The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

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?