Jeremiah Owyang researches social computing for Forrester Research and published statistics in his latest blog post “Email The First Social Network” that indicate email was the first and is still the most important social network and most widely used.
I just checked the number of email contacts I have and they out number the number of contacts and friends I have on any of my social networks. It makes sense that you treat email as one of our main tools for helping to create your own personal brand. There are a couple of basic attributes you should setup for sending emails.
First create a personally branded email address and avoid using free email account addresses such as johndoe_1@hotmail.com or john_doe_1@gmail.com because such addresses do not portray professionalism.
If you have your own name as your domain you should setup an email address that looks something like John@JohnDoe.com which looks a lot better and something people will easily remember. You should also create a professional looking signature file which will be appended to the end of every email you send, your email signature could be considered as your profile:
========================
John@JohnDoe.com
www.JohnDoe.com
Senior Vice President Marketing Acme Mechanical
www.AcmeMechanical.com
========================
I’m sure you would agree that this looks a lot more professional than ads you’ll see on the bottom of emails that are sent using free email accounts. Your personal brand is the way that people see you and email is definitely a social network that you’ll use extensively so it makes good sense to gain the maximum benefit as you use it.
Socialising