You manage your own brand; create something

How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars.
- Steve Martin

We live in age of social media.  We all have become media owner of our own social circles.  We have friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, colleagues on LinkedIn and members on Blogger.  If you have been active on social media, you'll probably have a Facebook Page or two with fans and NetworkedBlogs account with a few followers as well.  All these channels have created an easy way for anyone to publish their voice.

Action is what counts;
key to proactively manage your own brand?
Just do it.

What used to be an very difficult proposition of creating the syndication network of your writing is now a few clicks away with no upfront cost at all.  In fact, we live in a time where thoughtful content is increasingly more difficult to find.  Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, it's so easy for people to share their minute-by-minute reactions and they travel instantaneously through our social graphs to flood people's news feed pages and tickers.  Frequent microblogging updates increase the noise for users, and it's that much more difficult for people to find quality content.

And what's amazing is that there are more channels than ever before.  In addition to aforementioned sites, there are Tumblr, Pinterest, Wordpress, Google+ and Foursquare, and the list is still growing (I don't expect this trend to slow down anytime soon).  What this means is that we will have more channels at our disposal to deliver our message to potential readers.  And what it really means is that it's all about you the content creator.  Whether your content was discovered from Facebook Page, Tumblr or Google+ will not matter because the real brand will be you, your name.

But all these channels won't mean a thing unless there is content to be delivered.  You have to find a topic that you care about, and start contributing to the larger conversation with your own point of view.  If you don't get up and start writing or video recording your own content, you are not going to get anywhere.  The first step in managing your brand proactively as social media owner is to create content.

You just have to start doing it.  It does not matter whether you use Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook Notes and/or LinkedIn Groups.  As long as content is created by you and reflects your own view, it is fine.  Post them to your favorite blogging platform, and amplify the message by syndicating it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and whatever network that you can get your hands on.