Valeria Maltoni has an interesting post about how journalists are now engaging fans. I’m lucky to have met and spent time with news people like Jennifer Cabala and Jamie Yuccas and Jim Long, who are people outside of their stories as well.

Some people are engaging. Some people are just turning in news the way they have all along. Others are learning what it means to be a storyteller with a face instead of the vessel of information.

And this isn’t just about news. This is a corporate story. This is a small business story. This is a relationships-are-good-again story. And the people who know how to storytell in this new space, and who know how to be a personality while telling these stories are poised to do interesting things. The medium has changed. The methods have changed. The opportunity has changed.

Jen and Jamie and Jim are three passionate people who aren’t just the news any longer. Don Lemon isn’t just a suit at a desk. You’re not just an employee in the machine. And there’s a chance for that to be interesting and useful.

What would you do with it?

The challenge, as it were, is to build from a base, and then quickly show the breadth of your capabilities, all tied into an easy-to-consume story.

First Step: Be Damned Good at Something

You already are damned good at something. You just might not yet be choosing to acknowledge that. My dad is really good at poker. Justin Kownacki is damned good at web video. It can be whatever, but you have to start somewhere. Madonna started at music. She became an actor, a record producer, a fashion person, etc. But she started at music.

If you start at being known for being damned good for something, everything else gets a little easier. The related problem to this, however, is becoming pigeonholed. If everyone only thought of Christopher S. Penn as a financial aid marketer, that would hamper his forward growth. Thankfully, Chris counters this quite effectively by being part of the Marketing Over Coffee team, and by presenting outside the financial sphere.

But that relates again to platform thinking as well.

Diversify With a Unified Story

Gary Vaynerchuk started with Wine Library TV, where he speaks passionately about food. He launches ObsessedTV, with Samantha Ettus as a host, where it’s a passionate show about people. Gary could be boiled down to being a passionate marketer using the new channels of the web to drive response. He could launch a food enthusiast site, a car enthusiast site, a clothing site, and we’d all see the line.

Richard Branson does it similarly in the big leagues. Virgin has launched several brands, some of them successful, and others dismal. But his passion and the unifying theme is: I can do it better. We want to get behind that. I know many VirginUSA air travel customers who swear by the service. We know what to expect at Virgin Music. It’s a package of a story that diversifies.

The Arc of Your Personal Brand

Your personal brand has phases and arcs, such that you start by being known for something, you branch into some new territories with clear bridges from where you were to where you’re going next, and such that people can start to glean where you’ll go after that second hop. The trick of that is maintaining focus, and by keeping each hop somewhat closely joined.

You can’t do it all. It doesn’t matter that you have 14 interests. What matters is building from the position of what you do damned well, and tying it to where you want to go for a next hop. Don’t plan too far past the next hop. Work on maybe two or three brand extensions tops at any time. What do I mean by that?

In the personal branding perspective, let’s say that you’re an IT professional who gets known for his enthusiasm for writing about emerging technology. He’s pretty good, gets picked up by a lot of blogs to write for them, and becomes known in his space for finding interesting things and talking about them. Writing a book about his passion for blues music might not really get that “brand transfer” benefit, because it’s far afield of what he is known for doing.

The arc of my own personal brand looks like this:

• Known for personal media making and PodCamp.
• Known for working with bigger companies on social media strategy and execution.
• Known for building new marketing methodologies for others to follow.
• Known for writing about emerging business communications and community-meets-tech.

Something like that. I’m somewhere between 2 and 3 on that list. The challenge, as always, is knowing to say no to the extraneous things that don’t build on this arc. I love comic books, and would love to write for a comic book company. I’m a reasonable guitarist. I’m a decent artist. I like lots of things that don’t fit neatly into those arcs listed above. So they go to the side. I use them as hobbies and passions instead of career. And I don’t give them as much attention as the main storyline.

Platform Thinking and You

Can you plot the arc of your brand? Did you notice that I didn’t talk about a particular job or role? Don’t ever plan your brand around your job role, least of all in this current economy. Work from the perspective of what you can do well, what you want to do next, and how you can build out from a strong core into your new spaces.

What would the arc of your brand look like? How do you think that’s reflected in your blog, your website, your LinkedIn profile, your web presence overall? Will everything I find about you on the web reinforce this arc concept?

If not, will it soon, now that we’ve talked about it?

