What is Personal Branding?

I was recently looking for books about personal branding in the Kindle store, and unfortunately many of them were spam. However, I did find one kernel of wheat in the Amazon chaff, called What Is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! by Murray Newlands and Jim Kukral, that stands apart from the everyday marketing books that marketing types and aspiring marketers might pick up off the shelf.

Newlands and Kukral seek to make a book that’s accessible to ordinary people who want to learn about personal branding without oversimplifying any key concepts. Many books deem this too difficult, and thus aim at only one audience. They are either too technical, which makes them inaccessible to aspiring marketers looking to make money online, or they’re too basic, so professional marketers don’t learn anything new.

Books that try to appeal to both often get stuck in the middle ground by having concepts that professional marketers already know, but are too advanced for beginning marketers to understand. Kukral and Newlands, on the other hand, appeal to both groups. They do not lowering their content to the lowest common denominator, but they keep What is Personal Branding? accessible with easy-to-understand textual illustrations of what they’re trying to convey. Consider the following passage by Newlands:

Three out of four recruiters will look up information about you online, and those who do will use that information to eliminate more than one in three candidates they are considering.

This tells people who don’t have their foot in the door yet to make sure their Facebook profile pic conveys a brand, probably a professional brand, suitable for the job they’re applying to. But it also speaks on a deeper level: You have a personal brand that affects people’s perceptions of you, and even small things like what people find about you online can have dire consequences. In addition, once you’re aware of this brand, Newlands says that you should shape it so that it benefits you:

Taking the responsibility and owning your own personal brand puts you in the driver’s seat, and you will find that your awareness, not only of your brand, but of the way your brand interacts with and affects your business and field overall can be a powerful thing.

Newlands initially sets up a feeling of powerlessness by placing the reader into the perspective of a potential employee who’s just gotten a background check from a potential employer. Here, he flips it by giving the reader a feeling of control, since they can be in control of their personal brand (by shaping it online) instead of letting their brand control them (by not getting a job because of what people find about you online). He reinforces this point again later on, so that the reader is thinking about it before going deeper into the book:

Owning your personal brand means owning your personal future. Personal branding not only allows you to harness what is your essence in the here and now, it gives you the base to build on it as you grow, change, and build for the future.

Throughout the book, Newlands and Kukral use shifts like these to solidify advanced marketing concepts that many professional marketers haven’t even thought about yet. To further distil their knowledge, Newlands and Kukral explain concepts by using metaphors and common situations that most readers have been in. This makes the book easier for beginners to relate to and easier for marketing veterans to quickly learn advanced concepts so that they can take their marketing career to the next level.

Steve Sims

Steve Sims graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011, and now works for a PR and marketing consulting firm in San Francisco.

This is a guest post by Kaila West.

Customer relationship management, or CRM, applications can get rather costly for some of the highest level, professional versions. Think in the range of $2,500 per application and up depending on factors like numbers of users, location of users, and volume of customers and their data required for the business to manage.

For those with less budget than will allow for buy-in to such systems, there is a lower cost solution available. Search engine giant, Google, has developed its own cloud computing platform known as the Google Apps Engine. These applications are conveniently located in their Apps Marketplace and have the added benefit of plugging into the business account of other various Google powered applications. Google Apps which may be familiar are the business branded version of Gmail, the Google Docs suite of word processing and spreadsheet functionality, Calendar, and a host of other free apps.

By creating the App Engine and Marketplace, Google has made it easy for developers to produce relevant business applications they can sell. These applications provide for the business to maintain single user sign on accounts. This means once a company has signed up for a Google Apps account, users can be added for appropriate personnel within the business.

If the company has need for, say, a CRM application, their administrator can peruse the list of CRM apps available within the Marketplace and easily integrate that app into their existing suite, at the ready for all users on the system.

Following is a brief list of some stand out CRM applications available for integration into the business’ existing Apps infrastructure. Administrators will also be happy to learn that both user accounts and application details are easily maintained within their control panels.

