Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

The 3rd issue of Personal Branding Magazine is out today. All paid subscribers will be receiving their copy, which includes 35 pages, with 25 articles and more of my interviews with the influencer’s. If you haven’t downloaded the free sample, it won’t be available much longer, so get it while it lasts.

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Brand Matchup

With the release of the magazine, I decided to keep the Google theme and have chosen Larry Page to be the victim of my little game. Below you will see his picture along with an variety of soda products. The game is simple: match the personal brand with the product brands and leave your responses in the comment section.

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Q & A

Nathan Jackman: Well right now I work with a company that provides financial advisor’s, cfp’s, investors and such with a marketing tool. I am trying to write a new marketing strategy that talks about personal branding and creating trust and familiarity in their customers. We supply the professional websites and e-newsletters with templates and such so that they can continue to send out and contact prospects with their own personalized e-newsletter. What you could say is that I am trying to show them better ways to utilize our product as well as convince them that it is worth purchasing. Any advice? or do you need more information?

My Response: The solution could be a blog, where you can have a personal connection with your customers. A blog can act as your e-newsletter when you configure the RSS and allow your customers to subscribe to get your updates. Since you’ve already been supplying these customers with information by way of an e-newsletter and website, I think that you can streamline that entire process by putting your updates in a blog. If this is only meant for select customers, you can have a private blog. Customization is essential to customer retention. The major difference I see between e-newsletters and blogs, is that blog’s talk back. If you want to show them better ways to utilize your product, why not do a podcast, where your using the product. Camtasia, a screen capturing software package, allows you to film a movie on what is displaying on your screen and then post it to YouTube. Once you do this, you can prominently showcase it on your blog, which will be fed through your customer’s readers (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Netvibes, Bloglines).

Your Response: Please leave your thoughts in the comment section or ask a question for next Friday.

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The music video of the week is “Falling Down” by Duran Duran. You may remember this band from their hit 80’s song called “Hungry like a Wolf.” Leave your music requests in the comments section for next week!