How Do You Talk About Yourself?

There’s a huge difference between someone saying that you’re amazing and you saying it about yourself. On the one hand, you sometimes have to explain your credentials. For instance, if I’m asking you to think about what I’m saying, you might want to know my credentials, my qualifications, where I’m from. That’s why blogs have an About page (or at least, that’s the best way to use an about page, in my not nearly humble opinion). But there really is a huge difference between explaining your perspective versus outright bragging about yourself.

No, you can’t really cheat by restating what others have said about you. That’s still basically going to come off as bragging (to me). And this works on the personal scale as well as the company scale.

Which works better? An ad about how awesome you are, or an ad about how awesome your customer is?

Keep the Conversation Focused on Your Customer

In advertising and marketing and all business communications, think about your customer. One way the iPod won the MP3 war was they came up with a way for customers to think easier about the product. It fits 1000 songs. That was wayyyyyyyyy easier to understand than number of megabytes. Thus, the conversation was from the perspective of the customer.

Think of the old cheesy car salesperson. “Can you see yourself in this baby?” There’s a reason they say that. It works. People think from their own perspective.

In talking about yourself, talk instead about others, if you can.

I really loved what John Andrews was doing with his customer of the day blog posts for his little bistro. (Then again, I just read that John’s shop closed down, so does that make it a bad strategy?) John had the perspective that by praising his customers, they’d feel motivated to return. Seems reasonable to me.

Mick Galuski, who I wrote about as asmall town superhero, earns and keeps my business because he customizes his communication to me to make it about my interests. In turn, I praise Mick all the time, and talk with him about business, and give him potential ideas for future efforts.

What This Means to Personal Branding and Self-Promotion

In situations where you’re talking with others, do your best to talk more about them. Learn about them. Ask questions. The smartest people are those who plumb the depths of the other person, and come away knowing them deeply. We seem to fear, as humans, that the other person in a situation won’t hear us. We get worried that we’ll leave a conversation somehow unequally.

Strangely, the most “important” people (in at least the public business sense) I have ever met in my life have all asked me more about myself, and even with me trying hard to turn it around, they were gracious and interesting and still worked hard to know more about me than themselves. People like Vinod Khosla, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and many more have always started with more questions about me than about themselves.

If that’s how they roll, why wouldn’t you do the same yourself?

It’s certainly something I notice more often when meeting people, or learning more about them on the web. While writing this post, I was distracted twice to do other things, and in one case, I read someone’s about page on their blog and choked on how self-important they seemed (and hey, read mine and call me out if you think I seem stuck-up). The other was a request from someone whose event I once attended, where he spent the first 10 minutes doing a strange “you love me, you really love me” type performance. Great guy. Super smart. Off-putting as all hell to start an event that way.

What do you say?

Others are going to write about the platform and what it means to have apps there and will this work as a business. I don’t give a rat’s ass. You, and I’m talking to you, run out and get into your account today. Link up your WordPress or TypePad blog. Put up a few of your last presentations using the new SlideShare application. Consider throwing TripIt on there, and showing people where they can run into you at upcoming events. This is just dog clever.

Run to LinkedIn and incorporate your stuff into your profile. Make sure it’s a great complement to what you’re already doing, and amp up the way you promote yourself using that service.

What do you think? What other kinds of apps should LinkedIn be seeking? What apps do you use that make sense as another addon to the platform? How will this impact how you’re doing business?

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That’s the basic story of Wally Amos and Famous Amos cookies, but it might also be the story of corporate trust agents. We build relationships with these people who are representative of a company’s brand in our eyes. We’re in line for their cookies, but suddenly, they’ve got to start again with a new cookie company. Let’s talk about how that cookie might possible crumble.

Recent Moves

Charlene Li rose to prominence while working at Forrester. Her blog was there. Her presence on the web was there. When she left to go solo, this required a bit of brand extraction, or divorce, where she had to rebuild her own presence on the web to redirect interested parties to her new little plot of web real estate.

The same happened with Gia Lyons, former cool hunter from IBM, who ran off to join the Jive circus. Her presence was entangled with her corporate brand, and this meant that she had to do a little shuffling to put it all together again outside of the entity. I believe this will be more of a point to consider in coming years.

Closer to Home

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

Best in Show

Some trust agents are already doing this well. Robert Scoble has moved his blog along from Microsoft to PodTech to FastCompany with limited scarring. Of these, FastCompany did a lot of makeover work for Robert, but hey, it’s still his site and I’m sure it’s all still his decision at the end of the day.

