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Former Member
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I recently got into social media for work in a big way, I started with curating content and posting on LinkedIn and twitter and have now started to write blogs for the SAP Cloud Blog and the SAP Innovation Blog, all of which have been a great and low cost way of promoting both brand SAP and brand Clare Leighton.

 

There is a problem however with my Google ranking, I have misfortune of having the same name as a reasonably artist born in 1898 who was a writer, illustrator but was best  known for her wood engravings, there is a website devoted to her www.clareleighton.com and lots of people still studying her and writing about her work.  This means that whatever I do to try and boost my own profile on Google rankings, I am battling against a well established name.  I have got myself to number 11 in the Google search, but can’t seem to crack the first page!

 

I was not born a Leighton, I married one and interestingly, had I kept my maiden name of Woods, I would have had a similar problem as there is a modern day artist called Clare Woods with quite a big web presence.

Personal branding is a fairly new concept to me, I have been dabbling for a while, but it was brought home to me when I attended a Personal Branding workshop organised as part of people week at SAP.

 

The first slide gave a definition of a brand from Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson. “A brand is more than a name or a logo – it is a promise and a contract with every customer with whom you are dealing and if people feel that the offering does not live up to what they expect from the brand, they will decide to stop buying.”

 

Tom Peters in his book “The Brand You” noted that big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand.  In his website he also noted the things which a personal brand was NOT the first of which was

 

“1. It's NOT what you say about yourself.

In simple terms, what you say about yourself falls under the category of "freedom of speech." You can say whatever you want. Does not mean a thing. Your personal brand is an assessment the marketplace makes about who you are and what you bring to the marketplace.”

Reading this quote from Tom Peters whilst researching this blog, actually changed what I was going to write, I was going to tell you about all the things which I think I stand for – B2B marketing, cloud computing, SAP and outside work, netball player, Mum of 2 and active contributor to various education related causes, but as Tom points out, unless you believe what I have to say, that’s all just noise.

So what is important and which I am starting to realise is not how much stuff you push out, but how much people interact with what you write that counts.  I was therefore interested to learn about tweetlevel and Klout, both of which are online reputation and influence measures.  I am delighted to say that both my tweetlevel and Klout scores are pretty high given the standing start I came from so I guess I must be on the right track. 

Oh and please remember, if you want to find me on Google, you might need to look beyond the first page....