For a pre-baby boomer (we don’t even rate a name) like me there are lots of new concepts to learn these days. One of these is personal branding. Well, I find that if you want to understand personal branding, the go to guy is Dan Shawbel who calls himself the ‘Personal Branding expert for Gen Y’. If you go to his blog, you learn that:
“Personal branding is the process of how we market ourselves to others.”
That is the Reader’s Digest version but if you want more detail Dan is there for you.
As I play catch-up with Social Marketing and Web 2.0 and continue to build my web presence and credibility, it is clear that my personal brand can use some tweaking – more like a serious renovation. The tag line on my blog is “Leading the way for baby boomers since 1941.” This established that my market is baby boomers and that I consider myself to be leading the way. I might want to consider which way I might be leading but that would take some more thought. Obviously I aspire to expertise in using the Web and social media. If I am serious with that goal then I should claim my turf and get busy defending it.
Dan’s Personal Branding Blog provides some useful audits to help his readers learn how well they are using the tools available. The first one that I stumbled upon was the Twitter audit. Since Twitter continues to baffle me despite – or maybe because of– having two Twitter accounts, I was happy to read the post and take the audit. Out of a ten point perfect score, I got 4, putting me in the top rank of the worst group. I was happy not to score 0. The value of this audit list is that it iprovides specific actions for each question that can get you up to snuff. Therefore, where I scored zero, I have a task to perform that will put me closer to a successful use of Twitter in building my personal brand. Some are easy – like customizing the background. Others are harder – like engaging other similar people. I’m excited because so far I have found absolutely no value to Twitter. I want to believe, however, and maybe this audit will make Twitter useful to me. I would love to change my mind. Stay tuned.
Thanks Ralph!