Dan the Man With a Plan For Your Future Brand

Dan Schawbel is a prominent figurehead on developing, building, and maintaining a personal brand.  The New York Times referred to him as the "personal brand guru".  A lot of what I know about personal branding comes from Mr. Schawbel and is wonderful book Me 2.0, Revised and Updated Edition: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.  In this book Schawbel provides organized, thoughtful, and helpful steps and methods to starting and harnessing your personal brand.  In a world that seems to revolve around social media and having your person out for the world to see, it's important to understand how to control and manage your brand for your future careers.  As a reader there was a lot of information that I didn't know regarding my personal brand.  Schawbel's 4 steps to building your personal brand go as follows: Discover Your Brand, Create Your Brand, Communicate Your Brand, and Maintain Your Brand.  I myself worked to improve my various social media sites to reflect my overall brand.  I highly recommend picking up this book to help find what your brand is or to improve on your current brand.  I also recommend following Mr. Schawbel on Twitter for lots of great information and insight.  Look out for Dan Schawbel's newest book called Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success, which is due out September 3rd, 2013.

As always leave comments and let me know what you think.

Blog Along The Way

Hello, today I want to share about blogging.  Believe it or not blogging is a form of social media and just like any social media you can use it to express your brand depending on what you like. There is blogging about movies, video games, cooking, fashion, gardening, music, and any topic you can think of.  Blogging is a free service that allows people to write and express themselves.  

Blogs can be used for multiple uses. Most businesses work to maintain an updated blog to communicate news with their audience related to all things related to the company. People enjoy using blogs as a personal diary to their everyday life.  Some people create blogs to write about a particular topic that they are very passionate about.  Sometimes these passionate blogs can be found and can result in positive results.

A student in my social media class showed us a blog his friend did related to all things related to the American band, My Chemical Romance.  She was a devoted fan of the band and reported on everything going on in the band.  You could tell from her layout and her different posts, that she had put a great deal of effort and time into her blog. Her blog become so big that the band heard about it and invited her to meet the band and do an interview, just from writing about a band that she loved so much.

Now you might think “How can I get my blog to be so well known that a band finds it and contacts me”, well it’s not that easy.  You want to find a particular subject that you’re passionate about and then try to develop a niche topic related to your subject matter.  Let’s say you enjoy watching movies. Great, except movies are a very broad topic, you should try to narrow your topic from all movies. Let’s say you’re a fan of independent and comedy movies, then that should be your blog topic: Independent Comedies.

After you determine your topic, you should find a creative title that will stick out in a search engine.  Once you start writing and making particular tags in your blogs, you should have no problem attracting a large enough audience to your blog. I hope my advice has helped you begin considering a niche topic for your next blog. Please leave comments and let me hear from you about your blogs.

Marketing A Cause

I will be working on a group project that involves music marketing, so please help by following the band I mention below. We decided to name our group“140 Characters” after the micro-blogging text limit.  We decided our cause would be helping our member James’ band NeverWake and their Facebook page.  As the head of the group I want to work to build on the large Internet audience that NeverWake has.  One of my goals is to build on their international following. I also want to build hype towards their new album that they will be recording soon. Please check out NeverWake and share the support.

Your Future Brand For The Upper Hand Intro Video

Hi guys. Check out the introduction video for the blog. Thanks!