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.

The Technology of Brands

My friend and interactive media strategist Adam Broitman calls Google a “reputation management system.” I love it. Essentially, what Google knows is what’s true, as far as the uneducated are concerned. So, how does Google come to accept you as the authority on something? There are a few measurements to that at present.

• Inbound links from other sources – if someone is linking to your website, you must have information of value, especially if that someone who’s doing the linking is important.
• Outbound links to quality material – this is actually more for human love, but certainly helps prove that you’re a lively presence.
• Readable, searchable pages – if Google can tell what you’re talking about at your website, you probably are trying to offer something to the world.
• Constantly updating content – Google values freshness over staleness (don’t we all?)
• Listed in directories – Google wants to know that you’ve submitted your site for inclusion in the more prominent search engines and website directories.
• Mechanical quality – Google has a lot of other things it values, like well-written websites that follow standards, and it’s a little bit of learning to understand them all. Hubspot makes a free Website Grader tool that would help you understand a bit.

That’s what Google cares about, and that’s how a lot of people are searching for you. But we do this for humans, because humans are who make the decisions. So let’s look into what counts for your strong personal brand technologically, with humans in mind.

Start With a Home Base

First and foremost, build a site to call your own. I recommend a blog, because of a blog’s ability to command more attention from Google on one hand, and because you can use it to build your voice on the other. I recommend buying your own name as a domain ( here’s a list of domain registration coupon codes for GoDaddy.com). It might not be your home base or part of your largest plan, but buy it now while you can. And then, if you have another brand you want to promote as your BIG #1 brand, then buy that domain name, too, and put up a blog.

The aesthetics of your blog and your blog design are up to you. Pretty blogs don’t hurt people’s opinion of your work.

But we have to start thinking outside the blog, too. It’s not ALL about you. Or maybe it is, but it’s about how you get out and travel the web, too.

Build a Few Accounts

To participate on the web these days requires that you build some accounts at various web platforms. Here’s a quick list of sites and why you should have an account there:

• Google Accounts – so you can use several dozen free applications by Google.
• Yahoo! Accounts / Mail – so you can use several dozen free applications by Yahoo. (Also, take advantage of Yahoo’s OpenID account).
• Digg – social news site.
• StumbleUpon – social news site.
• YouTube – video sharing site.
• Flickr – video sharing site.
• Upcoming.org – social events calendar.
• Del.icio.us – social bookmarking.
• PayPal – online money transfer.
• eBay – auction site.
• Amazon.com – shopping site.
• This doesn’t fit anywhere else, but take a few pictures of your head to make avatars for accounts. Your company logo doesn’t cut it to me. I want a picture of your head, so that we can identify you at conferences and the like.

You might have some other “must have” accounts for my list. If so, let’s talk about it in the comments section, and maybe I’ll update with some of them.

Social Networks to Consider

There are plenty of communities online, and these all have social networks to empower them. I could list about a hundred places where you might choose to spend your time, but here are some real baseline social networks where your presence might help further develop your brand:

• Twitter – if you don’t “get it” right away, that’s okay. The learning curve is about 30 days before you feel like it’s indispensable.
• Facebook – I use Facebook as an outpost, where I build my profile, link back to my site, and give people a bit more understanding of who I am and what matters to me.
• LinkedIn – This is a professional network. Don’t let the “looks like a resume” fool you. Write your profile as if a human will actually read it. Be interesting. And participate with the community, and you’ll develop more awareness and build a stronger future.
• And a specialized network. If you have a niche or genre of interest, be sure to find a vibrant community to join that surrounds it. Love photography? Get into Flickr. Huge on music? Get into MuxTape or any million other cool music communities.

Coming Up Next

This is the end of part 2 of the series. Hopefully, you’ve got some suggestions to add to this section, as you clearly have some experience in how these technologies apply.

In the last part of the series, we’ll talk about how you might apply the human skill and the technology to your use of personal branding. This will have a mix of strategic and tactical points for you to consider, and hopefully, you’ll come away with some next steps to apply to your own personal brand.

How’s this working for you? What else do you need? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Part of the Social Media 100 series of posts. Feel free to subscribe for free to get the rest, and if you want even MORE content, subscribe to my newsletter, too!

It turns out that I have so many thoughts, that I’m going to break this post up into 3. This will be the first part: Branding Basics.

Why Build a Personal Brand?

You might already know the answer to this question. There are lots of answers, actually, depending on you, your needs, the way the world has shaped you. Let’s look at just one answer.

The easiest answer is that you might want to be memorable, and you might want to transfer your real world reputation into the online world. A strong personal brand is a mix of reputation, trust, attention, and execution. You might want to build a brand around being helpful (what I hope my brand means to you), or being a creative thinker (Kathy Sierra, for instance) or being a dealmaker (Donald Trump), or being a showman (David Lee Roth), or whatever matters most to you, and also what you are capable of sustaining.

