Success Story: Build Your Dream One LinkedIn Contact at a Time

November 5, 2008 at 11:58 am | In Networking, People, Personal Branding, Success Story, Success Strategies, social media | 8 Comments
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I love hearing your personal branding success stories, so if you have one, please email me (dan.schawbel@gmail.com) and I’ll post it on this blog. I’ve blogged about seven success stories on this blog and look forward to hearing each one. I like inspiring others with personal branding success stories.

Here are a few from the past

I had the pleasure of speaking to another ambitious millennial recently, by the name of Lewis Howes. I would personally say that I dedicate most of my time to Twitter and this blog. I haven’t been using Facebook or other social media sites as much as I have in the past. Lewis and I spoke on the phone and he’s a good friend of Connie Bensen, who is the coeditor of Personal Branding Magazine and one of my close contacts. Lewis told me that he’s had crazy success with LinkedIn and I thought that was unheard of. Today, he tells his story!

In the beginning…

Over the last year I would say that 90% of my business opportunities have come from building my network on LinkedIn. At first, I was a little confused with the networking platform because it was different than Facebook and Myspace, but I shortly began to realize the potential it had.

What I did to make me successful

Initially, I completed my profile as it suggests you to do, then I started to reach out to other professional athletes and individuals who worked in the professional sports industry. Since I had played one year of Arena Football already, my initial goal was to build relationships with other football players, agents, and scouts, and network my way onto another team.

I wanted to separate athletes from everyone else in the industry so I created groups like the Professional Athlete Network and the Sports Industry Network to build my database and differentiate the two. I then asked my network compelling questions, provided useful feedback, made key introductions, started a newsletter including unique industry information, and built a site with additional resources to help people in my database achieve their professional goals.

My achievements

Since I was willing to make those important introductions, offer unconditional advice, and help others land jobs or build their business, people started seeing me as a valuable connector.

Because I worked on building my personal brand on LinkedIn, I now:

  • give speeches to various associations and businesses
  • write for a sports industry magazine
  • receive sports sponsorship and marketing opportunities
  • host live networking events to LinkedIn members

I also get free products to test and review, and receive free trips around the country to attend events. Various inventors bring me their products and ideas for my day job where I work as an inventor and intellectual property broker. I have close to 1,500 direct connections, and 20,000 other connections from the various niche groups I created.

Without the LinkedIn platform I would have to say most of this would not be possible. Take into consideration that this did not happen over night, but these results are possible for anyone who is willing to put in the effort.

What I recommend that you do

For those who do not have the time to build their network, I suggest focusing on three things:

  • Complete Your Profile — What you write on your profile is the most important thing because your LinkedIn page shows up towards the top of the Google search results. Think of it as a resume on steroids; add all of your important key words and achievements and leave out the roids J
  • Answer Questions — I know a guy with 12 connections and a half-completed profile, and he answers a question a day. In the last 30 days he landed three new freelance jobs because of his helpful answers. This takes 30 seconds a day, but if done right, it could identify you as a leader in your industry and land you more business.
  • Recommend Others — “But, Lewis, isn’t the goal to get recommendations on my profile?” This is true because the more others vouch for you, the more potential clients are willing to hire you because they trust in your experience and services. However, I say make recommendations first because this does two things: your name and a thoughtful recommendation show up on another person’s profile, and eight out of ten people you recommend will return the favor. It takes a few minutes, but leaves twice the impact.

——
Lewis Howes is the founder of SportsNetworker.com, a business-networking portal for the sports industry. He is an inventor at trident-design.com, and has worked with numerous products from the initial ideas to manufacturing and licensing. Howes speaks to groups and associations on the power of using LinkedIn, and provides LinkedIn consulting sessions for individuals and companies. His book entitled LinkedWorking teaches how to achieve your professional goals while on LinkedIn and will be released in January, 2009. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn or contact him at lewis@sportsnetworker.com with any questions.

Success Story: Accept a Facebook Friend Request and a New Job

October 17, 2008 at 11:12 am | In People, Personal Branding, Success Story | 4 Comments

I love hearing your personal branding success stories, so if you have one, please email me (dan.schawbel@gmail.com) and I’ll post it on this blog.

Today’s source of inspiration comes from one of my good friends, Scott Bradley. Scott, just like Jason Alba, Ann Handley, Chris Russell, Tiffany Monhollon, Adam Salamon, Rebecca Thorman, Paul Gillin, Drew McLellan, Maria Elena Duron, Rick Mahn, and Connie Bensen, knew me before I was written about in Fast Company and my success snowballed up until what you see today. They’ve been with me still and I appreciate it. Scott is the Marketing Director for Personal Branding Magazine.

