When Polls Go Thud

Yes, that’s the sound of a poll hitting the floor – thud!

I’m not sure I could have predicted it, but last month’s poll met a resounding nothing.

Oh, sure, I could say that two thirds of my readers have no idea what a “Personal Brand” is, but that’s even a stretch for me to make!-)

Cricket

Apparently the topic of branding is not much of interest to the LinkedIn crowd, and I can’t say that I understand why.

Let’s have a quick look at the potential uses of a personal brand…

Job seekers

If you’re looking for work, you need a personal brand to stick out from the crowd. Would you like to be one programmer out of a sea of 28,443 professionals living within 50 miles of Manhattan that use the word “programmer” in their profile?

Or would you like to be the “web guru” and share that space with just 16 professionals using the term?

Sales people

If you’re selling something, would you like to be one individual among the 2389 “salesman” / “saleswoman” living near Manhattan?

Or would you like to be a “superstar”?

Professionals

While those two cases were easy to present, it doesn’t take much to see that it’s easy enough to fit in with the crowd.

But nearly everything you want to do professionally involves standing out from the crowd – and how do you do that? A personal brand…

The process

If you want to get going and build a personal brand – read “Resource for Building your Personal Brand“. I put that up on the site last year.

And I also cover it in a segment of “The LinkedIn Personal Trainer“.

Back to the poll…

So yes, the single thing that the results tell us, is that most people don’t even understand what a personal brand is.

But the lack of response – that tells me something even more important – most people don’t even care about the concept of a personal brand!

Fewer people participated in this poll than any other the site has offered – even the introductory “do people actually participate in online polls” poll!

Charts and such

So – without something useful to chart, I’m comparing the number of responses against the responses for other polls…

Poll response rate

Work cut out for me…

Well, this definitely tells me what kind of issues LinkedIn users need to hear about.

Of course – it also means users probably aren’t interested in reading more about personal brands. I might just have to find a way of telling people about personal brands without telling people about personal brands.

I’ll see what I can do…

Next up – Is your use of LinkedIn focused on a job search?

I know many people consider the site essential for job searching, and I do cover those topics here, but let’s find out how diverse the current readers of this site (and users of LinkedIn) are at this point in time.

So tell me this – Of the time you spent on LinkedIn last month, how much of it was related to finding a job?

Check it out – just over to the right and up.

To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock