WorldClass Personal Brand Management

Personal Brand Management

by Kendell R. Lang

When talking about personal brand management, I am talking about my personal brand, my executive brand, my intellectual brand, my brand statement, and my personal value proposition. As a technologist, writer and change management specialist, there is a tried and true methodology which I've personally used many times in the past which I believe applies to this phase of my personal brand assessment.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, yes...the old SWOT analysis is an ideal way to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and where the opportunities and threats lie with regard to selling my, my brand.

In this post I'm talking about using the SWOT analysis to help me address the ever-present question of strengths and weaknesses, but if you think about it, it’s the perfect way to identify some very personal areas of opportunity.

Of course there is also the definition of insanity by trying to get a different result by doing the same thing. In this case I am seeking a specific outcome so I have to be willing to get outside my box and use proven tools in a new way. When I go about performing this self-analysis, the most difficult task is going to be realistically, as independently and as honestly as possible consider my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in light of my objectives, my experience, my circumstances, my sphere of influence, my chosen vertical market and the technical skills of my chosen profession.

I am thinking about this not purely from a competitive position, but I'm think about this as war. Psychological Warfare. The Art of War put into the form of a Thought War. In my personal brand continuum "space", who is vying for the same results, the same objective, the same partnership, the same engagement or the same job? I have to so fundamentally shift my thinking to be radically focused on and genuinely most interested in the needs of the target, partner or hiring company. What makes me stand out to solve their problems? Here’s how I am using the SWOT assessment process to define my personal brand and find my next book agent, production company, joint venture partner or maybe even a job :)

Strengths:
· What advantages do I have?
· What do I do better than anyone else?
· What unique or low-cost resources do I have to offer?
· What do others see as my strengths?
· How do I help close the sale or reduce overhead?

Weaknesses:
· What areas can I improve?
· What areas should I avoid?
· What do peers in my market see as weaknesses?
· Where do I fail when trying to close a sale or reduce costs?

Opportunities:
· What opportunities am I seeing?
· What interesting trends can I identify and take advantage of, such as changes in technology, regulations, social patterns, etc.?
· What is happening in my market that can promote new business development?

Threats:
· What obstacles do I face?
· What interesting trends can I identify which I should be worried about?
· Are the required specifications for my project, my venture, my job, products or services changing?
· Is changing technology threatening my personal brand position?
· Do I have bad debt or cash-flow problems?
· Could any of my weaknesses seriously threaten my business?

Once I actually complete my SWOT analysis I expect to have a clear picture of how I fit in my target market, my strengths and weaknesses, and what will differentiate me from the competition.

Now I can then get to work on distilling my findings into a succinct pitch that really shows my strengths and why someone will seek me out.

WorldClass Branding for Small Business

Realities of Online Brand Development and Search Engine Optimization for Small Business

 

 

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Cyndia Zwahlen writes;

The small business was funded in part by venture capitalist Peter Rogers and his Dry Creek Ventures, which targets clean energy, water and food businesses.

Such small local food outfits, especially those that are gentle on the environment, are key to the long-term health of the economy but need formal access to local investors to succeed, says social venture-capitalist and entrepreneur Woody Tasch.

Shifting capital to organic farmers, independent food entrepreneurs, farmers markets and restaurateurs will pay off in stronger local economies, a healthier environment and improved supplies of affordable, healthful food, Tasch said.

He founded Slow Money Alliance last year to spearhead the creation of regional networks of local investors that want to put their money into local enterprises.

"We've had the life sucked out of our society and economy by financial markets run amok and globalism run to extremes," Tasch said. Slow Money is "part of a network emerging of people who want to repair the damage."

Chapter 3 - THE BACKGROUND

Chapter 3

THE BACKGROUND

To lay out the perfect plan, you have to understand a few things. First, it is all about relationships. Everything in life, no matter how you frame it, boils down to relationships. If you could take human nature out of whatever equation you’re dealing with, you could do it perfect every time. I could have been a multi-billionaire several times if it weren’t for human nature. Unfortunately, that’s not the world in which we live, so you have to deal with people. The beauty of the perfect plan is that I did it completely in isolation. If you bring one other person into the equation, it won’t be perfect. If you tell anyone about it, it will be foiled. One of the keys to the perfect plan is to create a vacuum from which it can be launched without any dependency on another human being.


