The Me Brand

You know the saying – it’s a Me Me world. Or, it’s all about Me. Those statements ring oddly true today more than ever. Every day of your career you are building the Brand of Me. Your professional Personal Brand is a very important asset in today’s online, virtual, fast-blogging business world.

Advertisers define branding as the idea, concept or image created in the minds of people when they see a company logo or product. Companies invest millions to create and communicate their brand through print, radio and TV advertising. Business professionals can now leverage this concept and its power to create their own Personal Brand using the Internet. Marian Banker, President of Primestrategies.com and creator of BrandingU says a personal brand “is similar in concept and can be used as the foundation upon which to build the brand for your business or career."

The idea of a Personal Brand is not new, but today there are new tools available for helping you create, maintain and market your Personal Brand. Fast Company discusses a number of powerful ways you can build “The Brand Called You”.

Why is this important to you? People want to do business with people they know or people they feel they can trust. So how can you communicate your value through the vastly impersonal mediums of e-mail or the Internet? Answer: When people search to find out more about you, if you can offer a friendly and informative online presence or online brand, people will have the sense that they know you and be more receptive to doing business with you.

One of the free and easy methods available for creating or supporting your own professional Personal Brand is through an online profile. You can create a summary of your career in an online profile – an online virtual home for your brand. You can then use it to communicate your brand to others by linking it to the signature of your e-mail footer, posting it on your website, and listing yourself by name atop every major search engine. Ziggs makes this free and easy. Check out Ziggs today and create your free online profile – your professional brand. To see an example, you're welcome to visit my online brand-in-progress: Meet me at Ziggs

Bookmark Ziggs - the fastest-growing people search engine for finding and connecting with professionals.

Walt Mossberg Reviews Ziggs

Walt Mossberg reviewed Ziggs in one of his recent Personal Technology columns in the Wall Street Journal, together with Indeed, a comprehensive jobs search engine. What’s exciting about Walt’s column on Ziggs and Indeed is that with this article Walt officially puts the concept of “vertical search” on the journalistic map.

The idea that the big horizontal search engines - obviously Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and more - don’t always meet a searcher’s needs is an important concept for the search industry and the consumer marketplace. As people become aware that there a multiple search engine options for tailoring their searches, they become empowered and more informed. Ziggs is glad to see Walt introduce this viewpoint to his loyal readership, using Ziggs and Indeed as good examples of vertical search engines.

Walt begins by saying, “The big search engines like Google and Yahoo dominate the business of navigating the Internet. Millions of people start every Web session by typing a search term into these sites. But coming up with search results tailored to your needs isn't so easy. Because these major search engines index a huge swath of the Web, and are designed to find almost anything, they are necessarily general in nature. In most cases, you'll get lots of irrelevant results. So more and more companies see a market for what is called vertical search. These are search engines designed to help pluck only specific types of information from the Internet. They index only those sites likely to have that specific kind of information, and they use search queries tailored to their specialties. I've been testing two of the newest vertical search sites, both designed around people and work.”

Walt goes on to review Ziggs, stating that Ziggs “helps you find people with particular skills or other characteristics for hiring or networking purposes. For instance, it might help you find a lawyer in Washington specializing in international trade, or an alumnus of Brandeis University who lives in Delaware.” He goes on to say, “If you aren't listed somewhere on the Web, Ziggs allows you to create a detailed profile that will pop up whenever anyone searches for your name, or for other characteristics that match your profile. You can even include a photo, a favorite quotation and a canned ‘interview’ based on questions Ziggs supplies.”

“Ziggs is free for searchers. There will be a $25 annual fee to be listed in Ziggs, though it's free for the first year.” A point of clarification is needed here. As of March 20th, 2005, Ziggs is absolutely free for both searchers and professionals who want to list a profile in Ziggs. There is no charge for existing or new listings in Ziggs.

Walt offers criticisms of Ziggs as well. He indicates that our services seem to focus on helping people promote themselves, rather than providing comprehensive information. And that in fact is one of the primary goals of Ziggs. There are already numerous search engines that provide comprehensive information. In fact a search at Google for the name Mark Smith yields 29 million+ results by that name. Now that’s comprehensive – but it doesn’t deliver the searcher the Mark Smith they’re searching for. That’s where Ziggs steps in. As a dedicated people search engine, Ziggs enables the searcher to conduct a search that yields a list of Mark Smiths that can be instantly sorted by state, city or company, enabling the searcher to quickly pinpoint the right Mark Smith.