9 Top Google CRM Apps

• Insightly: Insightly is the most popular Google Apps CRM and Project Management package. Track leads, proposals, opportunities, projects and manage files, all through an easy to use interface. Link to Google App page.
• Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM offers businesses a complete customer relationship life-cycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management. Link to Google App page.
• Capsule CRM: Capsule is a simple, flexible CRM for small businesses and sales teams. Capsule makes it easy to keep track of your customers and other contacts, your sales opportunities and follow-ups. Link to Google Apps page.
• Applane: Applane CRM is an enterprise CRM that supports complete sales cycle and customer relationship. It has very efficient user interface with context menu and many advanced features. It is hosted on GAE. Link to Google Apps page.
• eStreamDesk Helpdesk: eStreamDesk is a flexible helpdesk and ticketing platform that enables support staff to easily manage many requests from multiple services and e-mail addresses. Link to Google Apps page.
• Timetonote: Simple, Fast and Elegant CRM. Collaborate and share contacts, notes, tasks, projects and more with your co-workers. Features include: Google Contacts + Gmail + Calendar integration, Affordable, Secure: your data on Google’s infrastructure & SSL. Link to Google Apps page.
• Assistly: Assistly makes it easy for teams and Whole Companies to support customers right from the helpdesk. Tame overflowing inboxes and support customers via email, phone, chat, web, Facebook and Twitter. Link to Google Apps page.
• BatchBook Social CRM:BatchBook is a lightweight but powerful CRM that allows you to easily organize contacts, monitor social networks and track leads and deals. BatchBook allows you to keep track of your business, personal, and social networking contacts and share them with the rest of your team. You can create a flexible, easy-to-use contact database from scratch, or import your contacts from an existing system. Link to Google Apps page.
• PipelineDeals: PipelineDeals provides you with the easiest way to manage your sales pipeline. Sales teams use PipelineDeals to manage deal flow, track leads, run reports and close more deals. Link to Google Apps page.

This guest post is by Kaila West, a writer for a CRM Social Media, a social CRM blog which covers the art of using social media for customer relationship management.

Funny T Shirt Holiday Gift Finder

I recently took a journey through the Headline Shirts Holiday Gift Finder.

The guys set up a quiz to help you find a shirt fro all of your family and friends- or maybe they set it up to just give you something to do for a few minutes at work when you’re bored… either way, you answer a few questions…

and end up with suggestions for funny t shirts as gifts for Christmas:

There’s even a brand new Elvis meets Darth Vader shirt…

Happy shopping everyone.

If we weren’t so busy trying to figure out the marketing thing, we’d all be busy working our businesses, right?

Okay… in reality we are doing both. As small business owners, we’re working on our businesses AND trying to figure out how to use social media and generate word of mouth and build tribes and put it all together with duct tape – it’s really quite exhausting when you think about it.

Here’s a small suggestion: work all of the new rules of marketing and PR around your existing business, instead of the other way around. Don’t stop generating buzz – you have probably been generating buzz for the past ten years and didn’t realize it until the phrase buzz marketing was coined, right? It’s not time necessarily to change your business to fit new marketing. It’s time to figure out how to make new marketing fit your business.

A Word About Company Events and WOM

There are so many things that are newsworthy that get overlooked – perhaps you are the first in your industry to really embrace a type of marketing technique. Or you increased your revenue 30% in a down economy. Or you got your first customer online using social media.

If you can get some media attention for these events, you can generate word of mouth. The idea isn’t to go out of your way to make something newsworthy happen. The idea is actually to look around you and find what’s newsworthy, and then promote it so people have  a reason to talk about it.

Here’s how to generate some much needed word of mouth marketing with company events.

1. Keep track of them.

The easiest way to lose sight of possible newsworthy happenings is to miss them or forget them. Keep a journal of what’s going on in your business, or ask your administrative assistant to help you with this. Small business owners, especially those who work alone, don’t get in the habit of having a weekly status or staff meeting, but keeping a journal will help keep track of events. You can use a blog for this, and get double the benefit, or, you can just jot down notes in a day planner if the blogging takes you too long.

2. Determine what’s “feature” and what’s “minor.”

Although all of your company events might be newsworthy, there’s a difference between something worthy of a feature story, and something worthy of just an announcement.

If you read John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing book, you’ll learn about these differences and what they mean. Ultimately, you need to know the difference because it will determine how to go about getting media attention.

3. Write about them in the right way.

Details are essential and something rather minor can end up becoming significant, especially if it sets you apart from competitors. So get used to writing detailed memos that you can later shorten and turn into press releases or pitch letters.

Use resources (like Duct Tape Marketing or another book) to help you write press releases and pitch letters the right way. There really is a right and wrong way to go about it, and when working with the media, process is everything. You have to learn to follow it.

