Press from the media, which now includes blogs, is a big deal because visibility creates opportunities for your personal brand. Corporations want good press because it gets their brand name out there, or reminds stakeholders of it’s existence. A lot of individuals view press as something “really cool” and if they get it, they start blabbing that they are suddenly “celebrities.” What is you gather bad press? Do you think that all press is good press because it draws attention to you? I think, within reason, press can be a powerful tool for people to learn about your achievements.

In my new book, Me 2.0, I have a short section called “visibility creates opportunities.” The big idea is that if you aren’t visible you don’t exist to the world. If hiring managers don’t know about you, you aren’t in their pool of candidates. If a male or female hasn’t heard of you, then you aren’t in their “pool” of people to date. The power of the press is that it creates a 3rd party endorsement of your personal brand. One of the most important ideas you have to get into your head about personal branding is:

“You are the chief marketing officer for the brand called you, but what others say about your brand is more impactful than what you say about yourself.”

Endorsements rule the world. Consider them word-of-mouth marketing powerhouses. When people start talking about you, instead of you talking about yourself, it’s ten times more powerful of an effect. We’ve all been in situations where we are trying to date, or form a relationship with, someone of the opposite sex. We realize that in order to be successful, we need their best friends endorsement. We pray that they will say good things about us and “approve us,” because when that happens, it’s a deal sealer. The same goes with marketing your personal brand!

Here are the benefits of press:

• Press statements as endorsements: If the New York Times or TechCrunch, for example, cites you as an expert, you can leverage that statement on your website, blog and other materials, in order to generate more leads, get a job, get into college and so on. Also, if you have a business or a product you’re trying to sell and get a press write-up, then you can advertise their recommendation in your materials.
• Traffic to your website: Some online media will include a link to your website and some will not. I keep telling everyone to “own your Google results” because if they don’t include a link to your website, then a percentage of people will Google you instead. A link inside an article will yield high traffic depending on the circulation and visibility of the article on the media website. Obviously, a front page press hit will give you much more traffic than one that is buried. Also, this traffic can be converted to RSS subscribers, email newsletter subscribers and friends on social networks, of which you can market to directly anytime!
• Rank higher in search engines: The Huffington Post has a PageRank of 8, TechCrunch as a PageRank of 8, US News has a PageRank of 8, The New York Times has a PageRank of 9, and Newsweek has a PageRank of 9. To view other sites go here. You can benefit in two different ways here. First, if they link to your website, your PageRank goes up (your asset increases in value). Second, if there’s no link to your sites, the article will rank higher for your name, so you’ll benefit as well.
• Increase share-of-voice/mind: You might have a saturated market or you might have just established the market on your own. Either way, when you’re cited in the media, more people will associate a particular field with your name, so you gain both share of voice and mind. The more press you get in a short period of time, the more people will remember you and each article will re-emphasize the next. Competitively, the more times you are seen, the more people will go to you and not them.
• Sell more products: If you’re promoting a product and someone writes about it, then a small percentage of those readers may decide to make a purchase based on the recommendation. If you have a website, it’s obviously easier for someone to go through the buying process. If your product is in stores, then next time they go to a store that sells it, they may remember it enough to buy it!
• Press as a status update: As you progress throughout your career, there may be milestones that you want people to hear about. Getting press for these announcements can help you get more customers, or opportunities that can make you even more successful.
• Attraction-based networking: When people hear about you, they may be drawn to make a deeper connection with you, with you putting in little to no effort. If the press hit is targeted enough, the exact people you want to meet will come to your doorstep. When you meet people who take genuine interest in you based on what they’ve heard about you in the media, they become your good friends, powerful allies and possibly your business associates.
• Other people will write about it: The interesting thing about press is that they all read each others work. Traditional journalists read blogs, watch TV, listen to radio and visa versa. They all learn from each other, getting new story ideas in the process. This is a huge plus for you because it means that you can get covered in multiple locations, without additional effort.

How do I get press?

Luckily for you, I have already created two how-to guides for pitching to traditional journalists and bloggers.

Today, I spoke with Tony Rubleski, whose here to help your brand break free from the clutter and mass messages sent daily.  Tony reveals some important marketing strategies that could help broaden the awareness of your brand, attract new clients and start a word-of-mouth buzz campaign.  We also discuss writing great content and how to get some free publicity for your brand.  If you build it, people probably won’t come, but if you build it and market it to the right audience, they will.

What challenges do businesses, as well as people, face in a world of clutter? How do they break free and get noticed?

The challenges are daunting in this age of marketing clutter or what I deem the age of advertising deficit disorder. For starters, information online is doubling every 18-months. We’re buried with choice and drunk on information. In addition, the typical North American is hit with 4-5000 marketing messages per day. It’s no wonder we all have a built in “BS Meter” as it relates to marketing.

Breaking free from the clutter to get what I call ‘Mind Capture’ isn’t easy but it is achievable. Let me offer three quick clues as the new book offers up many more:

1. Target the best prospects possible and customize your message to connect. Too many businesses never stop and analyze who their best clients are and how they sourced to them. Once you know this, find out where other similar prospects associate or can be found and target them with laser like precision.

2. Use strong evidence or marketing proof in your online and offline marketing efforts. The quickest form of credibility is a well written testimonial letter, review or video. What someone else says about you is a thousand times more believable than anything you say. In this age of marketing overload you have to prove your case quickly and establish maximum credibility sooner than later.