Walt goes on to note that Ziggs’ search results provide “neutral or flattering bios,” rather than info that “might warn you way from a person.” This is also an important distinguishing point about Ziggs. We believe that the most current, up-to-date information about an individual (for example, a corporate bio) satisfies 95% of people search needs. This should include contact information, background information and maybe even a photo. By delivering an up-to-date bio of current information in search results, Ziggs believes we best serve both the needs of the searcher and the person being searched for. This also ensures that the privacy of the people being searched for is also protected at all times.
Walt concludes his article with the finding that “both Ziggs and Indeed provide interesting, focused information that would be hard to find as quickly or precisely on Google or Yahoo.” Try Ziggs for yourself. We hope you agree!

Bookmark Ziggs - the fastest-growing people search engine for finding and connecting with professionals.

Graduating Students – 3 Tips To Land Your New Job

As graduation season approaches, many grads are looking to the same places to find jobs: online job banks, newspapers, job fairs. These methods are rarely helpful, as HR managers receive hundreds of e-mailed resumes, and seldom have the opportunity to sift through them all. How can you differentiate yourself enough to win an interview?

To differentiate yourself from the competition there are a number of options, many of which are not easy, and one that is. For example, in addition to a resume, some experts suggest creating a website to showcase yourself and your background. This involves paying a hosting site, as well as knowledge of website design. Although this is a fine idea for the more technically-oriented person seeking differentiation, there is a simpler approach – that’s as easy as 1-2-3.

1. Get an Online Profile

An online profile is a powerful tool that differentiates you from the mass of resumes flooding the market, and gives you an advantage in networking. A professional online profile is easy to create, easy to maintain and update yourself. No technical or website development skills required. No hosting service fees necessary. It enables you to present a digital photo, work experience, and contact information in a compelling and visual professional format that is more appealing than the traditional resume. To see an example of a graduating student’s online profile, check out Dario Paone’s and Ra Un’s profiles, both created and listed at Ziggs for free:


2. Search for Networking Contacts

Use a search engine for finding people in the field you seek or for finding people with a common background point such as your college. For example, using a search engine dedicated to professionals, you can conduct a keyword search for contacts in your field and city of interest and yield a networking list that results in the right introductions needed for the desired job. For example, you can do a keyword search at Ziggs for “marketing” and “Boston” and find an instant list of networking possibilities if your field of interest is marketing-related.

3. Connect with Networking Contacts

Once you have a list of potential networking contacts, e-mail your online profile with a quick introduction, followed up by a phone call. E-mailing an online profile to offer a warm introduction can establish trust and goodwill with the recipient, and can lead to a request for your resume and an offer to help.

Go to Ziggs today to jumpstart your job search. Ziggs can help you 1) create a free professional online profile, 2) build networking contact lists by conducting keyword searches against the more than 2.25 million professionals in the Index, and 3) begin networking immediately by e-mailing your online profile to your new network list. With Ziggs it can be as easy as 1-2-3 to land your first job out of college or grad school. Good luck and let me know how it goes.

People Search - A Guilty Pleasure?

Have you recently searched for someone on the Web prior to meeting with them or speaking with them by phone? Have you recently "googled" your X's on the Web? More and more people are exhibiting this somewhat "guilty pleasure" by searching to learn more about someone they're about to meet, or searching to find information on someone they once knew. It somehow seems like a guilty pleasure, because we know we may find information on someone - without them knowing we've found it.

Even if you've never searched on a name before, many of your fellow Americans have. According to Knight Ridder, one in three Americans online say they have plugged in the name of someone they know in a search engine. Wordtraker Report indicates that the search term "people search" ranks within the top 100 - 200 search terms across the Web each day. So someone may be searching online for you.

If that sounds unsettling, there is one solution that can give you a bit of control over the results that people find online about you. Try building an online profile. It's easy and it's free at Ziggs. Ziggs offers an easy-to-use profile creation template that lets you answer a few questions to build a professional profile. When you're done, it's hosted for free at Ziggs and searchable by your name or keyword. And if you'd like to see your name at or near the top of every search engine, Ziggs can make that happen for you as well for no more than $4/month. Learn more at Ziggs.

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Welcome to the Ziggs Blog

The purpose of this blog is to provide helpful tips and techniques for professionals to enable them to better find and connect with one another through the Internet.

Understanding that people do business with people, Ziggs mission is to assist professionals in meeting their business objectives by optimizing the experience of presenting to and connecting with professionals online. Ziggs' purpose is to help make doing business more personal by enabling integrity, quality and trust in the initiation phase of business relationships. To leare more about how we offer aid in this effort, visit us at Ziggs!.

We open this forum to professionals to review, add to and hopefully profit from. Our first value-add post will be coming shortly. We look forward to your participation.

Bookmark Ziggs - the fastest-growing people search engine for finding and connecting with professionals.