Scott is a special, passionate and intelligent human being. As one of the great networkers of the millennial generation, he understands the most important rule, “give before you receive.” Today, Scott talks about how he scored his current job, after being a Boston College student and working full-time at Macy’s in New York. I know Scott quite well and told him he wouldn’t last there (and that he would start his own business). I should have bet him money!

In the beginning there was FACEBOOK

My personal branding success story starts at Boston College my junior year. I had just taken over the Boston College Entrepreneur Society, and aside from providing an entrepreneurial voice on campus, I wanted to also bring speakers to speak with the members. Over the course of the two years I brought somewhere between 2-3 speakers a month and with each speaker I invited, they received an article in our newspaper. About 95% of the speakers that I invited came from networking on Facebook.

During the beginning of my senior year, I was contacted by Mike Michalowicz, on Facebook, who invested and still invests in young entrepreneurs. He wanted to come and speak to our group about entrepreneurship and share his entrepreneurial success story. As someone who had built and sold two multi-million dollar companies, one being sold to a fortune 500, there was no way I could not invite him. After his speaking engagement, I invited him out for a beer where I got to know him further. We immediately clicked, and stayed in touch from there.

Job interviews suck!

Around this same time, I was interviewing for jobs for after I graduation and just recently secured an opportunity with Macy’s Home Store in NYC. As I was excited about this opportunity, I knew I would always work on my other entrepreneurial projects to eventually get out of the corporate world and on to doing my own thing helping millions of people.

But wait there is hope

Around December of my Senior year during my Christmas break, Mike Michalowicz approached me and told me that he was writing a book and that he needed some help. Me being the give-to-give guy that I am gladly offered to help him with feedback and making the book the best it could be. The initial title of the book was called “Launch,” and then later was changed to “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.”

I read the manuscript, and then got back to him with my feedback. When I thought that was all I could contribute to the project, he then came to me during the spring time and told me, “Ok Scott, the manuscript is done, the title has been changed…now we need help figuring out our marketing strategy and how we are going to leverage social media to build our audience of hungry buyers.”

Because I love marketing, social media and building relationships with people through many of the social networking sites, the marketing ideas FLEW out of me. Before I knew it I had built the entire backbone of the marketing structure for the campaign, and structured the website in a way that would foster continual engagement, provide value, and in turn sell books to spread the message!

First day on the job

As I started my job with Macy’s, I went into the executive training program. After I had contributed all of the time that I had to Mike’s project…I decided that I was going to be with him the entire way to reach and achieve his goal of selling 1,000,000+ books and further changing millions of peoples lives in the process. Now mind you, I was still working for free.

I started my Macy’s job on June 23rd and from there my life began to get a little crazy. My days began at 6AM when I woke up, and didn’t end until 12PM at night. I would literally be coming home from work at 6:30pm and continued to work on Mikes project to make it a true success. After launching his website July 2nd it was a full blown pre-launch with the Facebook group that is 1300+ members now, and further an opt in list to boot!

Escape from corporate America – live your dreams

And then the day came…2 days before my graduation from the training program at Macy’s…At 8:30 AM I see that Mike is calling me. I pick up and say “Your calling quite early this morning…whats up?” First words out of his mouth… “How much is Macy’s Paying you?…I say XYZ.” He then goes, “How about I give you XYZ and ABC and you start with me full time as my right hand man who manages the brand/marketing/pr to launch this book?”

My jaw dropped to the floor…and to make a long story short I came to the end of the day and gladly accepted.

Success Story: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Personal Branding

September 25, 2008 at 11:20 am | In People, Personal Branding, Success Story, Success Strategies | 3 Comments

From time to time, I like to post success stories to show you that personal branding DOES work. If you have your own story, please email me. Today, Paul will be talking about his story on how he transformed his life by establishing his brand and then realizing that he should be constantly meeting new faces and communicating his value. To view more success stories, please click here.

Who is Paul Singh?

Paul has been an entrepreneur for nearly 10 years. With two successful startups under his belt, he is a process guy at heart and now focuses on helping startups and small businesses systematize the way they build their own path to getting ahead. His blog, Results Junkies, now reaches thousands of people every month and he’s currently writing a free ebook (coming in October 2008) that outlines a systematic, entrepreneurial method for succeeding.

Paul Singh’s story

Having bootstrapped my own ventures from the ground up, I managed to convince my younger self that networking was a waste of time. I routinely toiled away for hours on end, hiding behind my laptop deep within datacenters and coffee shops in the DC Metro area and actively avoided nearly every opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs.

Fast forward nearly 10 years when I joined PBwiki as the Director of Support and was immediately challenged to build my own personal brand. I wasn’t exactly sure where to start but I began blogging twice a week and stumbled across Dan’s personal branding blog. I spent a weekend reading through nearly every post but, being a process guy, needed to systematize the way I would tackle my own rebranding efforts. I ended up creating a simple, five-step plan to rebranding yourself and found it to be more useful than I ever imagined.