3. Focus on referrals within your business. Cold marketing is expensive and time consuming. Your existing customers can take you to more people than you’d ever imagine. The problem is that most people never humble themselves to ask their best customers to ‘introduce’ them to people they know. If it’s not a part of your overall daily marketing strategy to seek out and ask for referrals, it’s often forgotten and the business misses out on a lot of potential opportunities.

What are 5 cost effective marketing strategies people can use starting today?

1. Go to Amazon.com and get my new book for $13 plus free shipping as it’s loaded with a TON of strategies, actual marketing pieces and it’s easy to read and implement. I know it may be self serving, but the book’s valuable and a much lower cost than paying me $500.00 an hour.

2. Ask your top 10 clients to introduce you to two people they know that may be a good fit for what you do.

3. Communicate and make more offers to your existing customers. They already trust you, will look at your offer, and have a higher tendency to make a repeat purchase or refer you to someone they know that may have a need even if they currently don’t.

4. Upgrade your current marketing evidence such as testimonials, pictures, and website. It takes a little bit of time but it will serve you well in the future when you’re in a competitive situation and you win a deal because you’ve outfoxed and given more proof than your competition has or is willing to provide.

5. Create and use a powerful guarantee in your marketing efforts. This is gutsy but a smart strategy to employ. Too many people are afraid to back up their claims. Believe me, you’ll attract more business with a great guarantee than you might lose even if someone takes you up on your guarantee.

How do you generate free publicity to help promote your brand?

Free publicity, in my opinion, is easy to get. The quickest strategy I can give you is to partner with a local cause or charity you believe in. Leverage the good work into a simple media release and get it to the local media, chamber of commerce, your clients and the causes list of donors and volunteers.

This isn’t self-serving by any means but a powerful “win-win” for everyone involved and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Can you explain the shift from a “sales pitch” to “great content” in the new marketing world?

The shift from pure sales pitch to great content is simply the ability to educate clients and prospects as to why you are the best option. In a world with lots of choice, the Internet and intense competition, your mission is now to educate within your overall marketing strategy. Take people by the hand, educate and prove your case is what progressive firms will do to stand out and again build Mind Capture.

What are your 6 societal forces that top marketers can use to create highly effective and profitable offers?

The six societal forces top marketer’s must be aware of with today’s prospects to create better marketing messages are:

• They’re cynical
• They have too many choices
• They’re bombarded with 4-5000 marketing messages per day
• They’re excellent at tuning our marketing messages
• Smarter than ever
• Time starved

How have you built your personal brand and gotten the attention you’ve deserved?

Building the Mind Capture brand and message is an ongoing process and strategy that evolved over five years ago when I wrote the first book and had a vision of where I wanted the business to go, serve, and grow into. It wasn’t a snap decision but a well thought out plan.

The business keeps evolving, changing and growing. The brand stays consistent and is vital. Don’t be fooled but direct response marketing is my passion, but I also see the value of branding. I’ve studied up close with the best direct marketer’s in the world and sold media for many years to traditional brand driven clients of all shapes and sizes. When you combine both disciplines properly you have a decided marketing advantage and can spot opportunities most people rule out or dismiss.

——
Tony Rubleski is the President of Mind Capture Group. His latest venture is the release of his second book in the Mind Capture book series titled, MIND CAPTURE: How You Can Stand Out In The Age of Advertising Deficit Disorder. The book has received excellent reviews from many of the top marketing minds and thought leaders on the planet and went #1 with Amazon.com on July 29th, 2008 in the marketing, advertising and sales categories. His work has been featured in many outlets including Bottom Line Magazine, The Detroit Free Press, the FOX TV Network and several prestigous marketing newsletters.

I’ve spoken about gaining visibility for your personal brand many times. When you have the spotlight on you, the “haters” come out to play.

When you stand for something, there are going to be people or groups that are against you. Every Hollywood celebrity has AT LEAST one person in this world who hates them. Unless you’re Gandhi, there’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t get along with everyone. I think it’s important for all of you to learn what to do when these “haters” come after you.

Yesterday, I had an incident where a group of people in a forum posted a total of 21 entries citing my name, picture, and a video. Their thoughts were all negative and very harsh. Aside from trying to rip apart my personal brand behind my back, they decided to post comments on my MODERATED blog 9 times in order to really dig into me. First, I’m going to show you what they said and then I’m going to go over what I did in response and what you can do if this should arise in your life.

Please note that I’m not upset or angry. I like to take punishment, so I can help protect all of you.

Some of the comments

• “He is inspiring. He can make any blog a success (except apparently his own).”
• “I’d hire him…as a dart board.”
• “He does look cartoonish! He looks like one of those cartoon characters who wear glasses, and when they take them off, their eyes are really tiny and squinty. But he’s pretty cute for a squirrel getting hit by a car. BRAND ME SCHAWBEL!”
• “Regardless of how smart his ideas are (for the record I won’t read any of them), this guy is a major douchebag.”
• “This fella is quite sincere about all this, unless of course this is a joke of Andy Kaufman like magnitude. It’s a thought.”
• “He’s in Boston, so he could just be exceptionally annoying.”

What I did

I did absolutely nothing about this situation (until I blogged about it today). This discussion board is locked down, so I couldn’t register as a user. Also, the conversation wasn’t based on fact; it was a bunch of immature opinions. To these people, it wasn’t about analyzing my brand. Instead they wanted to tear into my brand and spare no expense. If I weighted in, the situation would have gotten worse. The best move was to back-off and let the situation settle. Ignoring works!

