This week we’re talking about your personal branding trends for 2022, the year of remote work. What should you expect in the personal branding space? What I’d like to say is we should expect more people. Let’s welcome more people into this personal branding universe. I’m calling it the year of remote work.
THERE IS AN INFLUX OF REMOTE WORK
Why is that? Given our past trajectory in the past two years, what we are seeing is more and more people working remotely. That is because their corporation has allowed them to work from home digitally, either full-time or part-time.
It is also because more people have left the workforce and started their own companies, or have been unemployed by the workforce and are looking to start side gigs, their own programs, or entrepreneurial ventures.
What that means is a lot more people are in the digital working economy, and that means remote work. It means people are virtually finding ways to build income and that trend creates a lot of opportunities.
REMOTE WORK IS CONNECTED TO PERSONAL BRANDING
Here are the three things that more people entering the workforce lead to. It’s all connected to personal branding because this is more people who are looking to build their own online reputation. You cannot work online in a digital environment without thinking about how you are representing yourself and what your reputation is online.
There are three things that are contributing to this trend. Number one is mobility. There are more people now that have realized that remote work will unlock the opportunity for more mobility.
FIND FREEDOM THROUGH REMOTE JOBS
Mobility means you have more freedom in a lot of areas. What it means is freedom of location. You can work from home and move to a new area that might be more income adjusted to what you might be making.
Now, post-pandemic, it might be more opportunistic where you can move to where there might be more places for you to find income both online and offline. It all is grounded in this idea that if you can build an economic income for yourself and for your family that is derived in some way, shape, or form digitally, then you are free to make your expenses not so location dependent.
In other words, let’s say even if you make half this year what you made last year, if you can move anywhere in the country, you could easily jump around to somewhere, decrease your expenses, and be living better than you lived before.
Mobility is the key to this, and remote work has unlocked that. In other words, a lot more of our jobs and a lot of those skills are translating into a digital environment. You may not need to be in-person to make a sales call, have a consultation, or manage your customer.
All those jobs can now be managed online through virtual communication, and that changes things. When your meetings in person are replaced by meetings online, it changes the game. Remote work is being driven by the changes in mobility. You now have an opportunity to diversify where you live to also change the way you make money.
JOBS ARE BEING DONE DIFFERENTLY
Because you are home and you’re not in an office physically eight hours a day, driving to the office sometimes an hour a day, it gives you more opportunity to fill your day with other digital jobs. You may be able to be multitasking while you’re doing other work.
Now your job, instead of being dependent on hours, is dependent on projects. You completing a project for one company no longer stops you from completing a project for a second company. Obviously, that depends on your non-competes with your companies and what the nature of your work is. However, there is more opportunity than ever to add income streams.
This will add stability to the average person’s income, which is what we are all looking for in this kind of world, where the economy has changed and our job opportunities have changed.
COMPANIES ARE EVOLVING TO INCLUDE REMOTE WORK
You’ve already seen this. You’ve seen companies that are having more and more trouble finding the staff they need to complete their work. What they have to do is be more flexible. They have to give people opportunities to work remotely.
They have to allow people new hybrids of working, where they can work a few hours instead of full time to complete project by project. That is an opportunity for people, especially in personal branding. If you want to be that person they hire, you now have to change the way you represent yourself online.
The other piece of mobility has to do with your time. Your time is now owned by you. The next step is how you become more efficient at using that time. How do you show up? Where do you communicate? What meetings do you show up to? How do you deploy your highest skills in a digital way? That’s all the first level of this.
BEING REMOTE MEANS MORE CONTROL OF YOUR TIME
The second level of the 2022 personal branding trends and the year of remote work is about the digital community. As we are breaking away from the corporate environments and we are working online more, it means that there are new relationships forming.
People are still looking for connection, but they’re finding it virtually. They’re finding it via new communities, whether because they’ve moved to this new physical location or because they are now connecting more within virtual communities.
It could be a Facebook group or some kind of community-based interest association, or they’re joining clubs or coworking spaces because they’re working from co-working spaces instead of the office. Maybe they want to bond with other people that do what they do because they realize their network matters more than it ever has.
