Embrace your DNA, be yourself, put out awesome content, and people will be interested in what you have to say. Believe me, if you’re that good, people are going to find you, and they’re going to follow you, and they’re going to talk. And getting people to talk is the whole point.
word of mouth on steroids
Leveraging social networking platforms into effective conduits for your personal brand is all about building word of mouth. There’s nothing new in that. Since the first six handfuls of grain were handed over in exchange for a new ox, business owners have always known that what their customers and their friends, family, or colleagues think about their restaurant or car or vacation spot or cleaning service or design firm has always mattered more than any billboard or radio ad they could buy. But there have always been a finite number of people their customers and friends, family, or colleagues could talk to about their experience with their products or services.
Now, though, the Internet and social networks—and the instant access to online communities (and the millions of people who will eventually join them) they provide—have pumped word of mouth up like it was on steroids. The consumer is no longer limited to talking about her experience with your personal brand to the people in her immediate circle or even in random encounters during her day. Now, if she’s got a Twitter account, she can tell five thousand people that she just read your hilarious blog post about breeding Siamese cats. And since those aren’t just five thousand random people, they’re five thousand people who have deliberately told your Twitter reader they want to hear what she thinks, chances are superb that a good percentage of them are going to be curious enough to check out your blog for themselves. And like in a brick-and-mortar business, half the battle is getting them in the door. If they like you, many will turn right around and repost your reader’s comment to all of the people following them. And so on and so forth. Now, how long did it take you, the Siamese cat breeder, to reach thousands upon thousands of potential blog readers and customers this way, for free no less? Ten minutes, give or take. It’s mind-blowing, and every day more and more tools are being created to carry your personal brand further.
everybody’s doing it
You may not have started your business yet, but there’s a good chance you’ve already created a personal brand without even realizing it. You become one the second you create any kind of Internet account that puts you in the public eye. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter—social networking sites, yes, but personal branding sites, too. Don’t think so? Let’s say you’re a shutterbug and you use your Facebook or Flickr account to post your best photographs. You’ve just made it possible for someone whose passion is business development with expertise in advertising to see them. Next thing you know, you get an e-mail asking if you want to earn cash by shooting stock photos in your area. I know this might sound pie-in-the-sky, but it happens every day. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. You have to understand that we’re living in a world where word of mouth is allowing content to travel faster and further than ever before. It’s passed around and around until finally it falls into the right hands. I’m telling you, once you join the digital world you’re in play, so you’d better be prepared.
Maybe you think that you have no need to create a personal brand because you like your job or you work for a corporation. What, you think you’re invincible? Even if the economy were soaring, I would be telling you to start using social media tools to share your ideas with the world and make yourself a recognizable brand. What if you’re a trader at an investment firm and suddenly you’re out of work and all you have to show is a bull-crap résumé? Hold it, you might want to reassure me, my résumé is awesome. Tell me this: Is it a pdf of a tidy list of where you’ve worked and for how long, with a couple of strategic bullet points highlighting what you did in each job? Yeah? You’re toast. Keep your pdf so that the HR department has something for their files, but otherwise traditional résumés are going to be irrelevant, and soon. Even if they’re not yet, that résumé you’re so proud of looks exactly like the ones being waved around by the other three hundred analysts in your city currently hunting for jobs.
Developing your personal brand is the same thing as living and breathing your résumé every second that you’re working. Your latest tweet and comment on Facebook and most recent blog post? That’s your résumé now. That’s how you are going to announce to the world your ideas and opinions, the very things that make you unique and reveal why a firm—or better yet, a passionate entrepreneur cherry-picking top talent to build a whole new kind of investment company—would be dumb not to hire you. Think about how different your situation would look if you got laid off but had been keeping up your personal brand and become well established as a hot commodity. Before, it would have taken hours of phone calls and e-mails to announce you were available. Today, thirty minutes after getting the bad news you’d write a blog post, then send out a tweet and a status update on Facebook about your situation, and immediately every manager in the industry would know you were looking for a job and, since they’d already be familiar with your brand, think, Hmm, how can I get her onboard here?