Dan why aren’t you linking us to this forum post? Your Google results are so important. What Google says about you is how others will perceive you. I have 124,000 Google results for my name right now, so the chances of this forum gaining traction and placing in the top 10 is near impossible. If I were to link to it in this post, it might give the forum wings, and we certainly wouldn’t want that!

Your options

1) Do nothing and ignore. When you can’t post a comment or write an email to the haters, then just sit back and ignore it. If the site has low authority and credibility (such as the above forum), then Google will brush the incident under a carpet (it will always be there though).

2) Show them the facts. Any legit source, such as the NY Times or TechCrunch will revise their articles if they don’t get their facts straight. It’s part of good journalism and building a brand. Send the journalist an email citing the facts and ask them nicely to repost or revise the article.

3) Comment with your opinion. If the article allows comments (blogs, forums, traditional news sites), then feel free to comment. When you comment, you MUST reveal the real brand you and not make up a fictitious name. Trolls should stay under the drawbridge. They have no place “hanging out” on blogs.

4) Blog about it: After showing them the facts and commenting, they might still not budge. The next step, is to post about it in your own blog. Only do this if you have to. I blogged about this incident to show that bad publicity does happen and what to do about it.

My Twitter friends weigh-in

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Today I interview David Meerman Scott, who gives us insight on why we all have to be content creators and actually listen to our audience before we take action. I hope you have enjoyed this interview series and feel free to leave a comment or email me if you are interested in a particular personal brand that you want me to interview.

David Meerman Scott is an award-winning online thought leadership strategist. He is the best seller author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and has just released another book called Tuned In. He is the king of publishing content, with hundreds of articles, videos and training seminars behind him. He is one of the top marketing bloggers and a Twitter user. The marketing programs he has developed are responsible for selling over one billion dollars in products and services worldwide. He has presented at industry conferences and events in more than twenty countries on four continents.

David, you give away a lot of free “goodies” on your website, such as eBooks, blog entries and case studies. What is the purpose of this? How does “free” translate into new business opportunities?

It comes down to goals. The goal with giving things away is to spread ideas as far and wide as possible. All my online content is totally free with no registration. And yes, I recommend to people in my speeches and seminars that everyone consider making their content totally free with no registration required.

The other way to offer content is to make people pay or make people fill out a form. The goals here are different – to earn revenue or to build a list.

However, the number of people who download free content is many times more than people who will fill out a form. My evidence is 50 to 1 ratio. A company I know called MailerMailer says its 20 to 1.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that bloggers are MUCH more likely to blog about a free ebook or other free content than something that requires a registration.

Once people consume some valuable free content, they know what to do. You don’t have to coerce them to contact you. If they like what the see, they will reach out and WANT to do business with you and your organization.

I just read Debbie Weil’s interview with you about your career and enjoyed it. Can you tell my readers how you progressed from your early days as a writer, to a best-selling author and now the co-author of “Tuned In”?

I didn’t plan on becoming an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist on purpose. I came upon it accidentally.

At the height of the dot-com boom, I was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation, a NASDAQ-traded online news distributor with $70 million in revenue. My multi-million dollar marketing budget included tens of thousands of dollars a month for a public relations agency, hundreds of thousands a year for print advertising and glossy collateral materials, and expensive participation at a dozen trade shows a year. My team put these things on our marketing to-do list, worked like hell to execute, and paid the big bucks because, well, that’s what one did as marketing and PR people. These efforts made us feel good because we were doing something but the programs were not producing significant, measurable results.

At the same time, drawing on publishing experience I had gained in my prior position as Asia marketing director for the online division of Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the largest newspaper companies in the world, I quietly created content-based, “thought leadership” marketing and PR programs on the Web.

Against the advice of the PR agency professionals we had on retainer (who insisted that news releases were only for journalists), we wrote and sent dozens of releases ourselves. Each time we sent a release, it appeared on dozens of online services such as Yahoo!, resulting in hundreds of sales leads.

Even though our advertising agency told us not to put the valuable information “somewhere where competitors could steal it,” we created a monthly thought leadership newsletter, with articles about the exploding world of digital news. We made it freely available on the home page of our Web site because it generated interest from qualified buyers.

Way back in the 1990s when Web marketing and PR was in its infancy, I ignored the old rules, drawing instead on my experience working at publishing companies, and created thought leadership strategies to reach buyers directly on the Web.

Guess what? The homegrown, do-it-yourself programs we created at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers than the big bucks programs that the “professionals” were running for us—and resulted in millions of dollars in sales. People we never heard of were finding us through search engines.

Wow. I had stumbled on a better way to reach buyers.

In 2001, NewsEdge was told to information giant Thomson Corporation and in 2002 I was given my walking papers. Instead of taking another corporate gig, I started writing books, giving speeches, running seminars, and giving away content on my new blog.

What have you learned from speaking to various audiences about social media and marketing? What challenges are they facing and how can they capitalize by using your strategies?

I deliver about 50 keynotes a year and run about 20 full day seminars a year. The most common questionh (and sometimes argument) I get is about the value of online marketing and especially the “Return on Investment” (ROI) of social media marketing.

Many people cite a bunch of polls and research reports that ask people questions such as “Do you read blogs?” or “Do you use social media?” or “Do you go to video sharing sites?” Often the resulting data show rather small use compared to those who, say, use search engines or email.

