The New Era of Personal Marketing 2.0
Aside from the increasing number of those who make a living directly out of them, the greatest impact of the social media revolution in the years to come will be felt by the rest of us in two different yet complementary fields: the extraordinary new possibilities to communicate and interact digitally (that is after all …
Heroes of Personal Branding (iv): Mago Ben
To turn a personal hobby into a lucrative career is a sure sign of talent and reveals an uncommon amount of courage and determination that only a privileged minority seem to possess. If – on top of that – the hobby-turned-job in question has never been practiced professionally in your country by anyone below the …
Heroes of Personal Branding (iii): k.d. lang
The chances of a Canadian Tibetan Buddhist, adroginous-looking vegan and out-of-the-closet lesbian making it in the inner sanctum of country music of Nashville, Tennessee seem so remote as to defy belief. It takes the unflinching faith in her abilities, the total love for music and singing and the rare amount of self-confidence found in personal …
Personal Branding Heroes (ii): Dan Balan
If at the onset of the new millennium someone had predicted that a Moldovan pop band would be selling over one million records in Japan and reaching the top ten in the charts of every major European country singing in its native tongue, he would have been accused of being an interested party, insanity… or …
Personal Branding Heroes (i): Jean-Claude Van Damme
Many men and women have successfully built strong and durable personal brands that have catapulted them to success: but few have done so with more gritty determination and ‘fighting’ (forgive the pun) so many internal and external demons as the popular Belgium-born action movie star Jean-Claude Van Varenberg, better known by his artistic name of …
Mistakes of a Lifetime
We all make mistakes: but not all mistakes are of the same nature, carry the same consequences or hurt ourselves and others to the same degree. And to rub salt in the wound, we might add that there are some mistakes – the mistakes of a lifetime – for which there does not seem to …
Personal Branding Redemption
My job as an online reputation manager has brought me face to face with many high and low profile individuals living some of the most difficult, testing and trying times of their lives as they found themselves in the eye of the storm in reputation crises that threatened to derail their careers. When thousands of …
Personal Branding: The Seven Deadly Sins
Since the dawn of the new millennium, Personal Branding has been going from strength to strength and is currently being touted as one of the ‘make or break’ factors for career success. Need recent proof to substantiate this claim? How about the inclusion of this blog on the Forbes ‘Top 75 Websites for your Career‘ …
Letter to an Unemployed Friend
Dear friend,
As I write these lines, I don’t know what your specific life circumstances or background are. I don’t know either how it is that you came to be unemployed, though in all likelihood it means that you are looking for your first job, that you were made redundant or that you voluntarily left …
Are you a 2.0 Egotist?
One of the harshest (and in my view, mostly unfair) criticisms hurled at personal branding is that – when taken to its fullest expression – it encourages and promotes self-centeredness, self-aggrandizement, narcissism and plain outright selfishness. Although anyone familiar with the brief yet intense history of personal branding models and philosophies in the XXI century …