May 7, 2008 | blog
Do you, or does someone else? There is some growing interest in the Personal Branding space on scenarios of people with the same name. I was fortunate enough to have a great conversation on the topic with Kristen King of BizChicksRule which she turned into What if Your Name Is Jenna Jameson? Personal Branding and Owning Your Space.
Now I was trying to figure out how to write a post with a reference to a porn star, but Kristen was able to do so in a really professional way. For anyone looking for tips on dealing with people sharing Google juice with another person, you need to check out her post.
Bigger Picture
This also brings up the broader question of Personal Branding itself. As you work to establish your brand, even a unique name, are you using the tools that available to you? There are many ways to promote your brand, but you need to act early and hit everything available. If you’re starting out building your brand, you need to be aggressive in going after the online properties that will not only represent you, but protect you from interlopers. Either intentional or not, you don’t want someone with the same name from encroaching on your brand.
Don’t Get Lost
As for the photo above, it shows two problems.
- There is very little on either can to make it obvious at a glance as to which is which. You really have to pay attention to get what you were looking for.
- There is nothing interesting to draw in a potential customer or lead. Blah! If this was your brand, you’d get lost in the crowd. Believe me, it’s getting crowded out there.
When building your brand, you not only need to own your space, but you need to capture that which makes you special and valuable. Otherwise, who cares if you’re sliced beets or sliced potatoes?
May 6, 2008 | blog, happiness
Hi all! One of my friends from SOBCon08 suggested that it would be nice to have a feed just dedicated to my Happiness posts. So that’s what I did. You can subscribe to this feed and get just those posts you’re looking for and nothing more.
Since I can’t remember who made that suggestion, please let me know so I can set the record straight and let everyone know.
Well I do remember! In a discussion with writing/blogging friend Joanna Young at the conference, we had talked about the mixed social media, personal branding, and other content. While we talked about possibly moving it to another site, it occurred to me to try a separate feed for the happiness posts. I think it works. Thanks Joanna!
Mar 14, 2008 | blog
It’s time has come, or passed rather… at least for me. I’m sure I’ll cross paths with my favorite email client and PIM in the future. I’ll either have a change of heart (unlikely) or a future client will insist that I use it for internal email at their location (very likely).
For all those anti-Microsoft folks that love to hear things like this, I simply have to say that it has little to do with the product. It does have everything to do with the way I work. As I transition much of my work online, I’m finding that I use more than one or two computers. Since it’s much harder to sync all the data on all these machines, and the fact that I simply can’t do this on some, leads me to world of cloud computing.
This is nothing new for me, I’ve been an advocate of leveraging the cloud for years, but it’s the first concerted effort to simply migrate my data and shift my app usage online. Yes this includes office productivity solutions as well. I’ll be using a lot of both Google Apps and Zoho Office. Both have their strong points and I’m aiming to leverage both for different reasons.
I’ve got most of my data on either XDrive or SkyDrive for differing reasons, and use Box.net as well for some always accessible drivers, tables, code snippets, and such.
I’ll keep MS Office Pro installed, but it’s use is limited to supporting my clients – nothing more. So join me, if you wish, and see how well this works out! I’ll share my frustrations and my wins equally with you.
Have you been thinking of doing the same? What are your directions on how you work, looking into the future?
Feb 8, 2008 | blog
So I was sitting at my local coffee shop this morning reading feeds, Twittering and writing. Not an unusual morning, but like other times a person gets inspired, it came from a comment from someone. This time from Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter. While talking about a the new Egos site created by Guy Kawasaki he Tweeted:
My recommendations to you: somewhere in the middle, develop your own feedreader of high value blogs and alerts everyone is unique
What occurred to me is that I didn’t think much about the a-list much any longer. While the semi-annual meme of beating on the a-list being a favorite sport for many bloggers, something any committed blogger will realize after awhile is that they develop their own a-list. This is simply the list of bloggers that they read and are influenced by.
It becomes less about the celebrity status of the blogger and more about the value of their content. I think it was Chris Brogan who started calling his personal list of favorites “Rockstars“, and it’s an apt title for a list of people who continually influence you on a daily basis. Hey I know good ‘ol Diamond Dave did that back in the ’80s for a heck of a lot of people. 😉
I’m sure a number of people are sitting back saying that I’ve missed the point of “The A-List”. They’d point out that this group of high-profile bloggers control the topics on Techmeme, Tailrank, et al. I don’t see that – I see a *lot* of great bloggers moving that conversation all over the place. At any rate, that’s not the point of this post. I’m really just talking about building your own list of blogs and bloggers that influence you.
Here are some opinions I’ve developed (though some are obvious 😉 )
- There is no one definition of the A-List – everyone’s a list is different
- “The A-List” everyone talks about are just bloggers – albeit with industry insight
- The more time you spend reading in the blogosphere, the more important the content and less the celebrity status of the blogger
- Your A-List will include high-profile bloggers, because of the value they bring to you, just like the lower-profile bloggers you read
I guess I just want to people to keep exploring and finding that content that has value to you. Don’t worry about if they are part of “The A-List”, there really are some great bloggers among them and many of their observations are relevant to the conversation that we’re looking for.
So, the A-List stops being “The A-List” when the reader realizes that each blogger brings value to the conversation and you start looking beyond who they are and more at what they say. What’s your take on this?
Photo credit: jzawodin
Sep 20, 2007 | blog
There are many good social networks to be a part of, but as I delve deeper into social media and personal branding I’m coming to the conclusion that your blog is becoming more important.
On your blog, you have a direct feed to your readers. Those readers can be friends as much as it can be potential employers or business contacts. Your blog can take on more of your characteristics, from the way you write to the theme that presents the information to your readers.
A blog can interact with other social networks, augmented with whatever tools you choose to bring into your branding strategy. Adding additional communications, video, audio and so on adds more value to your ability to network and share with your community.
The one big thing about viewing your blog as a social network is to remember the social aspect, which infers the interaction in a community. A blog’s comment system is there to enable the conversation, you are there to help drive the conversation. If you’re disabling comments because you don’t like some criticism, you may want to take another look. That feedback could help you grow in ways that aren’t readily apparent.
Also, your blog is your online hub. Use it to send information to other social networks that you frequent. It’s also the one place on the Internet that you can make sure people find out about YOU. You can make sure to let them know how to find you, to find your profiles and networks that you have left profiles, feedback, and articles on throughout the Internet. From your blog people can download a copy of your resume, talk about your latest work, and so on. Don’t forget that you can have an easier to remember URL to get to your blog than your profile on any service or social network.
Overall, the advantages of having a blog that you can interact with others is a statement about you. You took the initiative, you are reaching out, you are placing your ideas in a public forum, you are inviting feedback. Don’t get me wrong; in phrasing it that way it sounds like The Great You Show – but it doesn’t have to be. It’s up to you to be able to show it’s really about conversations.
On your blog, and through your interests and reading habits, you will find other bloggers in the same genre and begin to share links and comments with. This is one of the best ways to grow your network. No, it’s not like getting 250 ‘friends’ on Facebook in a weekend, but that’s because it’s more valuable. Having two or three blogging friends is more valuable and powerful than large numbers elsewhere. Your interaction in the blogosphere with others is what builds that value. It’s more than any number can represent because it’s real exchange of ideas, real interaction. And that my friend is social networking.
So what else am I missing? What else helps make your blog your entry point to social networking?