From the perspective of the value of social media in an organization’s overall marketing and PR efforts, this data is misleading and dangerous. Why? Because the data is used by social-media-resistant executives to justify sticking exclusively to the methods that worked decades ago like image advertising, direct mail, and the yellow pages. I frequently hear CEOs, CFOs, and VPs of marketing say things like: “See, social media is not important, so we won’t do it here. It is a waste of time.” Other people say: “I don’t read blogs, so how important are they?”

This data misses two tremendously important points for marketing and PR people to understand:

1) When asked “do you read blogs?” or “do you use social media?” many people answer “no”. However, practically everyone uses Google and other search engines regularly and the search results frequently include blog posts or YouTube videos or other social media content high in the search results. So even though people may report “no” when asked if they use social media, nearly everyone has been to a blog or other social media content through search.

IMPORTANT: Many people who reach blogs via search don’t even know they are on a blog!

2) When people who are not regular users of social media ask their network for advice, they often do it via email. Frequently the answer that comes back includes URLs to companies and products. And those links from friends, colleagues of family members often include blog posts. Frequently people ask their friends questions like: “What’s the best baby stroller to buy?” The answer may include a link to a blog post or a site with an embedded video. Again, the person asking for advice probably didn’t even know they were on a blog or used a video-sharing site.

Use social media data with caution. Don’t let your bosses diminish the hidden value of social media as search engine fodder and as a valuable type of information that people share with their network.

In “Tuned In” what are some methods to find out about your audience, what’s important to them and how to build a business to become the solution? What has been your main personal branding strategy from day 1? What does your future hold?

Simple. To find out about your potential customers, you must listen to them. Don’t just make stuff up. Don’t focus on your own egocentric view of the world. Don’t speak to people in your own gobbledygook, or your own jargon, or your view of your company through inane “mission statements.” Instead speak to your buyers using their language.

I use the strategies we outline in Tuned In. My audience tells me what direction to take my writing and speaking. Now I am working on a new book about viral marketing which is a terribly misunderstood topic. My new book, coming in March 2009 will be called World Wide Rave: Creating triggers that get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories.

In “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” what are the top 3 strategies a business or personal should use to get started today? How has the landscape changed from 10 years ago? What is the significance in speaking with your customers directly?

A) All marketers need to realize that nobody cares about you, your company, or your products and services. Instead marketers need to know that people care about themselves and their own problems. You need to focus on your buyers, not your own ego.

B) You need to forget everything you know about marketing in an offline world. Marketing on the web is not about you and your products.

We’ve been liberated!

Before the Web came along, there were only two ways to get noticed: buy expensive advertising or beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you. Now we have a better option: publishing interesting content on the Web that your buyers want to consume. The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed.

C) The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg your way in are the skills of interruption and coercion. Success online comes from thinking like a journalist and a thought leader.

Today, anyone can become a member of the media. PR practitioners care wholeheartedly about the blogger population these days, but they tend to treat them like traditional journalists. We shouldn’t be surprised with the sheer amount of press releases that cross wire services, and PR people who flock to bloggers for extra coverage (this especially happens in niche markets). To me, PR has become the supreme way of communicating your personal brand. PR has the power to make you a celebrity or to skip over you to the next expert who has one extra connection or a lot of money (to pay PR firms). In order to become known, the media (blogs/traditional sources) is the way to grow your brand and your business.

PR vs the media

Aside from Chris Anderson’s PR lashings and promotion of PR email addresses, there have been other feuds on the net. Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker fame, has her own blacklist now. Nothing against either of these web celebrities, but I think they need to reconsider posting people’s email addresses and names. I say this because, as I’ve noted before, this information will stay in Google for the duration of people’s lives and possibly tarnish their brand. I use an example below, but hide the person’s information, because my job is to help people instead of punish them. We can learn from mistakes without addressing individuals directly.

There has been a lot of mentions on how PR people are “evil” and how they don’t understand bloggers. There are even blogs called “The Bad Pitch” and “The Good Pitch.” Before we break this topic down anymore, I would like to recommend the top 5 PR agencies that “get it” and the personal brands behind them.

• 1) Edelman – Steve Rubel
• 2) Outcast – Dave Donohue
  (disclaimer: they are EMC’s PR Agency)
• 3) FutureWorks PR – Brian Solis
• 4) Shift – Todd Defren
• 5) Perkett PR – Jeff Glasson

Bad pitch example

Tips when pitching bloggers

1) Know your blogger. What works for one blogger may not work for another: I’m not sure any blogger has mentioned this tip yet, but feel it’s essential. Since people have individuality, read information differently and have inborn personal preferences, a press release may work for one and a phone call might work for someone else. Some bloggers might enjoy your usage of social media, such as Twitter (Twitpitch) in order to connect with them and share news.

2) Don’t play by the rules because there are no rules. Few bloggers may admit to you that there are actually no rules (at least yet) for distributing content through a blog. If you email a blogger, understand that it may be leveraged for a blog post within the next 5 minutes. In traditional media practices, there are editors and policies, whereas blogs are created by individuals, who don’t have any organizational constraints. Steve Rubel talks about this as well. All you can do is use best practices that are highlighted in this post and the one’s linking from it.

3) Lead with your personal brand. As with everything else we talk about on this blog; you need to introduce yourself by explaining who you are and who you are representing. Ryan Block of Engadget sheds some light on this as well. Brand recognition matters as well. If I already know the person who is pitching me, the probability that I will at least respond is quite high.

