Get Really Personal with Your Personal Brand
You might not be the offspring of Trump, Branson or Vanderbilt, but you do have a personal brand legacy. Consider your heritage: your parents, community, region, country, culture and ancestry. Pegging to your authentic underpinnings, which is your brand DNA, might be the platform you need right now, as you define the constellation of characteristics …
It’s Not Who You Are, It’s What You Mean
If you’re trying to sell yourself on your stats: as a bundle of skills and experience, you’re going to lose out to competitors who know what they mean and are promoting that to employers and prospects.
The goal of your personal brand effort has got to answer this one question: what do you mean to …
What Sex Can and Can’t Sell
Sex is the core of many celebrities’ personal brands. These popsugar people make a living being hot. They play out their lives with others who are just as hot. Megan, Brian, Scarlett, Ryan, Brad, Angelina, Gisele, Tom and the phalanx of usual suspects dance among their own kind. Their brand images are not just the …
This May Be Too Disgusting to Read But It’s True
Last week on Oprah, MacKenzie Phillips launched her new personal brand. She is the self-dubbed, new face of “consensual incest,” according to Sunday’s New York Times.
I won’t guess what reaction you’re having to MacPhil’s latest attempt to spin a lifetime of addiction and dereliction into an Oprah book bestseller (featured for ratings, not endorsed …
How to Greet Defeat and Come Back Richer
Coke had New Coke. Tylenol had poisoned pills. General Motors has bankruptcy. What do these big brands have in common, and what can you take away from their experience?
Resilience, the ability to bounce back from a significant stressor, is definitely an attribute of successful brands, personal and otherwise. We all experience loss, failure, betrayal, …
Controversial Communication: Incite a Riot or Facilitate Debate?
A dominant dimension of your personal brand is your personal history. Not your baby book and photos of you at prom. Your personal awareness and actions involving the events of the day: political, cultural, social, environmental, economic and otherwise. I call this dimension “personal brand engagement,” where you develop and communicate your take on what’s …
YouThinkInc Versus GroupThinkInc
In Sunday’s New York Times magazine, there’s an inventors’ support company featured, Quirky.com. It’s purpose is to take your crazy idea and put it out in the Quirky community for a group grope on what your concept would be if it were better than what you could think of on your own. I love this …
Are You Absent, Invisible, a Reflection or an Impression?
You may be among us and we might not know. If you’re not blogging or at least leaving comments on blogs, not tweeting or at least re-tweeting, or haven’t posted or at least contributed to a thread on a social network: you may be present but virtually invisible to us.
That’s unfortunate if you believe …
Write Your Will and Start Your Life
Great athletes start with the finish line in mind. Lance Armstrong doesn’t hop on his bike and wonder where he’ll end up. Michael Phelps doesn’t jump in the pool and paddle around. Why would you take to the open road of your career or business without a destination in mind and expect to wind up …
Bright Shiny Objects and Babies Like Me
I have a baby brain, even now after all these grown-up years.
A baby’s brain is exceptionally plastic, “captivated by the most unexpected events” and keen on seeing probabilities, while not terrifically impressed by certainties, per Alison Gopnik in Sunday’s New York Times.
Sounds like an entrepreneur’s brain, at least during the start up phase …