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester maintains his own blog presence, though he writes pretty frequently along Forrester lines. Louis Gray is his own man on the web. Superstar Steve Rubel keeps his brand though we all know he’s Edelman’s engine. It’s a balance where, in all cases, they are mindful of their position in the communities they serve, but also respectful of their employers.

That last point bears repeating. They are respectful of their employers. This includes making sure we do our work, that we deliver value while sharing a brand, and that we keep our motives in perspective. The business we do on behalf of our company must be the driver so long as it’s our primary salary source. Anything else is not fair, not responsible, and not sustainable in the longer term.

The Risk

But now, let’s shift back to the risk. If you are the company’s cool hunter, if you are the social media rockstar, if you are the person touching the community the most, remember that jobs are not and never will be jobs for life any more. As much as people tell me this (and you and I talked about it at Blog World Expo, mister), it’s just not the kind of business environment where anyone’s getting a company tattoo these days.

To that end, consider how your world will change when you shift roles. What happens if you go solo? How do you go from being Frank Eliason from Comcast to being Frank from Best Buy? (Because if I were a major company in the US or elsewhere, I’d be doing my damnedest to hire Frank away.) How might you stake out your own little place on the web where you can be you with or without your company badge?

And business leaders, how can you protect from the other direction in this world of the half-owned brand? Are you in the business of developing a deep bench of talent? Have you thought about succession plans for your “faces and voices” people? What happens when your community manager, someone like current superstar Connie Bensen gets a better offer, and you’ve lost one of your competitive advantages?

In my company, the answer was to start a process to reach out to some of the other social media up and comers in the space. I’ve been working on that for a little while now, and I love the idea. It means that, as a strategist, I’ve started to protect my company from a risk. But have you thought that through for YOUR company?

How is this working for your situation?

Recommended Reading:

Photo credit, scubadive67

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Get your personal branding audiobook here. (mp3 format)

And a very special thanks to Rob Blatt for his reading, producing, and distributing of the audiobook.

Personal Branding for the Business Professional Audiobook

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• Free eBook on Personal Branding

Most of the ideas come from previous blog posts, but as there have been several new subscribers in the last several months, and because I believe that the information might spread further in an ebook format, I wanted to give it to you free, and without any sign up or anything.

Free eBook on Personal Branding

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Personal Branding for the Business Professional (pdf format).

My Best Advice About Personal Branding

1. 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media
2. The Real Power of Personal Branding
3. Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online (part 1)
4. Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online (part 2)
5. Strip Malls for Personal Brands
6. Passion Drives Personal Brand
7. Elements of a Personal Brand
8. Personal Branding and Social Media
9. Quick Branding Tips for Individuals
10. 10 Ways to Make Your Next Conference Better

Here are some folks I think do personal branding very well:

• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Christopher S. Penn
• Justine Ezarik
• C.C. Chapman
• Mitch Joel
• Jeremiah Owyang
• Liz Strauss

Is that everyone? Hardly. But those came right to mind. Hopefully, my advice will help you think about your own personal brand. What do you think?

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club.

Branding one’s self in an online environment built on entropy and go-baby-go is difficult at best, and impossible if you forget to take your happy pills. To that end, I’ve come up with a quick list of 100 things you might do to help with these efforts. Feel free to add your ideas to the comments section.

If you like this one, please don’t hesitate to stumble, blog, digg, bookmark, and otherwise promote the hell out of this. That’s another tactic, by the way. : )

Listening

• Build ego searches using Technorati and Google Blogsearch
• Comment frequently (and meaningfully) on blogs that write about you and your posts
• Don’t forget the conversations hiding in Twitter (use Summize.com) and Friendfeed. Be sure to stay aware of those.
• If you can afford it, buy professional listening tools, like Radian6 or others in that category.
• Use Google Reader to store your ego searches.
• Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see who’s linking to your site.
• Use heat map tools like CrazyEgg to see how people relate to your site.
• Listen to others in your area of expertise. Learn from them.
• Listen to thought leaders in other areas, and see how their ideas apply to you.
• Don’t forget podcasts. Check out iTunes and see who’s talking about your area of interest.
• Track things like audience/community sentiment (positive/negative) if you want to map effort to results.

