Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Advice to Students - Personal Branding

Here's a brief slideshare presentation from Personal Branding Expert (not sure how you become one of these) Dan Schawbel. In about 22 slides, Schawbel gives graduating students - or anyone looking for a new job - great advice on how to develop and maintain a personal brand. A few of the great tips - purchase yourname.com domain; develop a website - a virtual resume - that takes each section of your resume and makes them separate pages; by an inexpensive webcam, dress up and start getting video of yourself out there. An alternative to the virtual resume is VisualCV, which I've blogged about before.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Authentic Personal Branding
Rodney Wayne

In life, as in business, branding is more effective, powerful, and sustainable than marketing and sales and an effective way to eliminate your competitors. It’s about influencing others, by creating a brand identity that associates certain perceptions and feelings with that identity. Branding isn’t just for companies anymore. There is a new trend called Personal Branding. Successful Personal Branding entails managing the perceptions effectively and controlling and influencing how others perceive you and think of you. Having a strong Personal Brand seems to be a very important asset in today’s online, virtual, and individual age. It is becoming increasingly essential and is the key to personal success. It is the positioning strategy behind the world's most successful people, like Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Donald Trump, Richard Branson and Bill Gates. It’s therefore important to be your own brand and to become the CEO of your life.
Everyone has a Personal Brand but most people are not aware of this and do not manage this strategically, consistently, and effectively. You should take control of your brand and the message it sends and affect how others perceive you. This will help you to actively grow and distinguish yourself as an exceptional professional. Most traditional Personal Branding concepts focus mainly on personal marketing, image building, selling, packaging, outward appearances, promoting yourself, and becoming famous, which can turn into an ego trip and let you be perceived as egocentric and selfish. They define Personal Branding from a personal marketing (selling) point of view. Personal Branding is more than just marketing and promoting yourself.
Your Personal Brand should be authentic. Authentic Personal Branding is a journey towards a happier and more successful life. Your Personal Brand should therefore emerge from your search for your identity and meaning in life, and it is about getting very clear on what you want, fixing it in your mind, giving it all your positive energy, doing what you love and develop yourself continuously. Your Personal Brand should always reflect your true character, and should be built on your values, strengths, uniqueness, and genius. If you are branded in this organic, authentic and holistic way your Personal Brand will be strong, clear, complete, and valuable to others. You will also create a life that is fulfilling and you will automatically attract the people and opportunities that are a perfect fit for you. If you are not branded in this unique way, if you don’t deliver according to your brand promise, and if you focus mainly on selling and promoting yourself, you will be perceived egocentric, selfish and a unique jerk, and branding will be cosmetic and a dirty business. Remember (Rampersad, 2008):
no vision + no self-knowledge + no self-learning + no thinking + no mindset change + no integrity + no happiness + no passion + no sharing + no trust + no love = no Authentic Personal Branding
Love is an important element in this Personal Branding equation. It is about loving yourself (self-love), loving others, and loving what you do. You should love yourself in at least equal measure to others or things. This can be found in most religions: “to love others as you love yourself”. Remember what Abraham Maslow said: “We can only respect others when we respect ourselves. We can only give, when we give to ourselves. We can only love, when we love ourselves”. Without knowing who you are (self-knowledge), it’s very difficult to love yourself and others. You need to make a positive emotional connection with yourself and find yourself interesting first, otherwise others you will not make a positive emotional connection with you and will not find you interesting. With an authentic Personal Brand, your strongest characteristics, attributes, and values can separate you from the crowd. Without this, you look just like everyone else.
Dr. Hubert Rampersad has introduced in his new book "Authentic Personal Branding: A new blueprint for building and aligning a powerful brand' an organic, holistic and authentic Personal Branding model which will help you to unlock your potential and build a trusted image of yourself that you want to project in everything you do, which is about your true values, beliefs, dreams, and genius. An effective brand is in harmony with your dreams, life purpose, values, passions, competencies, uniqueness, genius, specializations, characteristics, and things that you love doing. This approach places more emphasis on understanding yourself and the needs of others, meeting those needs while staying true to your values, improving yourself continuously, and realizing growth in life based on this Personal Branding journey. This should be based on your vision, rather than inventing a brand that you would like to be perceived as and to sell this to others. Remember what Oprah Winfrey said:
Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe. ….Hold the highest vision possible for your life and it can come true …. Go for your highest and greatest vision for your life and align your purpose with the flow of your life. …Follow your passion…Sooner or later, your passion is going to win out and nobody can stop you.
An Authentic Personal Branding Model
Building an authentic Personal Brand is an evolutionary and organic process and a journey towards a successful life. Rampersad included in his new book a holistic blueprint and roadmap to help you formulate and implement an authentic Personal Brand identity. This organic model consists of the following four phases, which are the building blocks of a strong authentic Personal Brand..................» read more by clicking on this link http://www.brandchannel.com/papers_review.asp?sp_id=1360
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Advance Praise for Authentic Personal Branding

