A Book and a Network: Inspiration for Personal Branding Success

Personal branding, whether you like the term or not, is something every web worker should consider. Don’t look at it as marketing or packaging yourself, but more as being true to yourself. Micheal Port’s book, “Book Yourself Solid” makes that distinction very well, while the Food Network demonstrates exactly how to make it work for you and your business.
Michael Port’s concept of personal branding starts with his belief that, “When you work with clients you love, you’ll truly enjoy the work you’re doing; you’ll love every minute of it. And when you love every minute of the work you do, you’ll do your best work, which is essential to [booking] yourself solid. Second, because you are your clients; they are an expression and an extension of you.”

The cornerstone of his philosophy is that “the greatest strategy for personal and business development on the planet is bold self-expression,” and many successful personal brands have used this very strategy to rise to the top.

The Food Network is filled with great examples of personal branding success stories using the “bold self-expression” strategy, and while the brands are very unique, they all attract their individual audiences by being exactly one thing — themselves.

Take three of the popular Food Network personal brands: Rachel Ray, Paula Deen and Emeril Lagasse. They each have individual flare and have used that individuality to create tremendous personal success. Read more…

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An Idiot’s Guide to Personal Branding?

Having studied branding very briefly in another life, I was curious about “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself,” by Sherry Beck Paprocki and Ray Paprocki. How would product and service brand theory be translated to the branding of people? And could a book set an ordinary human being on the path to being the next Steve Irwin/Oprah/Paris Hilton?

Despite that brief brush with brand theory years ago, I consider myself a personal branding novice, so I came to the book with an open mind. In terms of structure and coverage, it seemed well planned and comprehensive. It’s broken into four parts: “What is branding?”, “Launching your personal brand”, “Branding in the modern world” and “Brand extension and evolution.” So far, so good. There are 20 chapters in a total of 228 pages, so it’s obvious that they’re going to be pretty easy to get through.

Can you sense a “but” coming? Well, here it is.

Too General

I read the book from start to finish (though it’s definitely the kind of book you could dip into quickly to get tips on a particular area), and I found it very general. The references the authors give to readers’ potential occupations — from writer to plumber to college graduate (of any description) looking for a first job — suggest that the audience for the book was defined in terms of its target readers’ needs for basic information on personal branding. That might be fine if the authors had had more space in which to educate such a wide potential readership. Unfortunately, the broad-brush, general way in which this book addresses personal branding means that, for many readers (I suspect) little of the content will be personally relevant or particularly useful.

Here are a few examples. The guide covers all forms of promotion, from preparing a resume to buying billboard space. It takes the time to explain how the generation in which your target audience members are born will affect which media they use, and how they use them, but also includes sections entitled “What is print media?” and “What is broadcast media?”. Advice is also provided on manners, eye contact and the correct use of cutlery as embodiments of your personal brand. Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

How to Be an Effective CEO

First-time entrepreneurs are usually also first-time CEOs. When you look at your first business card that says CEO, don’t forget that it is not necessarily telling the truth.You earn the title of CEO through your actions and your results. You still have your training wheels on. Fortunately, there is probably more advice available on how to be an effective CEO than almost any other subject. This chapter gives you a quick guide, but do invest the time to read the classics, particularly:

* “The Effective Executive,” by Peter Drucker,
* “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” by Stephen Covey.

These are timeless classics. Their authors do not attempt to create any modern theory or expound on any particular business or market trend. The books work because they are based on observation. The authors observed effective people to find out what they did right.

The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker

Drucker’s “Effective Executive” was written in 1966. It is a slim tome and easy to read, even if the language sounds a bit dated. Drucker focuses on how to allocate time, because you can get more of almost any resource except time. His advice to find time for uninterrupted work is particularly relevant to today’s multi-tasking world. He is also very clear about the need to allocate enough time for people. If you need an hour with someone, don’t think you are being efficient by rushing through the meeting in 15 minutes.

CEOs allocate resources. The first resource they need to allocate is their own time.

