The Personal Branding Blog by Rob Cuesta

Have you made yourself scarce?

Have you ever paid over the odds for a 'limited edition' of something? Have you ever felt an irresistible urge to buy something NOW because it was part of a limited offer? And what about those REALLY old (and rare) bottles of vintage wine that sell for thousands, even though everyone - including the seller AND the buyer - know that the wine is undrinkable after so many years?

The answer is simple...    

Personal Branding and the Accounting Profession

Even as far back as 2005, members of the UK's Institute of Chartered Accountants were being advised to work on their personal brand. Addressing that year's prizewinners and the Institute's annual awards, Steve Easterbrook (UK CEO of McDonalds) said: “Chartered Accountants are in such high demand due to their well-rounded flexibility. [Accountants] learn from and observe business management competencies, behaviours and soft skills - both good and bad. To be respected today you have to be authentic. You must understand who you are, your strengths, your weaknesses and your personal values. By being open about these and by being consistent you will be able to build and protect your own reputation.”

Always give 100%

It's happened to all of us: you wake up in the morning feeling tired or somehow below par. Maybe you couldn't get to sleep, maybe you were up late, maybe you're starting to go down with something. You go in to work and you think "I'm not feeling great; I'll put in 60% effort today, but it's OK, I'll make up for it tomorrow."

NLP, sales and the fine art of leveraging social media

Recently I’ve been thinking about how the world of selling has been turned around by social media.

Marketers have developed a number of models to describe the process that buyers go through internally before they make a purchase, and one of the most commonly cited is the ‘AIDA’ model:

·         We build AWARENESS of our product or service

·         We do something to spark the prospect’s INTEREST

·         As they find out more, they start to DESIRE our product or service

·         Finally they take ACTION by buying

It’s the same process whether we’re selling a lawnmower, offering legal advice, or asking someone to hire us. Social media have added a new layer to this, because we can now tap into what happens AFTER the sale:

6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan

Social media can be a bit of a maze. It's no longer just about telling your friends what you've been up to: alongside blogs we have mashups, file sharing (the legitimate, business-useful kind like Slideshare.com), podcasts, wikis, video hosting, music sharing, bookmarking...

How do you make sense of all of those and use them to support your marketing efforts - personal or corporate? For one approach, take a look at this post by Lorna Li.

Ever wondered how to use Twitter in marketing for real?

Here's how one company did it: http://socialmediatoday.com/school/80680

Ask yourself: how could you use a similar approach on another network: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...

Starting a Social Media Team

Social can seem like a bit of a minefield in the corporate environment - after all, who wants their staff mouthing off online about their petty gripes in the workplace (at least that's how a lot of corporate executives still seem to view the medium), so I was pleased to find this post about how to set up a corporate social media team, though it's applicable to organisations of any size, and just as relevant in the not-for-profit sector.

It's not just candidates who interview badly...

There's a temptation to think that how an interview goes is always down to the candidate, but I received a request today for funny interview stories that reminded me of one interview that went badly in a VERY unexpected way.

It's an integration issue, silly

So, you're building your personal brand. You have your website, you have your blog, you have your online profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook and MySpace, you've written your elevator pitch, identified your key prospects, built your network, written your brand profile and your branded bio. Also, if you are job hunting, you have your business card, your online resume, and your paper resume as both .pdf and .doc ready to send. Or, if you are in business, or an entrepreneur, then you have your business cards, your brochures, and you've lined up referral partners with what they have to say to introduce you.

In short... you've got everything you need. Here's the bad news: that's the easy part. Now the work begins.

Niche personal brands

As I sat the other day lecturing some undergraduates on corporate strategy, I started to think about Michael Porter, the guru whose business model I was explaining.

Probably 80% of the people reading this have just gone "Michael who?" And that's fine, because the chances are that if you've never heard to Michael Porter it's because you didn't need to. For the other 20%, though, he is likely to be a major figure in many professional conversations, or at least in their daily thinking at work.

Now, does that make him any less powerful a personal brand than, say, Oprah, Bill Gates or Richard Branson?