MarketingMel

What's your personal brand?

Recently I had the opportunity to conduct video “man-on-the-street” interviews asking people about their New Year’s resolutions. This was a project to help one of our church ministers with his upcoming sermon. I learned several things:

1- Generally people do not like to talk about resolutions. Most likely it’s because they remind them of broken promises.

2- Unless they think they look good they don’t want to talk on camera. People obsess about their clothes, hair, make-up, etc. (This goes for men as well as women although the men I met weren’t worried about make-up.)

Ultimately resolutions reflect on our personal brand. As we move into the New Year let’s each take a quick assessment of our own personal brand and what we can do to better ourselves in 2011. Here are some tips I recently provided to two of my clients in customized one-on-one sessions and am glad to share here with you.

1. Google yourself- What do you find? Is it fresh? Is it negative? Does it need a PR boost?
2. Does your image transfer to mobile? People will be on their phones more than ever in 2011.
3. Who is your target audience? What communications channels are they using? Do you have your elevator speech planned for the next time you bump into Future Big Client X?
4. How do you plan to promote your brand in 2011? Through guest media appearances? Your blog? Podcasts? Social media? Your e-mail signature? Video?
5. Do you have an editorial calendar planned for 2011? Remember, you are a publisher. Now is the time to think seasonal and timely in your future writing and publishing.

All the best of luck to you in 2011 and remember, your personal brand is always with you!

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Put the right people on the bus and you are headed for success

In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great he advises business executives to “put the right people on the bus” when it comes to hiring decisions. To paraphrase the well respected business guru, “put the right people on the bus and it doesn’t matter where the bus is going.” He succinctly outlines the point on this video, (the “first who” concept.)
Recently I had an opportunity to “load the bus” by forming a mastermind group with some creative colleagues.  As a part of a brainstorm during my 2011 strategic planning session I decided it was important to get four other top regional entrepreneurs together with the goal of sharing information about our companies and discussing ways we could help one another. From the start I wanted to keep the session informal. The five of us met for a working lunch and from that session emerged a “star story” with the opportunities provided by each entrepreneur highlighted as one of the five points of the star. Those points include: leadership (Jeff Brunson), business systems (Curt Henry), financial accountability (Gregg Pechmann), business and relational development (Mary Reynolds), and communications (me, MarketingMel.)

Next we presented the story star to our city’s economic developer. He plans to team the entrepreneurs with some large corporations in our region struggling to share the solopreneur’s flexibility and strategic viewpoint. I’ll keep you posted on our progress. It would be good for all business owners to remember Collins’ point as we move toward 2011. First get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus. Then you will be headed for success.

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