A client complimented me this morning on the radical new look of my website, blog, and newsletter. She was, she confided, startled at first, sensing a disconnect between the “me” she had seen in our one and only meeting and the personality that was now splashed across my various platforms.

The truth is, I thought long and hard about who I wanted to be on the screen. My ah-hah moment came when I realized that I could  just be myself. Being myself — no longer trying to hug the corporate line, throwing away the blah-blah-blah of professional service selling lingo that I rip apart for other people. I rewrote everything — this time in my own voice. I encouraged the designer to play with fonts, colors,  and images — we even hired an illustrator to draw me, my lap top and Jack the Dog.

My collateral is now the real deal, at least to the extent that I am the real deal. Take me or leave me, this is who you get when you hire me. I used to think that I wanted any and all clients — now I know I only want the ones who like what they see.

The law of attraction at work.

Technorati Tags: personal branding, professional service sales, professional services

Why hire me when you, too, can plug directly into what national reporters and journalists are looking for?

Why, indeed. I’ve always said that there was no magic to getting press coverage. Just old fashioned shoe leather. If you want to pay me the big bucks to do the legwork for you, I won’t argue. And sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll be able to see a story where none existed before. But most of the time, as several people who aren’t flacks for a living have proved, a little diligence and question-asking will get you, well, maybe not into The Wall Street Journal, but close to it.

Trumpets, please. Now you don’t have to lift a finger. Self-described CEO, entrepreneur and adventurer Peter Shankman is doing all the heavy mental lifting for you. HARO is now making the rounds. At least a dozen clients have breathlessly emailed me this week. Have you seen THIS, they ask?

Have you? This is media relations for the great unwashed. Not the wine of the week/ diamonds for a dollar feeds of yesteryear when companies like Bacon’s charged folks like me a gazillion dollars for precious (and useless) queries from marginal “journalists.” Shankman and his HARO (which stands for Help a Reporter Out. Cute, huh?) have trumped them all. You can subscribe free to his daily feeds which contain real reporters looking for real sources on a wide variety of real stories. It is worth reading because he is very funny, seems to travel the US faster than a speeding bullet, and he has gained the respect of journalists and media groupies alike.

Who knows, you might just find your fifteen minutes of media fame.

Technorati Tags: HARO, media relations, shankman

 

 Brand You: In Which I am Interviewed by the MarComm Strategist: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I have been meaning to post it for awhile — okay, since forever — because so many people have been asking me for a quick thumbnail on what personal branding actually is. Dianna is a great interviewer, so I would highly recommend taking 19 minutes (that’s how long it is) out of your day if you are curious.

BNET’s blog (a great resource, in case you don’t know it) reports today that “The C-Level Isn’t Reading Newspapers Anymore: They’re on the Web.”

I vote we call a moratorium on any more stories, studies or research on the imminent demise of print media. Not because it isn’t true, but because I love newspapers. Always have; always will. I actually get excited opening-up my fresh copy of The New York Times and The Boston Globe every morning (although don’t get me started on what I think of the Globe these days. I read it because I have to). I love the local and regional papers when I’m traveling, and the only reason I “read” The Wall Street Journal online is because a person can only recycle so many tons of newsprint.

Loving newspapers means loving to read, giving yourself the gift of time to read, seeing reading as a vital ingredient to your day and your life. Internet reading is not real reading — it’s a quick hit, a scan for need-to-know information.  It’s a lot of (useful) things, but just don’t call it reading.

Technorati Tags: internet, newspapers, reading

“It’s not that we love Budweiser more than, say, Miller or Coors. (Well, technically, most Americans do love it more: Bud has outsold both brands for decades.) It’s that we love the idea of Budweiser, or, more accurately, Anheuser-Busch. Immigrants founded the company and, in the course of about 30 years, transformed it from nothing into one of the world’s largest breweries. … That’s why I love Anheuser-Busch and Bud. I am them, and they are me: a mixture of old world and new, hard work, tenacity and ambition.”