A personal brand gives you the ability to stand out in a sea of similar products. In essence, you’re marketing yourself as something different than the rest of the pack. Do you need this? I don’t know. Do you like to be mixed in with the pack?

Hints About Brand in General

What’s the difference between Coke and Pepsi? There’s a taste difference, for sure, but what does the brand signify? Tricky, eh? So what’s the difference between TechCrunch and Mashable to you? I would argue that Michael Arrington is more heavily tied into the Silicon Valley insiders scene than Pete Cashmore, and that the other authors on each site stack differently (I really love Mashable’s Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, for instance).

Remember that trying to develop a personal brand involves differentiating in a Coke vs. Pepsi, TechCrunch vs. Mashable world. Identifying yourself as the social media expert or the tech geek blogger is about as differentiated as brands of rice.

In some ways, the differentiator on brands is in what you deliver. What differentiates me from others might be in the volume of useful content I deliver. I’m not sure. You tell me what makes me different. My answer would definitely vary from yours.

The Human Side of Brand

First off, remember that branding isn’t playing a role. Be yourself. It will become apparent rather quickly if you’re being someone that you’re not. Gary Vaynerchuk is the same guy, camera on or off. He may or may not tone himself down a bit when meeting new business partners, but I promise you that he reverts to being himself the moment someone’s come to know what he’s about.

Second, you may choose to use some kind of alias, because you’re afraid of the Internet and stalkers. That’s great, except that your brand equity doesn’t stretch to potential jobs, unless you go around explaining that you have a secret identity. As a guy who grew up reading comics, I’m okay with people having identities, but remember: that means the equity doesn’t transfer as simply.

Finally, brands are complex and not especially one dimensional. Don’t try to be a one-note experience. Madonna has much more than one brand element. So does Guy Kawasaki. Don’t whittle yourself down to a simple footnote. Be complex and colorful and interesting. Only, be sure you can say what you’re about in one easy sentence, and that others have a sense of what you represent without your help. Madonna is a creative force of emotion. Guy Kawasaki is an innovator and experimenter.

Coming up in the second part of the series is the Technical side of Personal Branding. I look forward to your comments on this post, and if I’ve missed anything, let me know. There’s a lot to cover. What do you think so far?

Part of the Social Media 100 series of posts. Feel free to subscribe for free to get the rest, and if you want even MORE content, subscribe to my newsletter, too!

Photo Credit, Brian Solis

Trench Work

There are some basic things we have to do to get through a day, be that at our job, or in life in general, but these tasks aren’t the “good stuff.” They’re just things that need doing. Sometimes, we get stuck in this loop where we think, “Well, I’m doing my job” when we’re actually just doing the “trench work” part of the job. We’re digging in the ditch because that’s part of what it takes, and we’re confusing “doing things that need doing” with “progress.”

To rise above the trench and look around, post a little sticky note somewhere in your field of vision that hints at the larger purpose work that you need to do to REALLY get the job done.

At my day job, one big goal is to create content that helps businesses understand the larger, more impactful trends in technology. That means researching and synthesizing and producing materials to help with that work. If I do things that aren’t that, and mistake that for doing a good day’s work, I’m fooling myself.

Check Your Ponds

It’s really easy to think we’re on the right path to success, when actually, we’re only doing “big fish in small pond” work. Inside companies, if we’re doing the best out of our team, we wear that with a badge of pride. If our group inside the walls is the best group, we take that as our measure. This is deadly dangerous when considering what we could REALLY accomplish.

Look at your personal “ponds” all the time. If you’re doing exceptionally well, change the game and find a new pond. In his seminal business book, WINNING, Jack Welch said this was a strategy he used at GE all the time to get phenomenal growth out of an organization that was used to thinking of itself as #1 in its field for years and years. He’d find them different fields to measure themselves against, where they were #5 or 6, and then give them the goal of getting back to #1.

Look closely at your ponds. Oh, and another thing? (If you’ll allow me to mix a metaphor here). Make sure your ponds aren’t fishbowls.

Some Ways to Check Yourself

Here are a few diagnostic questions. When you answer “yes” to any of these, remind yourself what your larger goals are to get out of the trenches, and shift from comparing yourself to your direct peers and compare yourself on a larger stage instead.

• Is this work BIG, or is it a task? (Email is a task)?
• Is this work MEANINGFUL, or is it time consuming?
• Is this work POWERFUL, or is it what we’ve always done?
• Am I GROWING, or am I at the top?
• Am I STRIVING, or am I coasting?
• Am I REACHING for more, or am I checking off a box?

Squint at the capitalized words and I think they might be a good measuring stick.

What do you think? How does this apply to you?

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.

Photo Credit, bls num1 fan