It’s a fact that hiring decisions are made every day because of personal connections. If you’re a sales manager at Crest, every post you make online could have an agenda, whether it’s to reveal your thoughts on your industry—“We’ve got to come up with a fresh approach to packaging”—or to reveal your thoughts in general—“I think I want to take up ice hockey.” You cannot afford to be one-dimensional; everything you say that you think is irrelevant is now relevant. Think of all that online commentary you post as your half of one long, friendly lunch interview. If a manager is hiring and has the choice between two equally qualified candidates, she’s going to choose the one with whom she’s experienced some kind of bond, whether it’s a mutual belief in revamping the toothpaste industry or a shared love for ice hockey. Through your content you’re making sure that people can get to know you personally and professionally. Now, because your personal brand is already well known and respected, if you need a job and there is a position that needs to be filled, you’ll likely be the first one called. If you’ve built your brand right, those established firms will be out of luck because the biz dev guy who has been following you—someone like me—will have already invited you to participate in an exciting new venture. Your days of working to put money in someone else’s pockets are over.
four
a whole new world
Business in the future is going to be a field day for everyone with talent because they’ll no longer be forced to exist within the confines of old-guard institutions. For example, everyone who is screaming that journalism is dead because newspapers and magazines are folding is insane. The old platforms are in trouble, but that’s the best thing that could happen to journalists…the good ones, anyway.
The platforms are sinking because the readers are going online, which means that the ad money is going online. So of course journalists should go online, too. But their opportunity is not as a work-for-hire, where they scramble to earn a few bucks here, a few bucks there writing pieces for various online publications, nor as a staff writer earning pennies while the company keeps a disproportionate amount of the ad revenue brought in on the backs of poorly paid talent.
Unlike people in most fields, journalists are constantly building brand equity through their work. So all talented journalists have to do is take advantage of the technological and cultural shifts that are sinking their media platforms like leaky ships, go into business for themselves, and crush it. I make it sound so easy, right? I know it’s not. But guess what? It’s the future, and those journalists and reporters who get wise to that truth are the ones who are going to survive.
Now, some reporters and journalists are probably not business savvy enough to launch a new business on their own, though those who possess that rare combination of fiery entrepreneurial spirit and reporting chops could team up and form a killer online news service without any
biz dev partnership at all. They’re going to win really big. But journalists with less business sense but massive talent won’t be left out in the cold. I guarantee that as more business developers recognize the huge potential in this market, they are going to start recruiting top talent to join them in new ventures.
What might these ventures look like? We’ve already seen that small, lean, tight business models—like Politico.com, real-clearpolitics.com, seekingalpha.com, and minyanville.com—can work. The new generation of online news is going to be more democratic. Maybe we’ll see a four-person journalist staff team up with a fifth business partner to create thedailyscoop.com. Everyone owns a 20 percent stake in the company (obviously you can have a forty-person team and everyone would just own fewer points). They won’t report breaking news at first (and let’s be honest, how much of what you read in the paper these days broke the day before online or on TV?). Rather, they’ll focus on using social media to pump out provocative analysis. They do that for a year and build up cash flow through advertising, which would stream in because as we all know, money follows eyeballs, and these guys are good enough to draw a lot of viewers. With enough revenue in place they would eventually be able to hire more great journalists and launch investigative reporting. These reporters won’t get paid $80,000 to go to Afghanistan, they’ll get paid a 7 percent equity of a “thirteen-million-dollar-per-year” business that’s only going to grow and grow, and some of the reporting from Afghanistan will come from someone local armed with a combination cell phone/Flip Cam (they’re coming, you watch) who streams the news live.
There are lots of other ways these new businesses could play out. What’s to stop the ten most popular journalists at the Wall Street Journal from banding together in conjunction with a business partner to create their own online all-star team? Or maybe they could launch an online newspaper in which every time an article gets a click-through, the journalist who wrote it gets two bucks. Sure, there will be writers who might try to game the system and ethical questions will inevitably come up, but anyone who goes down that path is going to get exposed, guaranteed. There have always been people in every industry with hidden agendas, but now there is no place for them to hide.
News is also going to get more local, and we’re going to see news paparazzi. There will be a personal brand called The News Maverick, a newer version of Geraldo Rivera, who becomes known for jumping fences with his cell phone/Flip Cam and breaking major stories. What will that be worth? Plenty.
News has been functioning under a communistic regime, but capitalism always wins. Critics can argue with me and say that these new models demean the training and insight and education it takes to be a great journalist, and perhaps that’s true, but crying about how things should be instead of embracing how things are doesn’t do anyone any good. The changes affecting the news business are permanent. Fundamental supply and demand is shifting. Quantity is up, price is down, which means the cost structure has to shrink dramatically. And like it or not, many people’s respect for quality reporting has eroded. This upsets me as much as the next guy, but the fact is that it’s a trend that is having a huge impact on business and needs to be noticed and accepted. To explore and analyze all the sides of this story with the depth it deserves would unfortunately require way more space than this book allows, but I assure you, this is how things are going to roll. The only arguments I get in this debate, by the way, are from journalists and individuals with an emotional attachment to the idea of ink on paper and the romance of sipping a cup of coffee while reading the Sunday Times. Most businesspeople know I’m right.
