You Get It Winner of the Month – Sean O’Donnovan

This month’s Personal Branding You Get It winner of the month award goes to Sean O’Donnovan.

And for the second time in the history of this award, you’ll notice it’s a non-blogger.

The purpose of this award is to showcase examples with you so that you can start to take control of your own personal brand online. I know many of you are intimidated and don’t want to blog, and think that many of my past winners are doing way more than you can commit to.

Sean’s website is an example that you can and should do certain things to own your personal brand in search results. In fact, when I searched for Sean O’Donovan (even without quotes) his page was third (only following a .gov city website and the imdb website, which Google loves):

Here’s what I like about Sean O’Donovan’s website, which I think portrays who he is nicely:

Sean owns his name – can I stress this enough? It’s huge for branding, makes you look more professional (and serious), and search engines love it!

Sean has his picture (which looks nice and professional) and a rotating quote from someone on every page of his website – see image at right –>

Sean has all of the stuff I’d expect to see on a resume, and he took advantage of the formatting you can get online (colors, bolds, etc.). Not rocket science, and even expected, but he’s doing it right, and that’s good.

The header for Sean, a senior executive, is simple yet powerful, with a quote that exemplifies what he brings to the position:

Do you have any testimonials about You, Inc? Sean does! I suggest you harvest these – get genuine, specific testimonials from people that carry some weight (which is usually because of the company they work for or their title). You can even get them from your LinkedIn profile and put them on your personal website. Check out the first testimonial from Sean:

Sean has been in the press. Have you? He hadn’t before, but check out what he writes:

While in career transition in late 2006, I successfully pitched the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper to write a weekly column. Entitled “Diary of a Job Hunter”, the column ran for 10 weeks and tracked the ups and downs of an executive job search.

I think this is great, of course, the best part is his very last column, where he lands the job:

Finally, he makes it easy to contact him with a “Contact” page, and he puts a link to his LinkedIn profile, which is very well-done.

Sean O’Donovan, congratulations! You join a special group of professionals and have earned a coveted link from my monthly winner’s blogroll area (on the left), six months of premium JibberJobber (you can transfer/award this to someone else ), and a cyber-high five! Feel free to post the You Get It award on your site!

Here are the past winners:

• September 2006 – ClickDave – my review
• October 2006 – Kent Blumberg – my review
• November 2006 – Heather Henricks – my review
• December 2006 – Adelino de Almeida – my review
• January 2007 – Rob Humphrey – my review
• January 2007 – Ariel Meadow Stallings – my review
• February 2007 – Mike Schaffner – my review
• March 2007 – Susan Johnston – my review
• April 2007 – Thomas Clifford – my review
• May 2007 – Rob Frankel – my review
• June 2007 – Trent Hamm – my review
• July 2007 – Katie Konrath – my review
• August 2007 – Robb Hecht – my review
• September 2007 – OOPS! I took this month off and didn’t realize it! Lucky me 🙂
• October 2007 – Tanya Ferrill – my review

Special kudos to Paul Copcutt, of Square Peg Solution, who worked with Sean on this project, and helped him through the 360 review process (more on that later).