That isn’t to say the perfect plan can’t include people, it just has to be done without them knowing about it. How perfect is that? Using peoples time, skills and motivations to help me accomplish the perfect plan. All without them knowing they are accomplishing a piece in a fabric of events woven together in a way that they fulfill their part of the plan just by going about their daily routine.

In my life, there have been many instances where human nature has failed me. I’m not interested in going down any path of psycho-babble analysis of my life, but it is interesting to see how various individuals have helped shape the perfect plan. The culmination of our character is significantly shaped by external influences, in most cases that is contact with other people. The contacts that most influenced my development of the perfect plan are an interesting sample of the broad spectrum of characters.

I find human nature fascinating, probably from the earliest experiences of seeing human failures and being impacted by poor choices. The perfect plan assumes that you can’t be impacted by other peoples choices, good or bad, so you have to anticipate at a level of 5th dimensional chess what possible alternatives could come from various influences. The beauty of the perfect plan is that it anticipates the incongruities of human nature and the absolute certainty that people will screw up.

PROLOGUE - LIFE IS...Full of strange moments in time.

Prologue


LIFE IS…

Full of strange moments in time. Moments which become suspended in time, slowed down to almost exaggerate the intensity of what you’re about to experience. Moments which are similar to the dreams where you are trying to run but can’t get your legs to move. That brief second before the accident where the whole scene goes frozen for an instant, silent and you think to yourself, this is going to be bad. Then everything goes into fast forward and the crunching sound of metal spinning through the air as the truck flips over and all you see is the ground rushing up to collapse the hood of the cab before it crushes down on top of you, spitting you out the side and onto the ground. As you stare at the ground in disbelief about what you just survived, you are strangely focused on the gravel. Why am I just staring at the gravel? Get up!

So I survived, somewhat broken, but alive. Thanking God that I had been spared. Crazy, uncontrollable body shakes as the body releases the adrenaline dumped into the system, as if I’d just come out of an ice bath. But none of these kinds of life moments could have prepared me for what was about to happen.

We were having an early gift opening for our family Christmas before leaving on a ski vacation, just the four of us. My wife, Patti, my teenage son Kamden, my teenage daughter Kjersti and myself. Sitting around a warm fire, sipping a glass of wine and enjoying the brief quiet before the storm of finishing our packing. The kids are all excited about opening their gifts, but more excited about leaving in the morning for a winter adventure. I ask my wife a question, and I think I mishear her answer. I ask again, and I get the same strange response which makes no sense. I shake my head, look at the kids and they are as puzzled as I am. I cock my head a bit to the left like our little white bijon friche who tries desperately to understand what we’re saying, but just can’t seem to get it. The kids and I both think she is making a joke or kidding around with us, but when it happens again I get an immediate knot in my stomach. I know something is wrong…I just didn’t know how wrong. I call my sister, an orthopedic surgeon, and describe what we’ve just experienced. She tries to keep me calm, but I quickly grasp the gravity of the situation. After asking my wife who the current President is, and with a straight face as serious as can be, she disgustedly tells me, “geessh, purple cows can’t so there’s why I can tell you the President.” After randomly sampling the responses from a few other questions, my sister tells me that my wife is having some kind of brain attack and to get her to the Emergency Room…immediately.