4) Become a part of their community. This involves reading their posts, commenting on the posts that you can contribute value or experience to, sharing their posts and linking to their blog. Basically, bloggers love dealing with other bloggers. If you are a PR person, then just having a blog will position you favorably to other bloggers. Darren Rowse has some tips on this as well.

5) Content is king, even with PR pitches. Bloggers enjoy fresh and relevant content, that is unique or special to them. In order to do this, you must customize your pitch to fit their preferences, which you can learn about on their blog. Also, in the subject line of your pitch, use their name. The more effort you put into the strategy behind the pitch and the actually content, the less work we have to do to post it. Lee Odden talks about this in more depth.

6) The social media release. More than anything, I believe in the value of a press release that has “extra component’s” to it. The flat and original release has too much spin and is typically too long. Another issue is that it doesn’t tabulate the conversations around the release and is only consumable in written format. The social media release or SMR uses multimedia elements, such as podcasts and pictures (YouTube/Flickr), embedded hyperlinks, and sharing utilities such as Digg, del.icio.us and Redit. These releases are optimized for the web as well. Here are a few examples. Bloggers appreciate this type of release because there is rich content for their posts.

7) Be passionate and creative. Scott Monty is one of my favorite web 2.0 friends and he blogged about how we was pitched by two people who constructed a video-pitch on YouTube. He enjoyed it so much that he blogged about the pitch, endorsing the product as well.

8 ) Relationships still trump everything. If you are already friends with the person you are pitching, it becomes less of a pitch and more of a “friendly conversation.” The first question a blogger asks when receiving a pitch is “do I know you”?

Your Personal Marketing Plan Post Series

Section 1: Situational Analysis – A detailed description of exactly where you are in your life, as well as your mission, vision and life cycle.

Section 2: Audience Analysis – Researching what the market is for your brand, with both primary and secondary research and quantitative and qualitative measurements.

Section 3: Competitive Analysis – If you’re branded properly competition is irrelevant. If you’re still discovering and developing your brand, then you can only estimate who your competitors are by past data (Colleges) and from the strength of the brand you’re applying to (GE, Reebok, etc).

________________

Now for the most comprehensive piece of your personal marketing plan: you’re marketing strategy. You’re marketing strategy is composed of the personal marketing mix (4 P’s), along with your target audience, positioning statement, objectives/goals and integrated marketing communications plan.

The 4 P’s of personal branding (Spoke about this in 2006)

• Person – you
• Place - your desired workplace
• Price - your brand value
• Promotion - selling yourself

Person (formerly product) is as simple as YOU and as complex as your strengths, personality, appearance and competencies. Place is the location where the person is applying for a job or seeks employment. Price is the total perceived value of the person or candidate and promotion are the strategies that the individual must implement in order to gain visibility for his or her brand.

Target Audience

Once you research your audience (as I spoke about in part 2), you need to segment it to find your niche. Businesses locate their target market. Product managers must hone down on a single market per each product. Your personal brand cannot please nor is relevant to everyone walking this earth. There are some people that will cling to it, while others will be repelled and attracted to other brands that have more in common with them. There are four main area’s of segmentation that I will go over.

• Geographics – regions, countries, city/town size and climate
• Psychographics – people’s lifestyles and behaviors
• Demographics – age, income, education, status, type of occupation, region of country, or household size
• Behavioralistic – befits sought, purchase occasion, user status, loyalty status, usage rate

Here is an example: You want to target people who live in Boston, MA, who exercise 3-5 times per week, with a household income of $150,000, between the ages of 28 and 40, who are extremely loyal and purchase your type of product 10 times a year.

You don’t have to be that descriptive. You could say “College student’s in the Massachusetts area that like to read often.” The idea here is to think about exactly who you want in your audience and who you don’t. 60 year olds aren’t going to want to read a college magazine and a fortune 500 company isn’t going to hire someone with no experience. From both the corporate and individual level, one thing remains consistent, you need to research, observe and direct your marketing messages at a specific target.

Positioning Statement

In the personal branding regime, this is commonly known as a “personal brand statement.” Basically, you want to match your brand to the audience in a single sentence. Mine would be “I’m the leader in personal branding for the next generation of worker.” Here is how I break down my personal niche: Business > Marketing > Branding > Personal Branding > Personal Branding for Gen-Y. Since I’m only 24, I know I can’t cater to CEO’s, executives or legacy’s, but I know I can speak to just about any college student or young professional about personal branding. This work’s because I’ve been in their shoes and not that of an executives, therefore I can connect on a closer level. Also, people usually work with others that are more successful than themselves. It would be impossible for me to teach an executive that makes over $500,000, has won industry awards and shows up in the newspaper every day. People want something that can provide them what they can’t already get themselves.

You’re positioning statement is who you are and what audience you serve.

Goals /Objectives

How are you going to measure your outcome? How do you define success? When writing down your goals and objectives think short-term and long-term and make sure they align properly. “I want to be a millionaire” is not detailed enough. You really want to think about what measurable goals you can have, such that they are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely).

Integrated Marketing Communications Plan

When I did these plans for businesses it was a blast. You get a budget and then divide it up amongst delivery channels for your brand, devising a strategy that you can execute. Businesses can spend thousands of dollars on their communication budget (Coca Cola spends millions). If you’re a premature brand, then you need to budget more wisely. My tripod approach to personal communication is: awareness, adoption and retention. Awareness is when people know your alive and what you can do for them. Adoption is when they take the first level of investment in your brand, meaning they could subscribe to your blog or give you a job offer. Retention is an ongoing relationship between you or your supervisor or the attention you can weild with the people that have already invested in you (life-time value of a customer).

