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personal leadership brand

How to Add Personality to Your Personal Brand

“85% of your financial success is due to your personality, ability to communicate, negotiate and lead. Only 15% is dependent on technical skills.” Carnegie Institute of Technology The challenge we are facing is that whether you believe the often misquoted figures that our attention spans are less than goldfish they are plummeting. The average adult can only focus for 20 minutes. And I know having two teenagers in the house… Read More »How to Add Personality to Your Personal Brand

5 Superbowl Lessons for Your Personal Brand

Companies that ‘invested’ in an ad for this year’s Superbowl were paying $5 million for 30 seconds, that’s over $160,000 per second and then up to an additional 25% was being spent on advertising to promote the advertisement!

This great cartoon from Tom Fishburne at Marketoonist.com sums it all up. Check out his previous Superbowl cartoons too by visiting his website.

The commercials and the half-time show are for many the primary reason they watch the game. Some people even plan whole parties around the ad breaks rather than the game itself.

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3 Positive Aspects of LinkedIn’s Redesign for Your Personal Brand

So it’s official, it’s finally arrived. Well, at least LinkedIn’s blog is announcing it’s imminent arrival to your computer soon – the New Desktop Redesign.  You can watch the promo video here that shows you some of the features;

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If you have been following this news it was back in the fall last year that the desktop redesign was first announced, to great fanfare. After several missteps and, as is common for LinkedIn, a number of glaring glitches and errors picked up by some early users, it seems that finally, the look for your profile on your computer will be changing. If you are one of the 10-20% of users so far, perhaps it has already changed.  Of course, you could be one of the 65% or so of mobile users that maybe never uses the desktop version, in which case “Carry On!”

The hope it to see everyone switched over in the next few weeks.

There has been plenty of criticism of the new design, complaints about disappearing features and threats of departure from the platform. At the end of the day none of us really like change, yet if we embrace it and more importantly look for the positives then there are always upsides and it makes for a much better experience.

Now, if you are like me and use the desktop version to access your LinkedIn account the majority of the time, then you may want to note 3 critical aspects of the new design that will impact how your personal brand can be featured on the platform.

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5 Places to be Personal in Profiles to Get Noticed Online

When was the last time you asked a personal question in a business meeting?

Chances are recent. One client meeting I had, just before the holidays, involved at least 25% of the time the two of us covering every subject from politics to parenting to pasta and everything in between. None of which had a direct bearing on the very critical issue about which we were meeting. Before you say,

‘yes, but it was the holidays, so you were bound to be more relaxed’

this was the first time I had spent more than a few minutes with this client, and we only had a limited amount of time.

So, when someone shares something personal on LinkedIn, why do many professionals get bent out of shape? There never seems to be a day go by now without seeing someone on LinkedIn decry the ‘Facebookization’ of the platform. There have even been petitions started.

I am not talking about the functionality of LinkedIn or the look and feel, or even gamification of the platform, which seems to mirror Facebook in several ways. It’s the quizzes, IQ tests, cat photos, and posting something that is tantamount to click bait to which people are objecting.

There has been a highly covered example, generating thousands of comments, of Candice Galek, the owner of a swimsuit company, who posts pictures of models in bikinis.

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Roman poet, Lucretius

If you are not happy with the content shared by a connection in your network, the easiest and most effective response is actually to do nothing. Anything else adds to LinkedIn’s ‘interest factor,’ which is what drives the algorithm, makes that post more attractive and ultimately that person’s place in search results. If it gets unbearable, you can choose to receive their updates no longer or finally disconnect from them.

While the platform is a business network and your profile is your own that you take with you throughout your career there are opportunities to reflect your personal brand in appropriate and impactful ways.

LinkedIn’s research has found that 87% of recruiters want to see personality reflected in a profile. Now, they are a picky lot (I know I used to be one!), and not wanting anything superfluous, so you can be fairly confident that others will have a similar viewpoint.

Here are five ways to stand-out in a personal way on LinkedIn;

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7 Ways to Boost Your Career in 2017

I was enjoying a beer over the holidays with a friend and sharing our recollections of the past year and what we had to look forward to in the coming year. Dan had his best year ever, he hit his sales numbers about two-thirds of the way through the year, earned a huge bonus and enjoyed promotion to a senior account manager role.