It was one of those times when all of sudden everyone knows something is terribly wrong. The kids begin to cry in fear, not knowing what’s happening to their mom. We quickly load everyone into the car and drive a few short miles to the local ER. My wife is objecting the whole time, half the time making sense and arguing that she’ll be fine, the other half talking gibberish. The intake nurse is quick to recognize the urgency of the situation and immediately gets my wife on a gurney and back into the ER. I sit the kids down and make sure they are situated. Then I join the group of doctors working on my wife back in the triage area. As they start to do testing and asking her questions, I see a blank stare come over her eyes and she stops responding. Like a tidal wave rolling in, the gran mal seizure starts as her eyes roll up into her eye sockets and her body becomes overwhelmed with what’s going on inside her brain. The doctors immediately recognize the onset of the seizure and do their best to assure me that they know what they are doing. How can you know what to do for something as awful as this? The doctors are amazed that we were lucky enough to get her to the ER before the seizure began, as most victims usually lose consciousness and fall down. The first few seconds of the seizure are marked by complete rigidity in every muscle in her body. She stops breathing completely. I cannot fully describe the grotesque contortion that happens to the body when it goes into this state where every limb is seemingly completely hyper-extended, but yet in total constriction. Shortly after the complete rigidity comes the convulsion, violent and rhythmic. All of her extremities are slapping wildly against the gurney, pretty much like Darryl Hannah having a death seizure in one of my all time favorite movies, the Blade Runner with Harrison Ford. I will never be able to watch that movie in the same way ever again. The experts can only watch and make sure her airway is open and that she doesn’t bite her tongue. This is when it hits me that this is why they call it “practicing” medicine, as they have no solution for this. The seizure lasts for what feels like an eternity, but in reality is probably about 3 minutes. The convulsion weakens and just like a submerged diver coming up for air, her respiration starts again with a huge gasp as she gulps for fresh air.

As she stabilizes, they wheel her off for X-rays, CT scan and PET (positron emission tomography) scans. I learn later that PET is a major diagnostic imaging modality used predominantly in determining the presence and severity of cancers. It is currently the most effective way to check for cancer recurrences and it offers significant advantages over other forms of imaging such as CT or MRI scans in detecting disease in many patients. Being an engineer and always wanting to understand root cause, I learn that for the PET scan she is given a radiopharmaceutical, such as FDG (fluorodeoxyglucose), which includes both sugar (glucose) and a radionuclide (a radioactive element) that gives off signals. She is injected with these contrast elements, and the emissions given off are measured by a PET scanner. A PET scanner consists of an array of detectors that surround the patient. Using the gamma ray signals given off by the injected radionuclide, PET measures the amount of metabolic activity at a site in the body and a computer reassembles the signals into images. Cancer cells have higher metabolic rates than normal cells, so they show up as denser areas on a PET scan.

I will never forget when the radiologist and medical oncologist called me into a small room lined with little white light boxes all around the walls. They turned off all the lights in the room except the light boxes and then jammed the slides up into the metal clips to hold the scans. This is when it happened again, that out of body slow motion experience just like the accident. I was literally floating up in the corner of the room, watching this bizarre scene unfold in front of me. I looked down at these two lab-coated geeks and said to myself, that poor bastard is going to get some really bad news. As I said that to myself, it hadn’t even hit me yet that the dude was me. When I realized that was when everything went into fast forward high speed mode. It was like my whole life flashed before me and all I could do was sit there in shocked silence. I vaguely remember hearing the doctors talk to me, sort of like how the adults talk to Charlie Brown or the other kids in Peanuts with a “wa-waa-waaa” muffled voice sound, but not intelligible. I do remember crystal clear the sentence, “You see that little black node in her frontal lobe? That is a brain tumor. You need to put your wife’s affairs in order because she will not be here in a year.”

You cold-hearted bastards! Didn’t anyone teach you bedside manner in medical school? Are you such a social retard that you have lost the ability to have any compassion whatsoever? What ever happened to just the politeness of saying, “I’m really sorry, I’ve got some bad news which is going to be really hard to understand. Would you like anyone to be here with you as we talk about this?” This was like these guys were the purveyors of bad news as sport, just trying to see how callous they could be. I knew a guy like these guys before, a forensic pathologist who dealt with death all day long. A life that was tainted by the gore of seeing every imaginable type of death and figuring out how to survive without being scarred for life. The reality was that dude was twisted by his profession. How could you not be affected when you’re the person pulling body parts out of the plane, train and auto wreck or trying to figure out how a man could kill himself using a trapeze hung above his bed and a sharpened fence pole nailed to the wall and impaled up his rectum? That is some twisted stuff. But to be fair to this pair of dumb and dumber, I’m sure it was just a reflection of their own badly honed coping skills, or more realistically their denial of having to interact with real human beings. How could someone survive in a profession where every day you are telling people their loved ones have cancer and are going to die? It’s no excuse for these idiots, but at least I can rationalize why they were such moronic communicators.