Here are some of the strategies you can use

• Social Media – The cheapest way to build your presence online, offer thought leadership and be visible on Google.
• Social Networking – Als0, very cheap and effective. Once you have a message, you can just push it through your network.
• Email / Newsletters / Lists – Build or purchase lists of people that would be interested in your services.
• Radio - This area is dying at some level, but if you have a select audience and go on-air, it can help you gain presence.
• SEM Pay-Per-Click – If you have a website already, then you may invest in Google Adwords, so that when someone Google’s a keyword that is relevant to your brand, you will appear at the top.
• Public Relations – Placement in magazines, websites or even blogs can lend you a lot of credibility, traffic, customers and happiness. PR has become the dominant force in marketing communication plans.

Through Personal Branding, I’ve gotten to meet some amazing young stars. One of the most prominent and resourceful is Tiffany Monhollon, who writes the Personal PR column and has just started a blog on that very topic. Today, I interviewed her concerning this topic to give you a better view of how important it is. Tiffany is a corporate communications supervisor at one of the world’s largest staffing and human resource services companies. Currently, she finishing her master’s degree in journalism.

She’s worked and written for a Fortune 500 company, an international missions organization, volunteer groups, university organizations, newspapers and start-up businesses. She is passionate about defining the lines of professionalism, integrity and authenticity in our new media world. She writes about this and other career and new media-related topics at her blog, Personal PR.

Me: Tiffany, how did you transition from writing a blog entitled “Little Red Suit” to “Personal PR”?

Tiffany Monhollon: It’s been an interesting process, to be sure. Little Red Suit was organized around a metaphor that worked for me at the time, because I had been planning to launch a women-oriented business. But my plans changed, as plans often do, and I chose to stick with the blog anyway, instead of a blog hosted at my personal name website. That’s because when I first chose to launch a professional blog, I had a lot of uncertainty about whether or not to even publish my full name publicly, because there was at that time a lot of discussion around the subject – think Kathy Sierra and Creating Passionate Users. In the first few months, I blogged about this topic and issues of authenticity and transparency in blogging, and that conversation is where a lot of readers started showing their support and joining in the conversation with me, and a few high profile bloggers at the time encouraged me to use my full name to blog by. And eventually, I did. After that, my blog really took off, and it was great, but I quickly found that I wanted to blog at a place where the URL didn’t appear to be exclusively woman-oriented in content, because it never was that type of content.

Around the same time I started thinking about launching a new blog (or re-launching at a new URL), I chose to shift the research for my master’s thesis away from corporate culture and towards the phenomenon of professional topic blogging and personal branding. And my research led me to a pocket of study into Personal PR. Imagine my surprise when you e-mailed me to propose new columns for the magazine, and “Personal PR” was on the list! All the pieces started falling together at the right time, and I realized that this was the direction I’d been searching for in a new blog. And it also worked naturally into something that’s at the heart of what I most enjoy writing about.

Me: Can you explain more about building powerful relationships in the digital age and the discussions you have had and will have on your blog around this topic?

Tiffany Monhollon: From early in my career, and even throughout my life in general, relationships have played an integral part in my success, in various ways. When I started blogging professionally, I realized very quickly that the same could be true of my virtual relationships as well. As most people in our generation, I was an early adopter of most technologies, and perhaps even more so because my dad has been into computers since I was a baby, and the Internet was just one of many things I learned about quickly. I remember when there was just one person in my high school I could e-mail because they had dial up and a hotmail account, too! So of course, in college, when things like Xanga appeared, I signed up quickly, and the same for MySpace, Facebook, etc. But those were more of a time zapper for me, because I never got anything of true value out of it, other than some fleeting interaction with people I hadn’t seen since high school, etc.

Blogging at Little Red Suit was different than any of my other new media experiences, and that was for three reasons. The first was, I was positioning myself within a thoughtful community of professional bloggers. Even though I didn’t really realize it at the time, this made a powerful impact in my blogging. The second was, I was creating relevant content. It was relevant because my readers showed up, read it, and participated with it. This is something that as a lifelong writer I had always dreamed up but never really imagined possible. And it’s also powerful, because it challenges you to continually create better and better content. The third was, I was interacting with the right people. And by right, I mean people who would interact with me, encourage me, promote me, and build a relationship with me, both other bloggers and readers.

These relationships are empowering – personally, the encourage you and make you continually improve. And professionally, they open doors and lead to opportunities you wouldn’t get a shot at any other way. And the really interesting thing about these relationships is, they’re not just empowering in the digital realm. In other words, they don’t just help you become a better, more popular blogger. They can help you in your career. For me, as my expertise and authority in the blogging world grew, so did my confidence, expertise and authority in my job and career.

Me: As the Personal PR columnist for Personal Branding Magazine, how do you differentiate your blog content from your column?

