I am very excited to share that The Refinery at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest will host O.C.'s very first Orange County Social Media Summit on Friday, May 18, 2012. Over 300 people have RSVP'd to date and will draw in many more folks that are interested in learning, connecting and sharing with other social media advocates.

This event will be like no other event in Orange County. Social media pioneers will share business successes, personal growth, reports of increased web traffic, and scores of other benefits, from simply being present, and being themselves in social media.

The brains behind this event are the lovely @RochelleVeturis and @HaleyVeturis -- social media's sweethearts. A big heart-filled thank you for inviting me to participate as a panelist at the wonderful event. You can view all keynotes and panelists below. A shout out from the keynotes are also below for your viewing pleasure.

[Click to view more panelists.]

Facebook recently rolled out timeline for brands, and it’s important to know what this means in order to maximize your brand’s presence. Have you converted your page yet? Have you been wondering how your brand can benefit the most out  from the new layout?
 

One benefit is that when someone visits your new timeline business page, he/she will now have a more personalized experience. Visitors are now able to see how their personal Facebook friends have interacted with your business page. So, if a visitor tags your page in one of their posts, those with whom they originally shared will see these stories highlighted on your business page’s timeline. This is an opportunity for brands to tell a more engaging and authentic story.
 

Here are some key points I’ve collected from Mashable, HubSpot and Facebook on how to get the best exposure for your brand.

Cover Photos – Be sure to take advantage of the top image area by adding an image that is 851 x 315 pixels.  According to Facebook’s policies, the image may NOT contain:

 • Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your page’s “About” section
• References to user interface elements, such as “Like” or “Share,” or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”
• False, deceptive or misleading content, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property

Visual Content - There will now be more emphasis on visual content, such as photos and videos. Take advantage of this new real estate. Visual content will  increase brand engagement on your page: According to an internal Facebook study, “posts including a photo album or picture can generate 2X more engagement than other post types.” Because images will now appear larger and be more prominent, make a point of posting your best-possible visual content or making the content you already create more visual; Think photos, charts, infographics, and other content visualizations.
 

Existing Landing Tabs – The ability to specify a landing page is no longer an option. This is a major downfall for brands, although your existing tabs are still available and are now located under the cover photo. You can link to each page (i.e. if you have a custom page for a promotion), and once you click on a tab, there is navigation to select other options from a drop-down. You are able to manage three of the tabs ( or “Views” as Facebook now calls them). Click the down arrow to the right of the displayed tabs (the number next to the arrow is how many tabs you have). See image below.

After reading my last blog post – Wait, you haven’t read it yet? Go ahead and get caught up and meet us back here! – you’re probably, hopefully, maybe thinking about personal branding and image management more than you were just a few short weeks ago. And you might also be wondering why it all matters so much and why it’s so important.

As personal branding and image management consultant and expert Diana Jennings points out, “In order to succeed in business and in life, you need others to present opportunities and open doors for you.” Yes, succeeding in life and in business is pretty important, I’d say.

When you have a strong personal brand and image, that’s when people want to open those aforementioned doors for you. According to Diana, a strong personal brand positively affects credibility when the quality of your work and knowledge is consistent with your representation of who you truly are and what you’re truly about in this world. This consistency in all manner of communications – including everything from the way you dress to the comments you leave on a blog and the information conveyed in your email signature to the network you associate with – is what instills confidence in others that you are capable of walking your particular walk, instead of just talking the talk, ultimately increasing the number of opportunities that are presented to you.

Personal branding and image management isn’t just for powerhouse executives of giant corporations, politicians or fancy people anymore. It’s for professionals at all career levels, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs who aspire to a level of success higher than the one they have already attained – which is pretty much all of us, right?

The overwhelming majority of successful people are good communicators. They’re able to tell a good story and convey a strong message through their speaking and writing, but their non-verbal communication needs to reinforce what they’re saying or putting on paper in order to be truly believable.

Imagine you’re standing in an aisle of your friendly neighborhood grocery store and you’re trying to decide on a product in a category in which you don’t have a go-to brand and all of the products seem pretty much the same. You’ve narrowed it down to two options – one with visually-appealing packaging and one with packaging that looks like it took design cues from a grade schooler – when you realize that you’re running late for a meeting, you need to pick up the kids, you left the stove on, or any of life’s other little urgencies. So, you make an impulse decision and rush for the registers, nicely packaged product in hand.

According to Diana Jennings, founder of a personal branding and image management consulting company called Brand You Image, we make a lot of the same snap decisions when it comes to people and who we want to hire, who we want to work with and who we’re going to trust. To revisit our supermarket analogy, when we perceive two people’s qualifications or experience to be the same, we often rely on their image to help us decide which one we should select for the task at hand.

And that’s why Diana stresses the importance of her dual disciplines, image and personal branding, and the careful management of each. Your personal brand is your current reputation and the perception that others have about you, while image is the visual representation of that brand.

Embarking on a journey to discover your personal brand is an contemplative adventure that involves jotting down and otherwise documenting your short- and long-term goals, values, passions and the mental images and daydreams you have of your future, as well as the vision you have for our world and the purpose or role you will play in making that vision a reality. That vision is your supreme goal; it’s what keeps your eyes focused on the horizon instead of on the ground in front of you. “All of this information is then used to strategically develop a plan to maximize the communication of strengths,” says Diana, “especially to decision makers who can best help the individual move forward in his or her career or business.”

Since we’re visual people living in a visual world, you can’t just stop at telling your brand’s beautiful inner tale; you have to make sure that it tells the same story on the outside too. And that’s where image management comes in. Image management is the process of identifying the visual characteristics of your personal brand attributes that will leave a positive and differentiating impression on others. Managing one’s image is a form of non-verbal communication that includes clothing, grooming, body language, manners, mannerisms and personal surroundings to help establish and reinforce authentic credibility as a professional. Basically, it’s how you tell the world that you’re the stunning package they want to run to the register with instead of the dented white can with “PROFESSIONAL” in generic black lettering that they want to leave on the shelf.