Internet Marketing 101 - Personal Brand Development Components

Internet Marketing 101

Personal Brand Development Components

In a recent article titled "Personal Brand Management: The Secret to Career Mobility" by Todd Rhoad he states, "Developing personal brand equity is a key element to establishing and maintaining your career mobility. Increasing manager equity is the quickest method for improving and selling your brand throughout the organization. It requires an understanding of what managers like, how to measure your changes and how to influence their perceptions with less effort."


Developing a compelling personal brand image still remains essential to positioning yourself. Everyone is overworked and unable to focus entirely on any one thing, so your ability to have someone managing your personal brand is essential. Professional development in the corporation has morphed into the reality that you have to manage your own personal development. In other words, management doesn't have time to help you develop your career. Sure, they'll take a few minutes to help you jot down your goals but it won't go much further than that. Employees don't get the kind of attention nowadays that helps develop careers. The best way to promote yourself is to promote your personal brand and that is what I deliver for my clients, personal brand management.

Personal brand management has a variety of components and you should carefully consider how to integrate all of the following into your personal brand strategy.

Internet Marketing

Methodology. Strategy. Technology. Execution.

These elements are the foundation to delivering powerful results. Having the ability to do a 360 degree evaluation and to seamlessly implement all aspects of an Internet marketing plan provides my clients a single source solution when partnering with me.

Pay Per Click Management

Pay Per Click Management (PPC) - My personal brand management implements a pay per click strategy which has a solid track record of delivering superior ROI.  My results are certified by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - My experience as an SEO analyst provides my clients with efficient, high ROI producing organic search engine optimization campaigns that are part of a fully integrated Internet marketing strategy.

Paid Inclusion (SSP)

Paid Inclusion - I help businesses extend their Internet marketing reach at a low and controllable cost through paid inclusion marketing also known as Yahoo SSP.

Content Advertising

Content Advertising - My Interactive marketing expertise continuously maximizes content advertising opportunities for my clients and refines a placement strategy to give my clients new leads, eCommerce sales, and millions of impressions.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing - My targeted social media marketing will help you personally or your business control, protect, and grow your brand.  There is a huge brand awareness developed through social network marketing and you need someone with my experience to help you protect your personal brand.

Website Design Website Design & Development - As a full service Internet marketing specialist, my ability to create custom websites and landing pages that blend visual appeal with usability for the end goal of conversions is part of the overall personal branding strategy.

Online Video Marketing

Video Marketing - I cannot underestimate the importance of developing compelling, rich media content to effectively communicate your value proposition and convert visitors into customers. I spend a great deal of time getting my customers into the studio to produce effective video interviews to share their personal brand via video.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing - I have broad experience managing affiliate programs in various industries, including one of Commission Junction's top 10 affiliate marketing programs. If you are providing a service and are looking to leverage your solution, you must have an affiliate marketing strategy and I can help you accomplish this.

Discovering your personal brand is the most challenging part because it takes the most thought. I can help you find yourself.  Once you understand that, it is time to create your brand. Once the creation process completed, you are now able to deliver this content, both verbally and electronically, to whoever you want to understand who you are and what value you provide.

Even with a strong Personal Brand, over time it may decay or be out-of-date. That is why the third strategy is to maintain your Personal Brand over time. The brand must be updated with the latest technical competencies, attire, and feel in order to survive. The market changes rapidly and corporations transition, forcing you to evolve in the same fashion. It's all about knowing where you are, who you want to be, and strategizing how to get there.

 

Top 5 Personal Branding Tips for Success

1. 
   
