Social Media 2011 – Top 11 Personal Branding Trends. Part 1.

Hi friends, Hope you're doing really well. Let's talk about about popularity, glory and everything in between. Here are top 11 personal-branding trends for 2011, first-5 in the first part of this article. These great promotion ideas will keep you visible as you grow in your marketing career (affiliate marketing, email marketing, e-business). Quick tip: for 2011, video is a primary focus and plays a major role in most of these 11 trends below. Please enjoy! 1. Anywhere Hiring As companies increase hiring after the global recession eases, they will be more open to bringing on ideal candidates regardless of the candidate's location. Driven by greater competition for talent, leaner budgets, years of successfully working off-site and advances in technology, there will be a marked increase in the number of people re-entering the workforce from remote locations. This trend will make offices slimmer and commutes shorter, but it will cause you to rely on technology even more to build your brand, land a job, and do it well. Video will be a particularly critical tool for interviewing remote candidates and a vital medium for communicating your brand message and building your identity with colleagues. 2. Homecasting In real estate listings, it has become common to see the initials "HO," for home office, as a selling feature. As more people start to work from home in 2011, look for the abbreviation to become "HOS," or Home Office Studio. And with the move to all things video, the home office will now become a "set," giving new meaning to the real estate term "home staging." Home offices will have video equipment designed to ensure high-quality audio and professional-looking backgrounds for synchronous and asynchronous communication. Although Skype has been the basic mode of video connections for quite some time, Cisco recently announced the more robust Telepresence for the home called UMI. Homecasting systems will become less expensive, higher quality, and more pervasive. 3. VIDmail Email is so last decade. Good riddance, because email is one of our weakest forms of expression. Words account for only about 7% of a communication, and words are pretty much all we have to work with on email. As video becomes easier and easier to create and distribute, it will eventually replace the ubiquitous text-based email that we've been using for about 30 years. Look for changes to email software and new products to support this evolution from text to video. VideoBIO and Talk Fusion are just two of many companies that offer services to support video in email. 4. Prêt-à-Regarder (Ready-to-Watch) In the Mad Men '60s and Mary Tyler Moore '70s, the dress or coat-and-tie "uniform" was just about mandatory. During the '80s, we loosened up and created casual Fridays when we acknowledged that formal clothes don't necessarily make the employee. In the '90s and '00s, every day became casual in many workplaces, especially if those workplaces were the spare bedroom or dining room table. Soon, the fashion needle will swing back a bit. If you work from home, the days of working in your pajamas are numbered thanks to live video meetings. But no need to stow the shorts and flip-flops, since we'll mostly homecast from the waist up. 5. Personal Branding Infused Human resources leaders understand that an excellent way to retain talent is to increase engagement and help employees apply their best skills. Over the past decade, many Fortune 500 companies and global brands have built personal-branding training programs to support employee development. In the coming years, personal branding will be fully integrated into learning systems. That means there will be elements of personal branding included in soft-skills training—from new-hire orientation through leadership development. As you participate in development programs in the coming year, listen to how many times you hear references to your personal brand.