Tiffany Monhollon: Well, the form for blog content and magazine content are inherently different. Columns for a magazine have to be able to stand alone and are less interactive, so they tend to revolve around one specific topic or element, and they have to be concise and require a lot of time, research, and finesse. But the blog is different because it’s more interactive, and it can be very strategic, like the column, or I can write for it more spare of the moment. It also serves as more of an ongoing conversation and interaction about the subject. I can offer tips, personal insights, and extensions of other posts or article’s I’ve read by linking to them. There is also a larger range for me to explore and expound upon at the blog.
So that’s the basic difference, but for me, it’s not really a goal to differentiate content – anywhere I write – because it’s important to me to be consistent wherever I am – in real life and in the digital. So both serve as a great venue to share my ideas, but they are very different in form, purpose and audience.

Me: There are various ways to communicate your brand online, in both traditional and new media channels. Which do you see as having more impact on the end user?

Tiffany Monhollon: Really, it depends on the individual user. A more traditional media format is different in form, function, audience and even purpose than a blog, for example. Most traditional channels are a great way to generate a lot of attention, traffic and buzz around your brand, but a new media outlet such as a blog lets you actually create relationships with readers, bloggers, even reporters. These relationships can offer more than simply attention, traffic and buzz. Because there are people who know and care about you on the other end, as opposed to just a bunch of people briefly interacting with your brand, which is more typically what happens with a traditional type outlet. Both can be really important tools in promoting your brand, so it’s not a matter of one or the other but more of finding the right balance for you.

Me: How do you think personal pr intersects personal branding?

Tiffany Monhollon: This is a really interesting question, and there are a lot of ways to answer it. You can look at it as a pretty seamless intersection if you simply realize that theoretically, personal branding is born out of marketing theory and personal PR is, of course, based in PR theory. And with the rise of MPR, it’s easy to see how they work together for your image and your career.

Personal PR is in some ways a whole life/career philosophy that encompasses many things. It’s a very dynamic concept, much like the discipline and definition of public relations is. But people have a certain perception of PR that it’s all about media and promotions and attention. It’s not: that’s really just one element. Concepts like corporate social responsibility, relationship management, communication, media realtions, issues management – and many more – that stem from PR flow so smoothly into the career realm. So it’s simply one umbrella that covers a lot of different aspects of your image and your career, which makes it similar to personal branding in many ways, and there is some intersection regarding what’s under each umbrella, but they’re essentially two different disciplines that work together seamlessly for one overarching purpose – to enhance your career.

Me: Will “Little Red Suit” die now that “Personal PR” has surfaced? Will the branding be consistent? (Picture of you in the suit vs a regular headshot)

Tiffany Monhollon: This is a really interesting question, mostly because I’ve gone back and forth on this. To be honest, just maintaining one blog is difficult enough with a full time job, grad school and the volunteering I do. So my intent with launching Personal PR was to sort of move blogging territory there. Most prominent bloggers who advised me in the process said to focus on one blog, and that would be more than enough, and that my loyal readership would follow me there. But I still have so much traffic at Little Red Suit it’s a hard question to answer, because there are a lot of things I could do with the site, and there are many people who successfully blog at more than one site. So it’s possible that I will continue blogging there, just more infrequently.

As far as branding, goes, I’d already switched to a professional headshot mostly because it looks more like me than the things I had launched Little Red Suit with, but I am sticking with the color red to keep some consistency.

Me: Finally, what have you learned from blogging relationships (like ours) and what are three pieces of advice you would like to give my readership?

Tiffany Monhollon: I’ve learned that blogging relationships are really no different than other relationships. They take time and consideration to cultivate, and they must be maintained, but they can really make a difference in your life and career. If you’re a blogger, they’re invaluable, because they are ultimately your most powerful tool in your initial phases of promoting your content as well as your personal brand. They help connect you to opportunities and people who can help you succeed. That’s what I love about blogging relationships so much – it really seems like there is such a culture of mutual peer cultivation. There’s not a ton of competition because there’s room for everyone in the blogosphere. And what’s amazing about blogging is, you very literally have to have other people (links, comments, traffic) which can be intimidating, but if you just take the time to cultivate the relationship – with each reader or blogger you want to, you can have them (relationships, links, comments, traffic).

1) Be your most excellent, every day. If you blog, this means write the best, most interesting, value-added content you can, each time you write. On the job, display a solid work ethic, do your best, learn continually, and push yourself every day. Your personal brand is worth nothing if there’s nothing to back it up. Your personal PR is pointless if there’s nothing excellent going on to talk about. Be worth talking about first. The rest will be much easier if you never stop pursuing excellence.

2) Build real relationships. At work, your community, at home, at the grocery store, on your blog, on other people’s blogs, wherever you are, wherever you spend your time, build relationships there. You never know where the next career-making relationship will come from. And make them real relationships by making them 2-way, and by putting other people first. Realize that, as Zig Ziglar said, you can have anything you want in life if you help other people achieve what they want. This doesn’t mean you help people get what they want just so you can get your way too; on the contrary, selflessly helping other people succeed naturally lends itself to them helping you in their own ways sometimes.

3) Don’t forget about life. To the career-oriented individual, it’s easy to put so much of yourself into the next big thing that you somehow lose sight of the rest of life. But it’s critical for your career that you prioritize to be a whole person. This means taking time to give back to the community and others around you. It also means taking time for the rest of your life goals, be that dating or family or just taking a vacation. Your career, your brand, and your relationships will benefit if you keep this in sight.

An octopus has eight tentacles, as does the subject of personal branding. Each tentacle has suction cups for sensing and tasting other sea creatures and objects such as coral. Personal branding touches each related topic in a dissimilar way. The personal brand or head of the octopus is the centerpiece for the model, which is you. Each tentacle represents an area that either impacts or is influenced by your brand.