Home Base

• Home base is your blog/website. Not everyone needs a blog. But most people who want to develop a personal brand do.
• Buy an easy-to-remember, easy-to-spell, content-appropriate domain name if you can. Don’t be TOO clever.
• A really nice layout doesn’t have to cost a lot, but shows you’re more than a social media dabbler.
• Your “About” page should be about you AND your business, should the blog be professional in nature. At least, it should be about you.
• Make sure it’s easy to comment on your site.
• Make sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your site’s content.
• Use easy to read fonts and colors.
• A site laden with ads is a site that doesn’t cherish its audience. Be thoughtful.
• Pay attention to which widgets you use in your sidebar. Don’t be frivolous.
• Load time is key. Test your blog when you make changes, and ensure your load times are reasonable.
• Register your site with all the top search engines.
• Claim your site on Technorati.com
• Use WebsiteGrader.com to make sure your site is well built in Google’s eyes.

Passports

• Passports are accounts on other social networks and social media platforms. It’s a good idea to build an account on some of these sites to further extend your personal branding.
• Twitter.com is a must if you have a social media audience. It also connects you to other practitioners.
• Facebook and/or MySpace are useful social networks where you can build outposts (see next list).
• Get a Flickr account for photo sharing.
• Get a YouTube account for video uploading.
• Get a StumbleUpon.com account for voting.
• Get a Digg.com account for voting, as well.
• Get an Upcoming.org account to promote events.
• Get a del.icio.us account for social bookmarking.
• Get a Wordpress.com account for its OpenID benefits.
• Get a LinkedIn account for your professional network.
• Take a second look at Plaxo. It’s changed for the better.
• Get a Gmail.com account for use with reader, calendar, docs, and more.

Outposts

• Build RSS outposts on Facebook. Add Flog Blog, and several other RSS tools.
• Build a similar outpost on MySpace, if your audience might be there.
• Make sure your social media is listed in your LinkedIn profile.
• Add a link to your blog to your email signature file (this is still an outpost).
• Be sure your social network profiles on all sites has your blog listed, no matter where you have to put it to list it.
• Make sure your passport accounts (above) point to your blog and sites.
• Use social networks respectfully to share the best of your content, in a community-appropriate setting.
• Don’t forget places like YahooGroups, Craigslist, and online forums.
• Email newsletters with some links to your blog makes for an effective outpost, especially if your audience isn’t especially blog savvy.
• Podcast content can have links to your URL and might draw awareness back to your content, too.

Content

• Create new content regularly. If not daily, then at least three times a week.
• The more others can use your content, the better they will adopt it.
• Write brief pieces with lots of visual breaks for people to absorb.
• Images draw people’s attention. Try to add a graphic per post. (Not sure why this works, but it seems to add some level of attention.)
• Mix up the kinds of pieces you put on your site. Interviews, how-to, newsish information, and more can help mix and draw more attention.
• Limit the number of “me too” posts you do in any given month to no more than three. Be original, in other words.
• The occasional ‘list’ post is usually very good for drawing attention.
• Write passionately, but be brief (unless you’re writing a list of 100 tips).
• Consider adding audio and video to the mix. The occasional YouTube video with you as the star adds to your personal branding immensely, especially if you can manage to look comfortable.
• Brevity rules.

Conversation

• Commenting on other people’s blogs builds awareness fast.
• The more valuable your comments, the more it reflects on your ability and your character.
• Use your listening tools to stay active in pertinent discussions.
• Try not to brag, ever. Be humble. Not falsely so, but truly, because a lot of what we do isn’t as important as saving lives.
• Ask questions with your blog posts. Defer to experts. Learn from the conversation.
• Be confident. Asking for external validation often is a sign of weakness.
• Good conversations can be across many blogs with links to show the way.
• Try never to be too defensive. Don’t be a pushover, but be aware of how you present yourself when defending.
• Disclose anything that might be questionable. Anything, and quickly!
• Don’t delete critical blog comments. Delete only spam, abrasive language posts, and offensive material. (Have a blog comments policy handy, if you get into the deleting mode.