   Start by letting me help you discover your personal brand.
   
   
   
2. 
   
   Ensure your skills, competencies, interests, and personality match your objectives.
   
   
   
3. 
   
   Network with peers, professionals in your field, and family members.
   
   
   
4. 
   
   Create all tangible pieces simultaneously with your intangible core message for maximum consistency.
   
   
   
5. 
   
   Send out as many invitations to network as you can, with the strongest content you have.
   
   
   

Career development is dead and Personal Branding is in. There are far too many job applicants for you not to take into account the entire personal brand management issue. Personal Branding is about differentiation, positioning, and creativity. It allows you to have a better insight into what you're interested in, your career, and your pursuit of happiness. Ask yourself this: Do I want to be like everyone else? If you do, then you will not be chosen for a competitive position. Those who aren't distinct are known, in marketing, as commodities. Commodities have to battle on price and you want to be compensated for your value, so stick with Personal Branding. Commodities are easily replaceable and unrecognizable by the target audience.

There is an even bigger picture with Personal Branding and that is life. Those who have strong brands will not only succeed at their profession, but will also have a better life experience because they will gain confidence in their skills and feel unique in a world where there are billions of people. Career development was only the beginning and now Personal Branding has taken over and you must brand yourself!

Let me help you, so call me at 760.445.3315 or email me at kendell.lang@gmail.com

Personal Brand Continuum

The Personal Brand Continuum

by Kendell R. Lang

When talking about my personal brand continuum, I am talking about my personal brand, my executive brand, my intellectual brand, my brand statement, and my personal value proposition. As a technologist, writer and change management specialist, there is a tried and true methodology which I've personally used many times in the past which I believe applies to this phase of my personal brand assessment.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, yes...the old SWOT analysis is an ideal way to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and where the opportunities and threats lie with regard to selling my, my brand.

In this post I'm talking about using the SWOT analysis to help me address the ever-present question of strengths and weaknesses, but if you think about it, it’s the perfect way to identify some very personal areas of opportunity.

Of course there is also the definition of insanity by trying to get a different result by doing the same thing. In this case I am seeking a specific outcome so I have to be willing to get outside my box and use proven tools in a new way. When I go about performing this self-analysis, the most difficult task is going to be realistically, as independently and as honestly as possible consider my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in light of my objectives, my experience, my circumstances, my sphere of influence, my chosen vertical market and the technical skills of my chosen profession.

I am thinking about this not purely from a competitive position, but I'm think about this as war. Psychological Warfare. The Art of War put into the form of a Thought War. In my personal brand continuum "space", who is vying for the same results, the same objective, the same partnership, the same engagement or the same job? I have to so fundamentally shift my thinking to be radically focused on and genuinely most interested in the needs of the target, partner or hiring company. What makes me stand out to solve their problems? Here’s how I am using the SWOT assessment process to define my personal brand and find my next book agent, production company, joint venture partner or maybe even a job :)

Strengths:
· What advantages do I have?
· What do I do better than anyone else?
· What unique or low-cost resources do I have to offer?
· What do others see as my strengths?
· How do I help close the sale or reduce overhead?

Weaknesses:
· What areas can I improve?
· What areas should I avoid?
· What do peers in my market see as weaknesses?
· Where do I fail when trying to close a sale or reduce costs?

Opportunities:
· What opportunities am I seeing?
· What interesting trends can I identify and take advantage of, such as changes in technology, regulations, social patterns, etc.?
· What is happening in my market that can promote new business development?

Threats:
· What obstacles do I face?
· What interesting trends can I identify which I should be worried about?
· Are the required specifications for my project, my venture, my job, products or services changing?
· Is changing technology threatening my personal brand position?
· Do I have bad debt or cash-flow problems?
· Could any of my weaknesses seriously threaten my business?

Once I actually complete my SWOT analysis I expect to have a clear picture of how I fit in my target market, my strengths and weaknesses, and what will differentiate me from the competition.

Now I can then get to work on distilling my findings into a succinct pitch that really shows my strengths and why someone will seek me out.