So blogged Maureen Ogle, author of “Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer,” in The Washington Post several days ago. What do I know about beer? Virtually nothing, unless you count my supreme annoyance at all the beer drinkers I know who leave their cans and bottles in the sink, waiting for the house cleaning fairy to appear.

But my attention was grabbed by an NPR story yesterday about the attempt, by a Belgian company, to buy Anheuser-Busch, the manufacturers of our beloved Bud. If ever there was a morality tale about brand, this is it. Does Bud taste better — no. Do people buy it for its taste? Arguable. What sets this Bud apart from all the rest is the story that is inexctricably linked, as Ogle points out above, to the product.

Think “King of Beers” and “Here’s to you, America.”

What other brands would consumers fight for because of what they represent? Coke? Campbell’s chicken noodle soup?

It is the story that we prize, that separates Budweiser from all comers……“That’s why I love Anheuser-Busch and Bud. I am them, and they are me: a mixture of old world and new, hard work, tenacity and ambition.”

We should all be so lucky with our brands. Go out, find your story and stick to it.

Technorati Tags: anheuser-busch, beer, branding, budweiser, coors, michelob, millers

The drive back yesterday from the higher altitudes of Vermont’s Green Mountains was a long low ride , descending through the lush green of Burlington, Montpelier and Barre. I was coming home from almost two weeks as a first semester student at The Vermont College of Fine Arts where, over the course of the next two years, I will be studying for my MFA in Writing. It is a low-residency program — which means that students are on-campus for two intense periods each year, and work with single member of the superb faculty during the ensuing six months. In my case, 200+ pages of a manuscript that I have now committed to writing.

This means that I will have to finally get time management down to an exact science — and I thought I was good at it before! Hah! For someone who works 50-60 hours per week as it is, the expected 25-30 that I must now add to that will be a very real and compelling challenge.

Last week, The New York Times said that, for a website, it “could hardly look less exciting. Its pages are heavy with text, much of it a flat blue, and there are few photos and absolutely no videos.” No, it’s not your average, run-of-the-mill small business website, but none other than LinkedIn, the online professional networking site that will announce that it has raised $53 million in capital, primarily from a Boston-based private equity firm. The new financing round values the company at $1 billion.

I read the article, and so, apparently, did millions of others. The first call was from my still quite hip 86 year old father who asked did I know about this thing he was calling “Link-ing ” –thought he might fool around with it. Wait, I said, I’ll set you up the next time I come over. (I get at least 2 calls a week from him asking how to open attachments that people send him or wanting to know how to cut and paste). Then, I get an email from my cousin Jonathan, who asked why was he suddenly getting a zillion requests to be a LinkedIn connection — he had never gotten any before. Was it coincidence or was he just really popular?

As the Times describes it, “LinkedIn gives professionals, even the most hopeless wallflower, a painless way to follow the advice of every career counselor: build a network. Users maintain online résumés, establish links with colleagues and business acquaintances and then expand their networks to the contacts of their contacts. The service also helps them search for experts who can help them solve daily business problems.”

I have never taken LinkedIn or other networking applications, like Plaxo, very seriously. They all seemed like good things to do during long, boring conference calls (”Hey, I’d like you to join my LinkedIn network!”) or a great time sink when you need to feel that you’re working but have no brain cells left. (”Yeah, I’m building my network!”). But after a few more of these emails last week I decided to stop being such a networking snob (I can’t stand the term, much less the task) and to kick my Outlook address book into high gear. Soon, the requests were firing out from me at a machine gun pace, and the acceptances were coming in just as fast. I felt like I never did in high school — everyone wanted to be on my team! I even began to start checking my LinkedIn homepage, which counts the number of people in my network. Only 87? There must be more people that I know!