“In Authentic Personal Branding, Hubert Rampersad has provided a sorely needed guidebook for knowledge workers. He shows us all how to build our own personal brand – and just as important – how to persuasively communicate this brand to the world….I love his focus on authenticity. …My request to you, the reader, is – make this book part of your life. Don’t just read this book for its ‘interesting’ content. Don’t be content with a few ‘aha’ moments. Make it part of your life planning – and ultimately part of your life! If you do, you can become a more integrated and successful person – and better enable your company to help you make a positive difference in our world!” -- From the Foreword by Marshall Goldsmith. Author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, a New York Times bestseller, Wall Street Journal #1 business book and the Harold Longman Award winner for Best Business Book of the Year for 2007.He is recognized by the American Management Association as one of 50 great thinkers and leaders who have impacted the field of management over the past 80 years.

“Hubert Rampersad has a knack for preparing comprehensive frameworks for analyzing important issues. … The four stage model that he suggests proposes an explicit way to turn a desired external identity into something concrete and actionable. …. It’s a wonderful step by step approach to making out desired brand explicit….The mental models and their related investigative questions will help you know where you are today so you can get to where you want to be tomorrow. …This book offers an architecture to turn these ideas into action.”—From the Afterword by Dave Ulrich, Professor of Business, University of Michigan, and Partner, The RBL Group. Co-author of the bestselling book “Leadership Brand’ ( Harvard Business Press, 2007). He was ranked as #1 management educator and guru by Business Week, #2 among management thinkers by Executive Excellence, and listed by Forbes as one of the “world’s top five” business coaches.
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Rodney Wayne is brand coach at TPS International (Miami Beach, USA). This article is based on Dr. Rampersad’s new book “"Authentic Personal Branding: A new blueprint for building and aligning a
powerful brand'” (Information Age Publishing Inc., 2008, USA). He can be reached at: h.rampersad@tps-international.com, www.Total-Performance-Scorecard.com
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Become a Certified Personal Brand Coach
You can become a Certified Personal Brand Coach by attending the Certified Personal Brand Coach Certification Program at your local Academy for PBSC & Brand Coaching. The emphasis is on building, implementing, maintaining, and cultivating an authentic, distinctive, relevant, consistent, concise, meaningful, crystal clear, and memorable Personal Brand, which is in harmony with your dreams, life purpose, values, genius, passion, and with things what you love doing. The image of your brand is a perception held in someone else’s mind. Successful Personal Branding entails managing this perception effectively and controlling and influencing how others perceive you and think of you. Personal Brand Coaching is based on a holistic and authentic framework, described in Dr. Hubert Rampersad’s new book “EFFECTIVE PERSONAL and COMPANY BRAND MANAGEMENT; A New Blueprint for Powerful and Authentic Personal and Company Branding.” This framework involves fifteen phases with comprehensive exercises, tools, and activities associated with each phase to be used by Personal Brand coaches to coach others. Click on http://new.total-performance-scorecard.com/Become%20a%20Personal%20Brand%20Coach.doc to find out about our Certified Personal Brand Coach Certification Program.

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