Learning and sharing... by Zoe Sands

Blog: My interview with William Arruda at Juniper’s Global Partner Conference, Las Vegas

When I found out that William Arruda was going to be speaking at the Juniper Networks Global Partner Conference I was giddy with excitement that I might actually get to met someone who has had an influence on my career. There has probably been a hand full of people who have had a significant impact on my career some of whom have been ex-lecturers, ex-department directors, ex-managers to current people who mentor me now. Those that have influenced me most and immediately spring to mind are Ken Lee (at the time he was Marketing Director at Hyundai Car UK Ltd), he got me into Digital Marketing during 1997 by instructing me to launch Hyundai’s first UK website and William Arruda, whom enlightened me through his book Career Distinction to start managing my personal brand back in 2007.

Personal branding has somewhat been a little hobby of mine since discovering that I shared my name with someone in the porn industry. Up until discovering this I had never Googled myself, as I thought it was egotistical and only something a celebrity or his/her team of PR luvies would do. I now realise that it is essential to keep an eye on my personal brand and what content is associated with my name, as people are searching on my name both in a professional and personal context.

So, with this background information in mind you can understand why I was very excited to be meeting and interviewing William Arruda, whom I consider to be my personal branding teacher. The interview was very informal and during which I got William to explain what personal branding means, whether there was a difference between personal and corporate branding. He was adamant that there is no difference between the two and that they have a strong synergy and complement one another, which makes sense. He emphasised that it is; personal branding plus corporate and not separate. We then moved onto how people can establish their own personal brand, William advised not to jump online and create lots of profiles and content, but to create a plan and be clear about your brand before expressing your brand. When you have your plan in place then you need to look at your online profile and check your name within Google, you never know there may be some content online that you don’t want to show up in the search results, William says this is digital dirt and provides two tips on resolving this;

1.    Vacuum the content up - get the content removed.

2.    Swipe it under the rug - create new content on your name and own the first three pages within Google, as statistically 73% of searchers don’t go beyond page 3 and therefore won’t see the “digital dirt”

We then discussed tips on creating relevant content, he suggested that we all should register our names as domain names, create our own website content and utilise YouTube by developing our own channels.

Regarding Social Media he pointed out that quite a few people have got into a lot of problems with inappropriate Facebook content being posted about them, to combat this you should keep your professional and personal life separate on this platform. There are tools and widgets that can help you do this, such as talent.com, honesty.com and brandout.com. Twitter on the other hand is a really useful tool as a pointing device, so whenever you create content you should syndicate this within Twitter.

I then asked William “how can organisations utilise personal branding?” He says that organisations need to develop talent; developing talent internally will complement the corporate brand. This in turn this creates engagement, motivated and inspired employees.

Closing off the interview I asked William to provide his top three personal branding tips, these are;

1.    Know your brand – get feedback from your peers

2.    Write a branded bio – include passions, experience and knowledge

3.    Update your LinkedIn profile – get a professional headshot and recommendations

It was a pleasure to interview William and I hope you have found this summary and video of some use. Do drop any comments in the box below, thanks.