Community

• Remember that community and marketplace are two different things.
• Make your site and your efforts heavily about other people. It comes back.
• Make it easy for your community to reach you.
• Contribute to your community’s blogs and projects.
• Thank people often for their time and attention.
• Celebrate important information in your community (like birthdays).
• Be human. Always.
• Your community knows more than you. Ask them questions often.
• Apologize when you mess up. Be very sincere.
• Treat your community like gold. Never subject them to a third party of any kind without their consent.
• Knowing more about your competitors’ communities is a useful thing, too. Learn who visits, why they visit, and how they interact.
• Measuring your efforts in building community grows out your brand as a natural extension.

Face to Face

• Have simple, useful, crisp business cards to share. Always.
• Be confident in person.
• Clothes and appearance DO matter. WIsh they didn’t, but they do.
• Have a very brief introduction / elevator pitch and practice it often.
• Ask questions of people you meet. Get to know them.
• Don’t seek business relationships right off. Instead, seek areas of shared interest.
• Know when to walk away politely.
• Don’t try to meet everyone in a room. Meet a half dozen or more great new people.
• Never doubt that you are worth it.
• If you’re terribly shy, consider finding a “wing man” for events.
• Doing homework ahead of time (finding people’s most recent blog posts, googling them, etc) helps one feel “in the know.”
• Make eye contact. It’s MUCH more powerful than you know.

Promotion

• Use Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Google Reader to drive awareness.
• Promote others even more than you promote yourself
• Bragging isn’t useful to anyone besides your own ego
• Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people
• Don’t digg/stumble/link every single post. Save it for your very best
• Another promotional tool: guest blog on other sites
• Another promotion tool: make videos on YouTube with URL links
• Another promotion tool: use the status section of LinkedIn and Facebook
• Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.
• Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it.

You probably have some great ideas to add to this. I’d love to hear what you want to add, or feel free to blog your own list and add value to the project that way. In any case, I hope this was helpful, and I wish you great success in your efforts to brand yourself and show the world what a rockstar you are.

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Disclaimer

None of this is meant towards any particular person that I’ve met in the last several years. Instead, it’s meant towards me, some of you, and some people I observe in social settings. If you’ve recently met me, I don’t mean you.

Confidence

If I stopped this post now, that’d be enough. If you don’t present yourself as confident, you’re already off on the wrong foot. It’s that simple. Why? Because I need to believe that you have value as you’re coming up to talk with me at the event. I have to feel that you’re pretty comfy with who you are as a person, and you’re looking to reach out and make new relationships to further develop your capabilities and ideas.

If you don’t have confidence right off, here are some tips: think about the three things that someone who’s really proud of who you are would say about you. Don’t tell ME these things, but have them in your mind. If you’re worried how the other person might receive you, stop. Instead, believe with all your heart that you deserve to be there, that you’re smart, that you are just as important.

And you know what? If the person you’re meeting you, after all that, STILL treats you like crap, then you smile politely, walk away, and flush that out of your head as fast as you can, because it’s definitely not you.

Be Brief

Here’s a spot where pretty much everybody could learn a lesson. I need reminders of this all the time. What happens is something like this: we make connection, we talk with someone we like, and we accidentally worry that the other person won’t know we’re smart, funny, useful, whatever. It’s almost like we’re drowning and we have to say everything, in case we never meet again.

Stay brief. Don’t ramble. Be confident that your small elevator pitch as to who you are, what you’re into, and why you’re happy to connect is enough. Believe with all your heart that you’ll have time to unpack what it is you need to say.

Finish Strong

Sometimes, everything goes great, but then people don’t know when to break off the conversation and go meet new folks. Why? Because maybe that’s all there was. If the person wants you to stay, they’ll usually give you indications of that. If they are all done with the conversation, and pay really close attention, they will give body language that says this. Truly. Just keep your eyes open, and you’ll get a sense of when to scram. Don’t scram earlier than that (unless you have to go). That’ll show a lack of confidence.

Some Bonus Round Material

A few more thoughts:

• “What do you do?” isn’t as sexy a question as “what are you working on that’s fun?”
• Yes, your breath matters.
• Dress how you want to be perceived. (I dress in what I call “rockstar casual,” half because I like it, and half because I’m too broke to dress the way I might.
• If you’re not sure what conversation is appropriate, practice with friends ahead of events and gatherings. (I say inappropriate things all the time).
• Remember that there are still boundaries between what’s too personal and what’s not, and yet, please try to be human.
• Remember that conversation is about more than one person. Breathe. Leave room.

What advice to you have? For me, for others? What have you noticed about your fears to meet others, or maybe we should talk about success stories and horror stories?