What is your GQ?

Yeah go ahead, take a guess. It’s not General Quotient and not even Gentleman’s quotient. And if you haven’t already Googled, it is Google Quotient.

Last week at NASSCOM Emerge’s Friday 2.0, the discussion was on personal branding. When asked what is brand, one of the answers that have stuck with me is your brand is what Google says about you. But seriously how many of us have actually Googled ourselves? It really throws up some weird and unimagined things sometimes. Like when I Googled myself except for the usual suspects like My social media profiles, blog etc I saw my name also appeared from my college’s newsletter as I used to write for it in those days.

Just then it struck me whenever I go to any conference or to any meeting, I end up googling the speaker as I did this time also. It just made me extra aware what my online presence meant. So I decided to list down somethings which anyone could do to enhance one’s personal brand online. These are not mine strictly, I did up a lot of them from my people I met or interacted online. Here they are 

1. Social media presence is hygiene and all have that. What matters is content. Are you an influencer on your friends (Facebook), followers (Twitter). What do you write about? And opinions do matter. Look at this article for some of the big influencers on Twitter.
2. The idea is to set oneself apart. Knowing what’s happening is just the starting. Like Joey from my beloved Friends you don’t need to buy a whole volume of Encyclopedia for that today. You can just follow some blogs or just simply go to Wikipedia. But more than digesting so much of content its necessary to produce some also. It is a two way street now. So create a blog and have a post up at least every fortnight.
3. The usual things like being funny, being a good story teller, writing even the most mundane topics in a storytelling manner always helps.
4. Comment on other blogs and make relationships. Once I just posted a comment on another blog. The comment had my blog link and I suddenly saw my blog’s traffic doubled in a week because of that, but here also quality scores over quantity.
5. Stay fresh and keep on updating your social life or people will stop coming to your blog and followers will unfollow you.
6. Have a metric in mind to know that you are really growing. Like the comments on any  post, pageviews etc. It can be anything but not everything.

And one last thing, Follow me on @Jatt_On_Hunt ;)