I had the opportunity to interview our very own world-renowned Personal Branding Guru, Dan Schawbel, about the release of his revised #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan, October 2010).
Meet Dan Schawbel
Though Dan originally wrote Me 2.0 for Gen-Y set, the book’s audience has expanded significantly over a short period of time. Me 2.0 and Dan Schawbel’s personal branding concepts have become synonymous with contemporary career development – and entrepreneurs, consultants, workers, and job seekers are all interested in the affects of personal branding in today’s ever-changing business environment.
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
What prompted you to revise Me 2.0?
I realized that technology had changed significantly in the past year, and with a push from my publisher, I decided to add about sixty pages. Also, the economy had gotten a lot worse, with an unemployment rate of over 9% in the United States, so adding a chapter on how to use social networks in your job search was logical and needed.
What has changed on the personal branding front since the original Me 2.0 was released?
The most significant change is that we’ve entered into a phase of the Internet I call “the age of resistance.” We live in a world that is completely opt-in now. You can subscribe and unsubscribe from just about anything, and since there are millions of content choices now; it’s becoming harder to stand out and build a significant community. To give you an idea of how competitive it is to get noticed, there are over 2 billion tweets per month, and over 200 million blog posts have been published on WordPress.com blogs alone. You’re competing with an endless sea of content! Personal branding is much more important now, because if you brand yourself as an expert in a niche field, you can become known through the long tail. Forget using social networks as marketing platforms; it doesn’t work. There’s just too much noise. You need to establish one-to-one relationships instead.
What major trends do you see in personal branding today?
I see a consolidation of social networks in the future. I think Twitter has no more than three years left before it goes out of business and Facebook has a monopoly over the market. Facebook will have most of our data and our time spent online through a mobile phone or PC. A new research report just came out from JobVite that shows that 2/3 of employees are either looking for a job or are open to new opportunities. 30% of people are freelancers right now, which shows that we are moving to a personal branding world, where your reputation online and offline can make or break your entire career.
Do you think job security exists anymore?
It hasn’t existed for years because there are no more pensions, and with global competition, companies will drop you in a moments notice. You’re only as good as your last project, and BusinessWeek Magazine highlighted this on their January 2010 cover with the title “The Dispensable Worker.” If you aren’t relevant to the marketplace, then you’re out of a job. It’s that simple, and that scary. I spend at least two hours each today learning about industry trends and opportunities. If I stopped, I would be out of business.
Can you tell me what life was like for you when you first started out? Did you have a personal branding strategy right off the bat? If so, how has it changed/morphed over the years? If not, when did it solidify?
I was born to be the personal branding expert I’ve become, there’s no doubt. I learned how to market myself during college, even before I knew it was termed “personal branding.” I had eight internships, seven leadership positions in campus organizations, my own consulting business, and straight A’s in college. I’m introverted and was scared to death about networking, so it still took me eight months, meeting fifteen people, getting rejected twice, to land my first full-time job at EMC Corporation in 2006. In 2007, I got sucked into personal branding and realized that I could be the spokesperson for my generation, so I started PersonalBrandingBlog.com, as well as Personal Branding Magazine, and other projects within six month. Fast Company wrote about me and my life changed, including EMC recruiting me to be their first social media specialist and Google asking me to speak at their HQ. My brand has expanded over the past years because older people like my message.
Is there any message you couldn’t fit in the book, but wish you could get out there?
Brand yourself for the career you want, not the job you have. It’s the single best piece of advice I could ever give and I say it in almost every interview now because it’s that important.
