Mar
14
Are You Building Your Personal Brand and Future Around Your Passion?
Filed Under Books, Personal Development and Success, Promoting Yourself | 12 Comments
I’ll share one of my idiosyncrasies with you, but promise you won’t laugh: Most people go to the library to find books — not me. When I accompany my kids to the library, I take my own books with me to read while waiting for them to finish.
Think that’s peculiar? I can assure you that there’s a totally rational explanation: It’s rare to find the trendy business books I like to read at a library. I’m much more likely to find them at a bookstore.
Still, my kids like to tease me about this seemingly odd behavior.
Imagine my surprise when on a recent library visit, I found both Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk and Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel in the new arrivals section. Finding these books was a fluke, but nevertheless, I do plan to check back in that section in the future. 
I read and thoroughly enjoyed Crush It!. The words of @garyvee helped to reinforce and refine my personal approach to business and social media branding. (I’m still in the middle of Six Pixels of Separation and liking it so far.)
Business developers are starting to approach me to explore joint ventures. They tell me how successful they are and then talk to me about changing my path, building a giant email list and making videos.
Gary, on the other hand, talks about building your personal brand through social media by being authentic and “delivering your content by video, podcast, or blog.” Being authentic guarantees to “differentiate you from everybody else, including those who share your niche or business model.”
Gary’s whole book resonated with me. However, his emphasis on building a personal brand around one’s passion got me to stop and reflect for several days about my own passion.
I realized that while I love social media, the web, and data crunching, I have a greater passion for helping people solve difficult problems. Throughout my career, I’ve been happiest when solving business problems has been at the core of my work.
Gary Vaynerchuk writes that loving your family, working super hard and living your passion are the keys to success. What’s your passion, and are you building your personal brand and future around that passion?
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Mar
10
Hubze is a New Business Site for Personal Branding and Social Media Aggregation
Filed Under List Building, Networking and Marketing Strategy, News, Promoting Yourself, Social Media and Social Networking Sites, Web Marketing | 29 Comments
People often ask me to have a look at brand new social networking sites. I typically decline, as I prefer to invest my time checking out social sites that have already gained acceptance.
However, this week, when my blogging friend John from EZGreatLife.com sent me to Hubze, a social media site that might help me brand myself and tie together Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites, I decided to investigate.
Accounting for my motivation was an expectation that the aggregation of social websites will be a major focus of 2010, as enabling technologies like semantic web come to the forefront. Don’t we all wish it would be easier to organize and streamline our many social networking sites?
The landing page provided little information. It did however indicate that I could become a beta tester if I joined by noon my time on the 13th, and I joined. John had told me that there would be gifts for the beta testers, but I’d have signed up right away in any case.
Hubze, Pronounced Hub-Zee, Formerly Moneza
Last night I attended a webinar to learn some details. I’m far from an expert, but this is what I learned:
- Hubze (formerly Moneza) is the name of the website, and it’s free to join.
- In my opinion Hubze and the Hubze Card are useful and timely ideas in their early stages of implementation, and I do not believe that Hubze is a scam.
- Membership includes your Hubze Card (which resembles Card.ly but is substantially more powerful). Your Hubze online business card provides your contact information, links to your active social sites and displays your live update feed (pretty much like Friend Feed does). The Hubze Card also displays how many people you are tracking (following) and how many you are tracked by (followed by), an indication of your social influence and clout.
- The Hubze Card is viral, as viewers are encouraged to get their own. When they do, they become part of your growing network, which expands outward from you at its center. This helps to grow your brand virally, but exactly how that works, I don’t yet understand.
- There will be a back office from which you’ll manage your Hubze Card and from which you’ll post updates to all your social sites at once (much as if you were using Friend Feed or ping.fm).
This is the Hubze Registration Page. Please join me at Hubze and we’ll build our networks there. Watch for the next Hubze webinar which will provide us with more details.
Coming in on the ground floor (as I did with both Twitter and Ning) will facilitate your community building process. 
Read the comments below and leave one of your own if you like.
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Jan
18
8 Reasons Why You Might NOT Be Promoting Yourself Enough
Filed Under Announcements, Facebook, Networking and Marketing Strategy, Promoting Yourself, Public Relations | 27 Comments
Our website promotion event and social media party was an enormous success. Hundreds actively participated, introducing their web sites, engaging in dialog and making new connections.
Fortunately, the time frame for the networking phase of the event is open-ended, so drop by my Facebook page any time to meet some new people and check out what they’re up to. I’ll be busy working on the page for a few more days, reviewing web sites I haven’t yet visited.
Our four-day event was in part an experiment, as Tom Woolf pointed out. A key takeaway for me is that many people are promoting their products, services, companies interests and causes but not sufficiently promoting them- selves.
Keeping a low profile may occasionally be appropriate. However, in general, self-promotion is integral to social media marketing and public relations.
These are eight reasons why self-promotion and injecting yourself into your content are very important:
- You transcend your interests. No interest or group of interests, no matter how passionate you are about them, can fully define you as a person. Admittedly, this point is too existential, so…
- Your subject matter might lose relevance. For example, your product can be discontinued or your company can go out of business. Your content will become irrelevant with no residual benefit from the effort you put into creating and promoting it. However…
- You’re always relevant as a person. You have inherent value, and you’re completely portable from one venue to another.
- You and I are unique. People aren’t interchangeable, but products, services and organizations tend to be.
- You and I are memorable. People will come to remember us and our faces once they see us a few times.
- People prefer to do business with people they know, like and trust. It has always been that way, even before Al Gore allegedly invented the Internet. You and I can relate to people and build solid social capital.
- Synergy. Our diverse interests and content work to build a bigger and more insightful picture of us.
- Social media is uhh, social. You and I are social. Our jewelry and weight loss products merely facilitate social interaction. People relate to people, and their relationships are ongoing.
More about promoting yourself and personal branding in upcoming articles.
At this time, you can probably suggest additional reasons for keeping it social, and I expect that you will.
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