They’re joining little groups and communities that are all based on their interest or their skills, whether it’s a community for marketers, accountants or people in finance, or communities of people in real estate or in coaching or fitness. They are finding like-minded individuals and bonding with them in a virtual way by people who are hosting these communities that are becoming leaders in this space.
RELATIONSHIPS ARE CHANGING ONLINE
Those communities are changing the way relationships are formed. It changes the way we think about and talk to other people. There are now new technologies that allow that to be easier than ever beyond Facebook even, which is the biggest one.
Now there are Discord communities for groups like this. There are Slack communities. It could be a membership that you’re joining for a low fee each month, or it could be a higher level mastermind where you’re paying for some coaching of some skill that you’re learning.
Joining that community-level engagement also contributes to personal branding because your reputation again starts digitally. You have to start to say, how am I representing myself and my personal brand online? When I connect in these digital communities, what shows up?
Think about what you look like and the profile you are building. What are you seeing in the blurbs on these digital profiles? Consider the images you use to represent yourself and your background on virtual calls. Think about what people find when they search for your information on google and social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
WHAT DO PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT YOU?
This means more attention is being paid to personal brands, beyond the people who are just trying to show up and become an expert, a thought leader, or a coach of some sort. The average everyday person working in a corporate environment in a white-collar job now has to start thinking about their personal brand.
We have new people entering the space, which will mean that digital personal branding becomes more common. Your bar is raised. You can’t just show up. You actually have to show up very clearly with clarity and purpose about what you represent, what you are looking for, who you are for, and how you want to stand out in that environment where more people are showing up.
PERSONAL BRANDING IS KEY TO REMOTE WORK
The third piece to this personal branding trend beyond remote work and beyond digital communities is this element we’re diving into, which is online reputation. Your online reputation is no longer just your social media profile. Your online reputation is now the people you’re connected with, the things you say, and the things you create online.
What does that mean? That means people have to be more intentional about the content they are creating. Now that you are online, everything is capturable. Whether you are just showing up or showing up and engaging, the engagements you have reflect back on you.
CREATE YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
The best way to get ahead of that and to create what people find about you online is to create content. Content creation now becomes not a luxury, not something for influencers. Content creation becomes critical to online reputation management. Your content becomes your resume.
The new skills of creating content, writing articles, blogs, and posts online, and even the more advanced skills of podcasting and video creation all become new pools of education and skills that people will be tapping into.
Like everything else as you enter new places, you have to acquire new skills. In the online reputation space, content creation is key. It’s not just going to be, how do I grow my Instagram, or how do I look more professional on Instagram and LinkedIn? It’s going to go beyond that to how do I create content?
How do I build a portfolio website or just a website where when people look for me, they find what I want them to find? How do I do that in a way that makes sense in a corporate environment where I still have a job, where it matters how I represent myself that is more portfolio-driven as opposed to business-driven?
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
REMOTE WORK MEANS YOU CAN DIVERSIFY
Maybe you are looking for people that will hire you without disengaging with the corporations that might already employ you. All that’s a balance and that new environment is all driven by this trend of remote work. In my perspective, this is a giant opportunity for people to diversify and start to think about how to set up more safety in your system, in your life.
In other words, what’s the balance going to be? Now you are more independent than you’ve ever been because you’ve diversified your income to not just being corporately employed, but to being corporately flexible. You are employed by them in a way that you determine, whether it’s full-time, part-time, freelance, hybrid, remote, whatever it is, and what you build on top of that with your spare time.
You can be building in the background something that can be the sustaining piece that gets you through the ebbs and flows of a corporate environment. That’s the new new. That’s the new approach is building systems that allow you to survive the up and downs of an unbalanced equation.
INVEST IN YOUR PERSONAL BRAND
Those are my thoughts on the trends for 2022. Remote work is continuing to grow, continuing to be an integral part of all of our lives. It is affecting the way we live our lives, impacting the way we set ourselves up in terms of mobility, where we live, and how we live. It’s affecting the time we spend, affecting us in terms of the communities we attach to bond with. It’s also affecting us in terms of the way we think about managing our online reputations.
Invest in your personal brand. Continue to think about how you represent yourself online and offline. Leverage the power of your voice, your perspective, and the opportunity that’s out there for someone like you, an individual. Go out there and create the opportunities in front of you.
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