Ralph Carlson Blog

Today we all need a personal brand

I just finished Me 2.0, Dan Shawbel’s book about personal branding. He focuses, as you might expect on his generation and it is a powerful source book for career building today. Today’s entrants into the job market face a truly different world from what I experienced in the 70’s. Dan demonstrates the power that Web 2.0 provides an individual to create a presence and be noticed. In my day the individual could only hope that the powerful would notice a letter or resume. There wasn’t much else you could do.

Roadmap for career planning.

I read it as a What Color is Your Parachute for the 21st century.  Dan provides examples of people making their opportunities and dreams happen using Web 2.0. Along the way he provides advice about using the tools and protecting your image on the web which, as he points out, is virtually permanent. What turns up when someone Googles your name will be there forever.

Vital information for everybody.

My point today is to tell everyone that Me 2.0 is vital information for all generations. If you are participating in life and business today, you need to have a web presence. Gen Y has the advantage over the rest of us. Web 2.0 is second nature for them. They may have things to learn about using it effectively but they use it. It’s the rest of us that want to believe that the world hasn’t changed and more importantly that we can be successful without a web presence. Believe me I have been there but I see the light and everyday I struggle with myself to get better at personal branding on the web

The past does not define me.

What I know is that I am not defined and limited by my job title and resume. My web presence is where I can demonstrate who I am and what I can do. Success from now on depends upon how well I use the resources of Web 2.0 to define myself and provide value to others. Over the last six months, I have stumbled along with Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and the like, going through the numbers but not really getting it. Maybe I have an excuse being born in the dark ages just before World War II but an excuse doesn’t make you successful.

Understanding and Recommendations.

Let me just say that Dan brought me closer to understanding how and why I need these tools than anybody else so far and provided some concrete recommendations for using them well. I am implementing them with confidence. I begin to see where I need to be and how to use them.

Keep current with your marketing.

Bottom line, I recommend Me 2.0 to anyone today who wants to be successful. I don’t think that anyone should handicap themselves with outdated and ineffective marketing tools and strategies. So if you are Gen X, Baby Boomer or even antediluvian like me, get Dan’s book and learn the ways it’s done now.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Boomer, career planning, Dan Shawbel, personal brand

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.

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Dan Shawbel, social marketing, success, twitter