4. Know your media contact list.

Don’t get in the habit of sending broad releases through expensive distribution companies. These services were set up for public companies that make tons of announcements to shareholders. For really small companies, it’s more effective to put together a list of 20 to 30 publications that you know your readers read, and work on becoming a resource for them. At the very least, learn how to distribute a press release yourself rather than going through a distribution service that could cost you hundreds of dollars. Until you are an expert press release writer, this technique will save you money and dramatically increase the likelihood of a story coming out of it.

This is a guest post by Tia, who when she’s not writing about blogging, social media, or private student loans, tries to keep up with a 3 year old toddler with obvious plans of world domination.

The way businesses communicate with both current and prospective customers has changed almost beyond recognition in the past decade. While traditional methods such as networking functions still have their place, the advent of the Internet and more recently social media has meant that many businesses face the choice between embracing this brave new world and being left trailing in their competitors’ wake.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of social bookmarking. Once seen as the province of the nerdy teen, successful businesses are now waking up to how important this is to the modern marketplace.

One of the key issues facing those who want to explore further is knowing where to start. The following list is a top 10 social media marketing sites for business.

1. Digg

There’s no escaping the fact that Digg, along with del.icio.us (see number two) are one of the biggest players in the social bookmarking world. They have a massive number of followers and this huge potential can be tapped in to by any business willing and able to understand its importance. Visitors have the ability to submit articles in many subjects, including business. You can’t afford to ignore Digg.

2. Del.icio.us

Ignore the rather self-conscious way they spell there name and rather focus on the huge opportunities the site can offer a business. It’s a great way to get publicity for events and/or individual items and can be a real ace up the marketing teams’ sleeves.

3. SERPD

SERPD is a growing network focusing on Internet marketing, SEO, social media, and much more.

4. Reddit

The site doesn’t have the most easy on the eye user interface, but it’s definitely worth persevering with as it is a powerful tool that can be really good at increasing your internet traffic. It works by submitting articles or stories that in turn lead people to your unique online content.

5. Technorati

One of the best kept secrets among the general social bookmarking world, the site may not be as well known as some of the others in this list, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It has a clean layout which is easy on the eye and works by registering your own blog with them. It has a proven track record of increasing readership in the business area.

6. StumbleUpon

A big player in the social bookmarking world, this site works by putting a toolbar to your browser and offering opportunities to meet new customers based on your interests. Think of it as the online equivalent of a local business commerce meeting, only with a global reach.

7. Squidoo

While by no means a business-centric site, Squidoo should be avoided at your peril. It is full of articles and guides to a bewildering range of subjects. Do your business a favor and submit a guide to your own industry. It helps set you up as an expert and gets your name out there – all for free.

8. Bizsugar

While not one of the big players, bizsugar is a dedicated business site and as such is certainly worth investigating. Businesses can submit articles or bookmarks and get involved in a community to ask and get answers to a number of questions.

9. Tip’d

A great source of financial news along with many worthwhile tips and ideas. Think of it as an online brainstorming session.

10. Mixx

Not dissimilar to Digg, it’s still worth checking Mixx out especially as it’s particularly good at local content.

Your Favorites

These are my favorite social bookmarking sites to use for business articles. What are your favorites?

Vern is a guest blogger that enthusiastically enjoys sharing online bookmarks in order to spread great content throughout the web.

For those of you who don’t know me I want to share one thing…

This is the ONLY paid course I have ever recommended in all my years of blogging.

Most courses are long on what and really weak on HOW.

This course isn’t.

It is a full step-by-step course with one of the best support mechanisms in place…and bonuses worth having including a free premium theme.

Why am I telling you this?

Read more on the course at my more detailed blog post:

Probably The Best Blogging Course

Image Credit CSE

The last several years have seen a rise in the capability and popularity of online degree programs.

Created as a helpful solution to those with busy schedules, schools like Western Governors University and the University of Phoenix have ramped up their online coursework for marketing degrees and tout it as a self-directed experience that makes for a viable alternative to on-campus program.

While many working adults certainly do benefit from online courses, they are still inferior to the actual, in-person college experience – and here is why.

For all of their technological and logistical advancements, these programs leave many problems unaddressed that can render them harmful and confusing for regular college students. Today, we explore why a real university is still a better option than going online.

Hands-on Experience

One of the major advantages of on-campus learning is the hands on experience you gain from university resources. Online education, for all of its strengths, simply cannot compare to the materials a college campus can provide you.

