good reconciliation between work and life. It will also take a different approach to our personal brand to make sure that away from the office does not mean far from the mind.

This mobility trend will also have an impact on the real estate market and on companies that offer co-working spaces and meeting rooms (As Regus, For example). This could increase demand - and consequently the price- second homes near beaches and airports.

5. The Transformation of Formation

The world is moving too fast for us to progress with the knowledge we already have. People and companies with strong personal brands make continuous training a priority – knowing that if you're not learning every day, they're falling behind. Our ability to learn and grow as we strengthen our brand will be critical to success.

Learning within organizations will become a key element for company success and employee engagement. Innovative organizations will use learning as a way to attract the best talent. Some organizations are already adopting formations with hard and soft skills. Kelly Palmer, Clo (Chief Learning Officer) LinkedIn said “With our platform LearnIn on LinkedIn we put the student in command of the ship. The old learning model is not relevant in the current job setup. Learning should not focus on the process, achievement or follow-up, you need to focus on the empowerment of people with access to the skills they need when they really need them. We are building a culture of lifelong learning for our people to prepare for success and commitment to their work”.

Workshops and other training formats will be combined or replaced with learning options on-demand. Video will be more common as a learning tool. Employees will be responsible for identifying the necessary training Crowdsourcing will have a direct impact on those most valuable training modules. Kelly Palmer went so far as to say “social actions are integrated into our learning platform. This helps us know what our people value most while making our learning assets more compelling and visible to the rest of the company. Real-time learning is integrated into everyday actions and becomes a natural part of the workday, not an added activity “.

6. Analyzing the, Inc. in the virtual world

Competition forces us to be even more creative to differentiate ourselves from the herd – whether we're looking for work, aiming for a promotion, looking for new customers or new members for our team. The best way to gain a competitive advantage is to have your own website. There was a time when I thought a LinkedIn profile was enough, but nowadays, with more personal brand experts, the level has risen. Having our own professional website will position us and differentiate from our competition. When we talk about personal branding, differentiation is key.

Just as each company has its website, we will also need a personal site if we want to take charge of our career. This may seem daunting, but the good news is that the barriers to launching a high-quality personalized website have completely disappeared. They are no longer expensive and require significant investment when creating or maintaining them. Emerging platforms such as branded.me (a note: branded.me is a business partner of my company Reach Personal Branding) and others will become indispensable to create an authentic and differentiated website. And while these platforms are becoming more and more popular, still represent an opportunity to stand out.

7. LinkedIn as a competitive advantage for businesses

Many managers thought that if their employees had a LinkedIn profile it was because they were looking for work. And at first they had a bowl, since LinkedIn was launched as a virtual resume repository. But since then, LinkedIn has been transformed into a comprehensive personal and corporate brand platform. The old fear about Employees on LinkedIn is being replaced in innovative organizations with “If my employees use LinkedIn regularly, everyone in the organization will have an advantage over the competition.”

Kirsten Boileau, director of Digital Star-up's at SAP said “We value our team as an integral part of our social media strategy. As part of our social selling initiative, we're welcoming everyone – from our senior management executives to our latest additions. We've implemented a weekly podcast called Social Selling with Game Changers, about social sales and training in employee branding, and we're working to keep this spirit present across the organization”.

People trust people more than brands

Jack Teuber, Creative Director at PwC, sums it up this way: “There are too many benefits to ignore. People trust people more than brands, so employees who participate in LinkedIn are a communication channel of great potential for the company. They can help increase the visibility and targeting of corporate messages, humanizing a company's brand and make it easier to find talent.

To expand our success and the strength of our brand in 2016, it will be key to identify the trends that will have the greatest impact on the success of our career.

Bonus track #1. Personal Branding and Big Data

We'll talk calmly in another post, but I add to William Arruda's tendencies the potential of the Big Data in personal brand management. At the moment I recommend the reading that made it easier for me Pau Hortal about a text by consultancy Sage in this Link.

Bonus track #2. Humanization and values

Not long ago I published on Soymi's blog a title post "It's the people, Stupid" in which he highlighted the need for Humanize and "debotobotize" our people's relationships with others, especially on the net. The phrase "Our life matter" is eloquent in this regard, because those who hire us for their project will want to know more than our hard or soft skills, they'll be interested to know what's moving us, we care, motivate us.