The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

Motivation, success and wealth 1

As anyone who has attended one of my courses or workshops knows, I'm a huge fan of personal development guru Tony Robbins.

Lately, Tony has issued a couple of motivational web videos around the subject of wealth and success. the first of them is notable not only because its a deeply motivational story, but because it's one of the best web videos I've seen. Granted, it was filmed during a break in the filming of something else more substantial, but even so, it's definitely raised the standard that anyone using video to build their brand should aspire to.

So watch it, enjoy the message, and learn from the production values.

Enjoy!

Do Your Targets Hear The Sizzle?

There's an old advertising adage that says "Sell the sizzle not the steak". In recent years, it's been distorted and misapplied by less scrupulous ad-men, to become "sell the sizzle, and forget the steak". marketers have taken products with little or no real value to the consumer and hyped them up just to increase the price. It's the basic premise behind the book "Never Mind the Sizzle...Where's the Sausage?" which I reviewed last year.

Of course, one of the common misconceptions people have about personal branding - and branding in general - is that it's ALL about the sizzle, so I thought this afternoon I'd look at the world of sizzle and steaks.

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.

Keeping it all together

At the last count, I had 14 profiles on different web sites. I'm not talking about the type that just say "tell us about yourself"; I mean full blown profiles where you describe your experience, what you do, and basically express your personal brand.

I've thought for a long thime that what the world of online personal branding needs is a service that lets you feed all those from a single source. In the days of XML and RSS and all those other TLAs that mean something about passing information between sites you, you'd think it would be easy.

The matter has been brought into even clearer focus this week, because I'm moving offices. So I nowface the prospect of going into every one of those profiles to see which ones have my office address, and updating it. Wouldn't it be great to have a single dashboard where I could log in, make the change, press the button, and *abracadabra* all my profiles changed at once.

When I heard about new startup Nombay.com I thought my prayers might be answered.

Managing your personal brand

Fellow brand strategist Hajj Flemings, author of "Brand Yu" has some great info on his blog, and is well worth following on Twitter. His blog post on reputation management is a great checklist of actions to take to track what's happening to your online reputation.

And the folks over at Jobmob have put a lot of time and effort into tracking down pretty much every tool you could want for managing your online reputation. For the most comprehensive list I've seen head on over to their site.

Apologies to my friends in the USA...

I am truly sorry... but... I'm afraid...

...you won't be seeing the new Bond movie for another couple of weeks :)

Now, if all had gone to plan, I would have been in New York this week, and I would have missed the first day. However, thanks to  last minute change of plan, that didn't happen. So instead I was here in the UK for the release of A Quantum of Solace.

By now you may be getting the fact that I am a bit of a Bond fan, so it was inevitable that I'd head down to the cinema for the first showing of the day. And so, 'bucket' of Coke in hand (not very Bond-like, I know, but it's the cinema!) I waited with baited breath as the lights came down.

Star of the small screen!

In September 2008, Dexter Moscow of the Entrepreneurs' Forum interviewed me on why organizations need to develop and leverage the power of the individuals in the company to survive the economic downturn. We discuss the idea that HR has become as much the custodian of the corporate brand as the Marketing Department, and HR managers now need to see themselves as brand champions.

I was also interviewed with fellow personal branding expert Tessa Hood on the subject of our forthcoming seminar in London for HR professionals.

The videos are all on www.robcuesta.com/video