His boss was expecting to see him take a higher profile role in the team with added responsibility, he was going to be traveling more, and his new sales target appeared atmospheric. He didn’t know how he was going to fit it all in. He was dreading 2017.

If the end of 2016 for you was anything like it is for Dan, you found yourself having to try and wrap up some key projects, drive in some final numbers, perhaps even complete performance reviews and other year-end tasks.

Then, before you can catch your breath or even start to worry about work, you were straight into planning, preparing and, hopefully, enjoying the holidays with family and friends and not getting despondent from all the negativity that many people felt this past year, in particular, brought them.

You must be exhausted already! Kicking off another year can be a daunting proposition. A new year brings a fresh set of challenges and almost a feeling of starting all over again. It doesn’t have to be that way. First things first, bid a final farewell to the last year, you can even use the 15 questions from the Review Your Year With No Fear Workbook to feel entirely complete, get your copy by clicking here.

Now for 2017. How do you find the energy to kick off another year, build your personal brand, maintain momentum and ensure you don’t get bogged down or distracted to still achieve what you want to in your career?

Here are seven ways to boost your personal brand and get things done without feeling overwhelmed.

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Who Is in Charge of Your Day? – Here’s a clue – not you!

Question: Who sets your daily agenda? Answer: Everyone else!!! The challenge you have is all the other demands that you let flood into your day and hijack it! E-mails – Research says on average, per user, you receive around 100 plus e-mails per day – 15% of which are spam, or useless, but the rest have some level of expectation for you, even if it is just reading and deleting.… Read More »Who Is in Charge of Your Day? – Here’s a clue – not you!

Why I Hate My Job

Tomorrow will be my last presentation this year. In total, I will have delivered over 20 keynotes, workshops, and online webinars on personal branding in 2016. Often the core message is the same, and then I adapt the content to the particular client and event. I am often asked, “Don’t you get bored?” I remember discussing this with a colleague some years ago and he told me that he always… Read More »Why I Hate My Job

3 End of Year Actions for Your LinkedIn Profile

As we enter the final 30 days or so of 2016, your thoughts may turn to the new year, fresh perspectives, new ambitions, and goals. Your professional online presence should be one of those areas that you take a moment to review and ensure you are set for 2017.  For many of you, your digital impression is gathered by others from your LinkedIn profile first. As we still await the new… Read More »3 End of Year Actions for Your LinkedIn Profile

The One Question I Always Get on Personal Branding

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Image Fast Company Magazine August 1997

Next year will see the 20-year anniversary of the Fast Company magazine article “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters. This was two years before his book series, which included “Brand You 50” were published. Most recognize the article as the ‘birth’ of personal branding or at the least the first time that the concept of having a personal brand appeared on the business radar. When you Google “Brand Called You” the article still appears at the top of the rankings. Read the article here

Many people still minimize the power of personal branding and some label it as egotistical and ridiculous. The criticism is legitimate towards those who have likened branding yourself to branding a bar of chocolate. In fact, the intention is to show the contrast between a person and a corporation when it comes to branding.

It probably took ten years after that article, for the notion of owning your personal brand to be embraced as an accepted way of managing your career, business, and even life. Celebrity branding has exploded with constant exposure and an unquenchable thirst for more. This leaves many people feeling inadequate unless they too garner the same visibility. Sadly credibility can sometimes take a back seat.

Social media has been both a blessing and curse and can be blamed for some of the hype, expectation, and disdain that personal branding attracts. But fault can also lie at the feet of the ‘gurus’ and experts who tell you to “Fake it until you make it” or encourage you to turn your social media streams into a one-way flow of personally branding me, me, me that should never be turned off.

When it comes to personal branding the one question I always get is

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The Good, The Bad & The Ugly of Brand Trump

good-bad-ugly

Since the advent of social media, I doubt there have been many events that have garnished as many comments, engagement, and mainstream media column inches as the US Presidential election, and in particular about Donald J. Trump.

I have often cited Trump, the businessman, as an example of a strong personal brand. He often followed the three C’s of branding – Clarity of message, Consistent delivery of that message and Constantly working at getting that message heard and noticed in his business dealings.

Without getting into an intense political debate, it could be argued that he delivered on the latter in his political run, but missed the mark on the clarity and consistency.

There is going to be a lot more said and written about this election, his presidency, as well as the hours spent analyzing why and how he became the 45th President of the United States.

So what were the plus and minus aspects of his campaign from a branding perspective?

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