This is probably more important for the sciences where on-campus students gain more than a conceptual understanding of the material by running actual experiments in the laboratory. Such hands-on learning exposes them to procedures and essential skills required for work in their field. The same kind of education cannot be had with online video or printable articles.

Opportunity for Networking

Building relationships with students and professors in your field is a cornerstone of the college experience. Working closely with your instructors department leaders at your school can expose you to career opportunities and professors can recommend you for placement in high-level courses or competitive internship programs. Instructors who know you as more than an email address online can also write you enthusiastic letters of recommendation to graduate school or job opportunities after graduation.

The friends you make in class could potentially become business partners or managers at companies you may one day wish to work for. It can be very difficult to build relationships online because there is little direct communication and no face-to-face interaction. And with word of mouth marketing, networking is a very important opportunity.

Opportunity for Internships

Participation in internships can help you get your footing in your field by opening the door for entry-level positions at solid organizations and introducing you to leaders who can potentially recommend you for jobs outside of the internship. When you attend an actual university, the department you are enrolled in, (Business, for example) networks with organizations, laboratories, and companies to turn up internship opportunities that their students can participate in.

The school then readily informs their students and professors about these opportunities and provides very easy, recommendation-ready placement for interested students. Conversely, online programs put the responsibility on you to seek out your own internship opportunities, apply yourself, and hopefully get selected on the basis of your enrollment in the program alone.

Organized Schedules

Procrastination is a big obstacle to overcome, especially for young college students. Those who have no experience managing their time and working within their own, self-set deadlines will encounter much trouble with online programs. Internet courses are designed such that you are solely responsible for reading the material and studying on your own, completing the work by the deadlines, and taking the tests when they are given; no excuses. With on-campus classes, students must still budget time to study for a test on their own, but the in-class lectures provide a solid schedule that is easy and repetitive for the student.

This gets you into a familiar rhythm and facilitates learning because you will come to expect that 9:30 AM on Monday is indisputably “advertising class” time. Without that set schedule, you must try to learn entirely on your own, whenever you feel like it. Rarely will you feel like reading chapters of your textbook, and the fact that you technically could put it off for later can cause you to fall far behind and struggle with your classes.

Immediate Clarification

Another advantage of on-campus classes over online ones is the opportunity to receive immediate clarification from an instructor. If you are in a classroom and have a question about the material in lecture, or feel you don’t adequately understand what was just said, you can simply raise your hand and have your concerns addressed right then and there. Online courses force you to email professors with your questions and wait for them to find the time to respond.

Bear in mind that your instructor might not totally understand the question, or could potentially answer it in an unsatisfactory way, which forces you to send follow-up questions and wait for a response again. In this way, the online student is robbed of the classroom interaction that facilitates fast learning and complete comprehension of subject matter.

Study Groups

Every individual learns differently and retains different aspects of class material than others. When test-time comes, it can be helpful to put together a small study group between you and several classmates. This allows you all to compare notes and discuss the subject so that you all gain a more complete understanding of the material that is going to be on the test.

Online courses make it exceedingly difficult for students to organize because each student has varied schedules and no face-to-face time to meet and study together. Thus, online students must strive to memorize all of the material by themselves, and take the tests without the opportunity to consult classmates on areas they feel weak on.

About the Author: Kara Taylor writes for Campus Explorer. Campus Explorer is the place to find the information you need on an online college like Strayer University.

While there are aspects of Word of Mouth involved in most Internet Marketing and Social Media activities, there are experts who have focused very specifically on Word of Mouth best practices and cutting edge strategies for years.

These are Word of Mouth experts you will definitely want to learn from and know about:

ANDY BEAL, creator of Trackur Social Media Monitoring

Internet Marketing Consultant Andy Beal, known for many years in Internet Marketing circles for the Marketing Pilgrim marketing blog, has been writing about Word of Mouth Marketing and Online Reputation Monitoring for years.

Andy Beal will become best known for developing the Social Media Monitoring Service Trackur, already chosen as their tool of choice by over 25,000 users.

ANDY SERNOVITZ, Word of Mouth Marketing Book Author

Even more closely associated with Word of Mouth is Andy Sernovitz who founded Gas Pedal Word of Mouth Marketing Blog and offers the Damn, I Wish I Thought of That! newsletter.

Why should we care about Word of Mouth?