Social media is a channel by which your brand can persuade, entertain or become noticeable to others. Entrepreneurship is how you take ownership of your career and become your own manager. Human resources within any company analyzes personal brands for recruitment purposes, whereas career development is a routine for positioning yourself as favorable to human resources. Public relations, whether through traditional or new media, is an option for notifying others that your brand exists, as well as managing your reputation online. Self-marketing and branding enables you to have deliverables for starting conversations between you and your audience. Forming relationships through networking is how you enable a brand transaction or establish a new opportunity. Finally, search engine optimization is your ability to rank high in search engines, due to other websites appreciation and trust in your website.

I’ve been contemplating this model for months now, after brainstorming the various topics that surround personal branding. I think it’s important to realize that your brand can be manipulated and revised throughout your life and the above categories are items to look into as you progress. Each column in Personal Branding Magazine is built off of this column, to give the full perspective on the topic.

This is a cross-post, in unison with Chris Clarke, a gen-y PR professional and friend of mine. Chris works at NATIONAL Public Relations as Coordinator, New Media. His role is to educate their staff of consultants about online communications and integrate social media into existing client offerings.

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Public relations used to be synonymous with media relations. Public relations professionals used to deal exclusively with appealing to the mainstream media, and their goal was to get their company’s story into the newspaper pages or on the evening news, usually by making telephone calls to the journalists and ‘pitching’ them their story.

‘PR’ has evolved over the years to become so much more than phone pitches to the mainstream media. Today, the profession is experiencing a rebirth, thanks in large part to the internet. Because of it, practitioners must concern themselves with appealing to far more audiences than just the mainstream media. A profession that was once about communicating key messages from large corporations to big media empires has come a long way. Companies big and small are using public relations today, and are targeting smaller, more specialized audiences – even individuals. Also, bloggers have taken the lead as publicists always looking for new content, so they have been the target of pitches. Some blogs carry as much, if not more, weight and subscription base, such as TechCrunch and GigaOm.com.

Public relations can be processed through individuals these days. Rather than building the image of a corporation or product, an individual’s talents can be recognized. The goal of just about every PR program is to raise awareness (to the positive news, of course) which should help increase sales. Personal branding is a form of ‘personal PR’. Through social media, everyone becomes their own personal PR spokesperson – as well as CEO, chief content officer, webmaster, marketing, business developer, and more. With positive news and increased awareness, you can increase your “sales” – you’ll be building your personal brand.

As your personal brand publicity increases, so does that of all the products or companies you support. Your name is associated with everything you touch and therefore everything can prosper simultaneously. Most people are recognized because of their formation or participating in a product launch or their charitable contributions.

The first step to building your personal brand is recognizing that you already have one. It’s that simple — and that hard and that inescapable. It was formed through your networks: friends and family, all of whom perceive you a certain way based on the interactions you’ve shared with them. In order to build on your existing personal brand, it’s essential to expand one’s network – or, what PR practitioners call ‘increasing awareness’. Word of mouth has been named the number one strategy for communicating your brand and through social media; it’s far easier to spread your message than it was 10 years ago.

By developing a blog and enlisting on a variety of social networks, you’ll become more visible and establish yourself as an expert, which will grow your personal brand a great deal. If you have something to say and a platform to say it on, people will be there to listen. When they listen, they make a judgment call, as to if you have the credibility available to express those opinions. Those that subscribe to your blog are your word-of-mouth evangelists for getting your message out and attracting more people to the brand called you.

Demonstrating thought leadership is the key to success: write intelligent blog posts, thought-provoking blog posts; write other bloggers comments; send a personal email to people who leave you comments; send in audio comments to the podcasts you listen to; connect with people you’ve engaged with on social networks; and finally, go out and meet the people you read and admire, because online connections are solidified in the real world and can turn into genuine friendships. The key is to freely express your subject matter expertise through your blog for free, therefore people can get a feel for who you are and are more inclined to purchase your services.

In short, start engaging. Show yourself to be intelligent and hard working, and success will find you. Discover what you’re passionate about, take a stand on that topic and blog about it. Just be consistent with who you are and the manner in which you present yourself. Authenticity is what online communities are based on.

You have the tools at your disposal, freely available, to make a difference in your life. If you choose to use it, a little ‘personal PR’ can go a long way to helping build your personal brand.

Brian Solis is one of the web’s finest new media PR influencer’s. His blog is one of Advertising Age’s top 100 marketing and media blogs, as well as a great resource for anyone interested in exploring social media, mixed with PR and much more. Brian’s blog also provides information related to the state of new media in Silicon Valley. When Brian is not blogging, he runs FutureWorks, which fuses “best of breed” new media and public relations and also podcasts at bub.blicio.us (spoof off of del.icio.us most likely). Aside from his businesses, he is a very genuine person, always willing to help anyone and poses as a great mentor.

The Podcast: Jim Kukral confronted Brian at Blog World about his success and his personal brand. I’m happy to have found this because it is just another personal branding success story.

• Jim Kukral: “You are getting most of your clients from actually your thought leadership that you provide and your brand…..you are a living case study for personal branding…building a company off of a brand.”
• Brian Solis: “It does work, if you demonstrate expertise, and at least sound somewhat convincing..it works.”

Credit: Jim Kukral’s Blog entitled “Marketing Ideas Online“

Do you have a personal branding success story? Feel free to send it to me for inclusion on this site!

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