My advice to others would be to simply get started, today – as with most things in life, you are your own worst enemy. You can choose to continue reading about personal branding to no end and dreaming about your “ideal” job or you can force yourself to spend at least 10 minutes to get started right now.

Today, I am PBwiki’s Director of Information Systems and routinely attend networking events in the San Francisco Bay Area and the DC Metro area. In fact, I specifically set aside a $3000 budget per year to travel between the coasts to keep in touch with entrepreneurs that I’ve met at these same events. Having a strong, consistent personal brand has led to a number of unexpected opportunities, new friends and a decent amount of side income as well.

The point is that you need to own your personal brand and you have to get started today. You’re unique, just like everyone else — start capitalizing on that uniqueness today and watch yourself get ahead in life faster than you ever imagined!

Success Story: One Brand One Tweet One Job

September 18, 2008 at 11:23 am | In People, Personal Branding, Success Story, Success Strategies, social media | 10 Comments

I love following Jeremiah Owyang’s blog. He is very creative for starting a “People on the move in the social media industry” series of posts. In Jeremiah’s last post, I saw a really good note about someone getting a job by using Twitter and jumped on it. I haven’t heard too many stories of people getting a job through Twitter. I emailed Chris immediately and he sent me his story, which is well written. He also asked if I wanted commentary from his new boss and the woman who recruited him on Twitter. So below is a compilation of everything. Just about anyone can learn something from this. From my perspective, I would enjoy a world where you didn’t have to submit to job boards, where you could bypass hierarchies and speak directly to the applicant/recruiter.

Chris Kieff, Director of Marketing, Ripple6, Inc.

I’ve changed jobs from being an independent consultant to becoming the new Director of Marketing with Ripple6, www.Ripple6.com. One of the interesting things about this is that I found my job on Twitter. I’m doing an interview with John Lawlor today on his Blog Talk Radio show about how that happened. It’s at noon eastern today but you can download and listen anytime http://snipr.com/btr-smc-12.

I spent several months looking for work after losing my job in January 2008. I went the usual route of job sites and resumes, etc. And I started writing my blog, www.1GoodReason.com, which gained me some exposure. The blog is the thing that gained me the best attention and consideration. At the same time I worked hard on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Doing everything everyone advises you do to, I was twittering, friending and linking; answering questions etc.

I went on numerous interviews and found 4 different companies that all wanted to hire me for a new position as a “Social Media” person. And each of the 4 companies, when the rubber met the road ran into a hiring freeze. Now maybe this is the new age lie in the current economy but since they were hiring very visible people in the Social Media space it is pretty easy to tell that they are or are not hiring, and they haven’t yet.

So as the last job fell through, and that prospect decided to freeze their hiring and asked me to possibly consult with them, I sent a “Tweet” on twitter, something like this “New Job just fell through, but got a new client“. One of the 1000+ followers I had collected over the past 6 months responded to me with something like, “Hey we’re looking for a social media marketing guy, you interested?“

We started a conversation that lead to a job as the Director of Marketing. Here’s the kicker, I had applied to the job, by sending an email to a job posting they had made a few weeks before. So my resume didn’t make it through the screening process, but my Twitter had gotten through the noise and into the short list. :)

Katie Bessiere, Director Client Services & Strategy, Ripple6, Inc.

Note: Katie found Chris on Twitter after he tweeted. She was already one of his followers!

I’ve used twitter for advertising open job positions multiple times now, and have found some excellent candidates that way. The message reaches the right people through twitter primarily because it uses my own social network ties to spread the word. I may be broadcasting to a smaller set of people, but they are a more valuable and more relevant set. I was actively monitoring twitter for job candidates when Chris sent his tweet out since I myself had sent several out about open positions in that same time period.

Twitter is certainly not the only effective social media outlet for finding people by any means; I’ve had success with others as well (Facebook and Linkedin, for example). The central tenet of all of these is the same though: using your own network to spread a message. Research has shown that weak ties are the most valuable source of informational and instrumental social support, so it should surprise no one that the phenomenon would repeat itself online or that the candidates found in this manner would be equally if not more qualified for the job.

Rich Ullman, SVP, Marketing, Ripple6, Inc.

Note: Rich is Chris’s new boss!

At first I thought it was ironic to find Chris this way, but it was quite appropriate. For weeks, if not months, I had ruled out candidates with impressive backgrounds and experience because they had less than a dozen connections on LinkedIn. That wasn’t a measure of their talent, but of their ability to adapt, adopt, and understand the medium and what Ripple6 does.

By coming to us from the ground up, it was one clear sign (but not the only one) that he knew how social technologies work, empower and change people. For our niche of the industry, that’s imperative today. And for others, it’s not that far off.

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