• Businesses should care because people ARE talking about them – whether they’re listening or not!
• Consumers should care because we can use what is said to avoid wasting our precious time and money.
• Together we can build a better world through sharing what we know and that sharing IS Word of Mouth.

Concerned about your Online Reputation? Click the image to Find Out How to Monitor Your Reputation on Social Media

ATTN: BLOGGERS: Are your readers interested in Social Media Advertising, Social Media Marketing or Reputation Monitoring? Earn commissions and offer them discounst on upcoming premiere Social Media Events.

First there was the Internet as it was used by scientists, the government and various other very smart individuals in private and education sectors. Then a fellow in Europe decided that it would be cool to share data he was collecting while working at CERN. To do this in an efficient and elegant manner, he created what eventually became the World Wide Web. His notes and info were now able to be “found” by his peers and eventually they were creating their own pages of knowledge to be shared and commented upon.

Fast forward to today, and you’ll find an infinite amount of knowledge and experience online. If you have a question you go to a search engine. Perhaps your query is somewhat specialized? You go to a niche portal that accumulates and coalesces information for your research pleasure.

One of the most powerful paradigm changes the Internet has brought to the masses is the ability to download software from any connected computer, anywhere in the world. This global delivery system has revolutionized the way computer programs are not only distributed, but has actually affected their development processes.

Following are some of the most downloaded software programs that will come in handy during any word of mouth marketing campaign, including a quick review and discussion of what makes that title interesting.

10 Programs to Assist in Online Marketing

• Pidgin – This instant messaging client helps you combine other popular messenger accounts (Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk, etc.) into one program so you can keep in touch with anyone, no matter what network.
• Open Office – If your business is not at the right point to invest in the Microsoft Office suite, Open Office offers you the best of applications with similar features to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others. You can also convert most Office documents into Open Office format and vice versa.
• Thunderbird – Again, if you don’t use Microsoft products, Thunderbird is an alternative email management program similar to Outlook and Outlook Express to help you organize your emails.
• Firefox – Professionals in the business of coding and developing web based applications took quickly to this new web browser software. It was a key tool that created competition for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
• Winzip – A compression/decompression program that provides utilities for creating smaller files for easier online distribution. The program has developed handily over the years and is still amazingly popular with anyone needing advanced compression tools.
• iTunes – iTunes is home to tons of podcasts for all forms of online marketing.
• Ad-Aware – As with most things online when you download software you also run the chance of getting spam, spyware, and possibly Trojan horses designed to take over your machine. This popular program checks the data stream as you download it.
• Skype – Originally just a way to communicate with others via voice, Skype has become THE online video communications software. Free communications has never been nicer.
• Gimp – Need to edit some images? Gimp is an open source Adobe Photoshop like product that will be able to assist you with your basic image editing needs. I have even created a few simple business card designs in this easy to use program.
• Acrobat Reader (PDF) – For over 7 years this document reader program has positioned Adobe’s portable document file as the leading way to secure the display of files across most operating systems and browsers.

Much of the download software available today doesn’t even resemble the earliest days of the Internet. With increasing usage of Application Program Interfaces (APIs), companies are centralizing the software and distributing the information via remote access to the application.

While this has affected downloads, there are still numerous categories of software which will always be needed, and downloaded regularly by Internet users. What are your favorite free, open source, or premium programs to help with all of your marketing needs?

This guest post is by Vern, a freelance consultant who uses a variety of open source software options as an alternative to having to buy software. With a little research, almost anything can be found freely.

Brian Solis was one of six prominent speakers who are also all authors at an event this past July 20, 2010 focused on how to be great at Word of Mouth Marketing. Even though that event is past, there are many more opportunities to learn from Brian.

We’ll start with this short (5:20 minute) Word of Mouth tips video created to promote the Gas Pedal Word of Mouth SuperGenius event that offers tips from Brian about what he calls the three Rs: Research, Relevance, and Resonance:

In the video and at that conference Brian touched on what he shares in his book Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.

Want to learn more from Brian? Today’s post on Murray Newlands shares some Brian Solis quotes and another of his videos. He is speaking at Influence People‘s upcoming Integrated Social Media and Email Marketing Event Friday September 17, 2010 in San Francisco.

There may still be Early Bird Tickets available to hear what innovative methods Brian and many other leading marketing experts, email companies and brands recommend to maximize your Social Media results.  Use that link or enter discount code iem19 to save an additional 10% off your ticket.