If the traditional platforms are sinking ships, then journalists are sailors who need to jump. If they’re not strong enough to get to the new ship, yes, they’re going to drown. But those who are great swimmers are going to sail very, very far. That is the way business has always played and always will. It’s a truth at the heart of this book—the game is changing, and your opportunity is huge if you take it.
The middleman has not yet been eliminated, but we’re getting there. A lot has been made of how the music and news industries have been turned upside down by Internet technology, but anyone who thinks the revolution is going to stop there is naive. The massive sea change that is rocking the news industry is going to rock every industry that relies on human interaction. And can you think of any business that isn’t in some way dependent on human interaction? I can’t. The changes that will be wrought by the Internet are as fundamentally transformative to content and commerce as the printing press. It’s a whole new world; build your personal brand and get ready for it.
plan your future now
If you don’t plan ahead and decide where you want to go, you’re in big trouble. My feeling is that no matter how much you like your job, you should aim to leave it and grow your own brand and business or partner with someone to do so, because as long as you’re working for someone else you will never be living entirely true to yourself and your passion. That said, I will never tell anyone to quit their job, especially if they’ve got other people to support. Family first, remember. I will, however, tell you to start planning to quit your job if you can’t answer yes to the following checklist:
Are you happy with your present job? Like, really happy. Like you don’t bitch and moan every Monday morning about how much you wish it were Friday night.
Do you work for a company that allows you to have a public persona, either about your field or your true passion (which when I’m through I’ll have convinced you should be one and the same, but I’ll cut you some slack for now)? In other words, are you allowed to have a blog, a Twitter account, or otherwise brand yourself in the public eye with an identity that is separate from that of the corporation? Some industries, like finance and law, will not allow this. If your passion is finance or law, do you love your field enough to make that sacrifice? Do you think you’ll love it as much in ten or twenty years and not regret missing out on all the opportunities inherent in social media?
If you’re not allowed to develop a public persona at work, are you allowed to do so during your personal time?
If you answer no to numbers 2 and 3, I don’t care how happy you are now, you should do everything you can to find another place to work or start the groundwork to launch your own business, because eventually you are going to suffocate. Any company that clamps down on its best talent and doesn’t allow them to talk to the public is holding that talent back from where the business world is going, and you don’t want to be left behind. Without the freedom to develop a personal brand, you will find yourself at a strong disadvantage to the competition that will have been pumping out that content and making a name for themselves.
If you’re not happy in your job but you can still build brand equity at work or at home by blogging or creating podcasts about what you love, I still want you to plan to leave and launch your own business because life is way too short to spend it working in a job you don’t love. I’m not as worried about you, though, as I am about someone who’s happy but not allowed to talk to the public, because as long as you’re creating content and building your brand you’re building future opportunity.
But if you’re not happy at work, and faceless, and have been forbidden to talk about your passion to the world, get the hell out as soon as you can. You’ve got no chance otherwise of creating a personal brand, and without one, you’re professionally dead in the water.
Look, financial security is important, but if you love sneakers and you know more about them and are more passionate about them than anyone else on earth, you can make money talking about them. I believe that with every ounce of my soul.
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Recently Tara Swiger announced she was quitting her day job to devote herself entirely to Blondechickenbou-tique.com, where she is building a passionate community of fiber growers and artisans; she sells hand-dyed organic yarn and blogs about knitting, dyeing, and other domestic arts. She’s clearly crushing it. Why can’t you?
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five
create great content
To monetize your personal brand into a business using social marketing networks, two pillars need to be in place: product and content.
We’ve talked about how to choose your product, which should be whatever you’re most passionate about. Whatever it is, it should go without saying that quality counts in a major way. You can hustle and market and network all you want, but if your sports drink tastes like trash, or if you’re putting out bad information, you’re going to lose.
know your stuff
Great content is what you’re going to pump into your social media networks to draw eyeballs to your blog. It exists as a result of passion plus expertise, so make sure you can talk about your product like no one else. Do your homework. You should be reading and absorbing every single resource you can find—books, trade journals, newsletters, websites, as well as taking classes and attending lectures and conferences (you’re also going to visit and interact with other people’s blogs on the same subject, but there’s a method to that, which we’ll get to later). You can even make the learning process part of your content. Think of all those cooking blogs that chronicle disastrous culinary experiments. Those are fun, right? And a pediatrician who admits he is considering changing his approach to vaccines based on the newest studies coming from the APA isn’t giving his patients’ families reason not to trust him, he’s showing them that he’s on top of the latest research.