One popular book today is “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” by Marcus Buckingham. Drucker was a big proponent of accentuating a person’s strengths rather than managing their weaknesses.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” first published in 1989, is a self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. It has sold over 15 million copies. Drucker observes the following habits in effective people:

Habit 1: Be proactive
Change starts from within. Most people react to external forces. To lead effectively, you have to overcome that natural tendency.

Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
You cannot lead unless you know where you want to get to.

Habit 3: Put first things first
This is similar to what Drucker recommends. You need to have a very clear view of what is important, so that you know what to spend time on. Note that this often means leaving your comfort zone by acting on tasks that you don’t naturally like or feel competent in performing. Read more…

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Real Estate Lists Grow Comfortable With the Web

AS if home buyers do not have it good enough already, finding a house for sale on the Web is becoming easier.

The triple threat of a weak market, legal pressure and increasing competition has compelled real estate professionals to offer their information more freely online, putting cracks in a walled garden of data that stood strong while the industry enjoyed its breakaway growth. It also presages an end to the days when sellers must list their homes with a broker so buyers can see them.

The trend revolves around the nation’s roughly 900 multiple listing services, or M.L.S.’s, where local brokers post information about homes they are selling. In years past, these services were highly restrictive about where and how that information could be distributed — for instance, frequently not permitting Web sites to display M.L.S. listings alongside for-sale-by-owner homes, bank foreclosures or other properties not represented by real estate agents.

Now, these organizations are connecting more freely with sites like Zillow, Terabitz, ZipRealty, Redfin and others. And while these sites do not have all the M.L.S. data, they have enough to give users more of a one-stop site for real estate shopping than ever before. Read more…

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Users Demand Expertise at How-To Web Sites

IF the Internet can make anyone a star, can it turn Barnes & Noble into one, too?

The bookseller has taken another step beyond its traditional business into the online publishing world, recently introducing Quamut.com, a site that teaches Web users things as diverse as the basics of football and how to build a Web site.

“Building a how-to Web site” is not on the list, but judging from the number of such sites in existence, it may be easier to do than follow a football game.

Quamut is the latest brand to capitalize on what company executives said is a growing disinclination among Web users for amateur how-to advice. Whether that distaste can support a departure from Barnes & Noble’s core business is a question investors will be considering. Read more…

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Teenagers Are Building Their Own Job Engine

PERIODS of high unemployment tend to be particularly hard on teenagers, who wind up competing for jobs with more experienced, laid-off adults.

When Faith Borden, 16, of Metuchen, N.J., applied for a job in March to be a counselor at a summer day camp, she looked around and saw “all these 30- and 40-year-olds,” she said. “Usually it’s just teenagers.”

She also applied at pizza restaurants, drugstores and most of the stores at her local mall, and even attended a job fair in Edison, N.J., but didn’t receive one offer. So she decided to work for herself, selling Avon products.

Also facing a competitive job market, Max O’Dell, 14, of Cary, N.C., started Smiley Inc., a custom T-shirt design business. He paints shirts in his driveway and hangs them in the garage to dry; revenue so far has been $170.

“Business is very steady, and I would much rather work for myself than at a fast-food place or something like that,” he said. “It feels really good to be my own boss.”

Unemployment for 16- to 19-year-olds is at its highest rate since 1992 — at 22.7 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is causing some teenagers to rethink their notion of work and to embrace entrepreneurship.

“This is a generation raised to believe they can do anything, and the first to grow up with entrepreneurial celebrities like Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google,” said Donna Fenn, who interviewed 150 young entrepreneurs for her forthcoming book, “Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success.” Read more…

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CRM without Compromise: A Strategy for Profitable Growth

IT has become a mission-critical enabler for CRM as it supports business processes and information needs. But it can be more than just an enabler - it can serve as a catalyst for business transformation. A synergistic system with employees, customers, and partners that consistently creates and delivers customer value will become truly customer driven.

Discover the CRM business benefits for your organization such as driving growth, maintaining operational excellence and enhancing competitive agility. Build your system so it is flexible enough to quickly respond to changing customer needs and business challenges to sustain a competitive advantage and enjoy a profitable growth. Discover how you can improve overall service efficiency by transforming your call center into a central interaction hub that complements human interaction with automation, convenient self-services.

Source: http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1194435868_38.html?psrc=RLT

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