By the end of the day, I had re-written my bio, spent two hours deciding which new picture of myself to upload, and going through all the connections I had to see who had more connections than me. (Answer: tons). I also began to ask people for recommendations (another neat feature, akin to ‘testimonials’ on a website. Never thought I needed those before, but now they were a must! I wasn’t going to let my poor page go unsung.

According to the Times, “the number of people using LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, Calif., tripled in May over the previous year, according to Nielsen Online. At 23 million members, LinkedIn remains far smaller than Facebook and MySpace, each with 115 million members, but it is growing considerably faster.” And so I, never one to wait until the ship has sailed, jumped on with both feet.

I now take LinkedIn very seriously, as you should as well — it is just as critical as Facebook, MySpace, or any of the other myriad of ways you can — and should — market yourself.

Question: what has your experience been (or not been) with LinkedIn? I’d be very interested to know.

Technorati Tags: branding, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, New York Times, personal branding

Let’s just say it took awhile to actually pry the last of my fingers off the old blog, which had begun to feel like a prom dress that I had made myself — but I slowly began to realize that it didn’t have all the glitz and glam that I wanted it to, and it certainly wasn’t keeping up with all the blog-fashionistas that I admire. Hey, and I’m supposed to be in the communications business! Go figure.

A tip o’ the baseball cap (hey, it’s summer and there are plenty of bad hair days,) to my friend Diane Danielson and her folks over at the Downtown Womens Club for being named as one of the top blogs at http://www.alltop.com. And if you haven’t checked-out the DWC in awhile, make haste. It’s an indispensable network, no matter where you call home.

So, here’s to sunny Friday afternoons in the summer, when the world slows way way down.

Technorati Tags: alltop.com, branding, dowtown womens club

You’ve all heard that you’re buying the hole, not the drill; the sizzle not the steak–that in selling yourself, it is achievements not skills that matter. Here is another way of looking at this, courtesy of one of my favorite bloggers, Penelope Trunk.

In a recent post, Career Lessons from Eliot Spitzer’s Call Girl, Ashley Dupre, Trunk points out that "call girls aren’t selling sex, they’re selling discretion……Of course a guy like Spitzer could get a mistress, no problem. He’s not great looking, but being the Governor of New York makes up for that.
But the mistress is dangerous—she could talk. In a call girl, you buy discretion."

The point here is to know what you are really selling. What problem are you the solution to? What question does your service answer?

Trunk talks about this in terms of writing a resume, but her clear-eyed wisdom applies equally to personal branding:

"You know why most people have terrible resumes? They can’t figure out what they really bring to the table. If you really know what you are selling, then most of your resume is not going to be relevant. But people get mixed up about what they are selling. And they start just selling what they think they should be selling that second instead of analyzing the situation."

As the columnist and writer Katha Pollitt opines in the current issue of The Nation:

Just once I’d like to see a male politician caught in a sex scandal stand up there at a press conference all by himself. You want to be an alpha male with extra helpings of testosterone and appetites that cannot be denied? Fine…….but if you get caught, don’t drag your wife in front of the cameras to prove how strong your marriage is. Practice saying these words: "No, darling, I could never live with myself if I let you humiliate yourself in public….."

There was Silda Wall Spitzer, the wife of the now-former Governor of New York, not once but twice (!), at her husband’s side, looking stricken and shell-shocked. And the same thought occurred to me — be a man! Stand up there on your own. There’s no political face left to be saved. Maybe Suzanne Craig, Dina McGreevey or, oh yeah, Hillary, should have flown to Paris when they faced similar photo-ops. Or maybe stayed home to deal with the rage and anguish of their children.

In the end, it doesn’t matter…..the outcome will be the same! As Pollitt so rightly (and indignantly) says, "People may use the words like stoic or dignified, but really what they’re thinking is doormat or enabler."

As we move towards the possible election of the first woman President of the United States, isn’t it time we gave political wives a permanent pass on this uniquely arcane form of political theater?