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NBA Free Agents vs Personal Brand Free Agents

LeBron + NikeWe are on verge of one of the greatest free agent periods in the history of sports. With NBA stars LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and the host of other NBA players who will make decisions on where they will play.

The free agent period starts July 1st with an official signing date of July 8th. Careers, sports franchises and the lives of GMs, team presidents, coaches and their families hang in the balance. A wrong decision could handicap a team for many years to come.

Let’s first start with a quick history lesson on free agency. Do the names Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally ring a bell? Probably not. Well they ushered in modern day free agency in 1975 when they challenged Major League Baseball in arbitration and won.

As personal brands we are all professional business athletes but instead of playing on a field we work in a field. Let’s contrast NBA free agents vs personal branding free agents.

Free Agent Definitions

NBA: There are two types of NBA free agents restricted and unrestricted. For the purpose of this article we will focus on an unrestricted free agent, which is a player who can sign with any team he wants.

Personal Brands: According to Daniel Pink (Author of Free Agent Nation): A free agent is someone who works untethered from a large organization—a free-lancer, a sole proprietor, the operator of a very small business.
Should Daniel Pink’s definition of free agents extend beyond soloprenurs to include intrapreneurs as well who have positioned themselves for new opportunities?

Market Value

As I watch the story of Powered a full-service social media agency unfold it is a great business story on personal branding free agents.

How do you develop a team? In sports, teams can build through the draft getting young players and building around them. In the business world this would be the evaluate of hiring millennial and developing them. The other option is signing free agents or trading (acquiring). Recently Powered has acquired talent through the free agent route acquiring: Crayon (Joseph Jaffe), Step Change, Drill Team, and Conversation Agent (Valarie Maltoni). For more details on this story read Jeremiah Owyang, article, FirstTake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

Q: Performance impact in NBA vs. Personal Brands

• NBA: Stats and how you perform under pressure
• Personal Brands: Popularity of your blog (Adage 150, page views) and engagement online (Klout Metrics), book sales, and speaking gigs to name a few.

Q: Reputation impact in NBA vs. Personal Brands

• NBA: Background checks, family history, off the court history and run ins with the law
• Personal Brands: Online Brand Reputation, valid your activity in social networks, and listen to your data stream in your social networks

Total Compensation

As a personal brand it is a great time to diversify yourself to create greater marketing opportunities. Establishing a personal brand is really about more than just creating a blog and tweeting but being portable and leveraging your personal DNA being who you were designed to be.

Q: Endorsements for NBA vs. Personal Brands

• NBA: Shoe deals, product commercials, etc.
• Personal Brands: More and more opportunities for influencers with a strong personal brand presence to experience endorsements with large brands: For example Usage of Ford’s Fiesta Movement Challenge and GM’s Chevy SXSW

Q: Rock Stars NBA vs. Personal Brands

NBA: Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Dirk Nowitzki
Personal Brands: Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Charlene Li, Wayne Sutton

Would you rather be an NBA star or a strong personal brand? Goes back to the Michael Jordan v Bill Gates argument. Would you rather be an NBA Free Agent or a Personal Brand Free Agent?

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36- Tips for Personal Branding with Twitter

Twitter is a great tool and provides many ways to impact, manage and build equity for your personal brand. In this blog post we will look at 36-tips for personal branding on Twitter.

1. Make your Blog Social – Integrate a Twitter widget into your blog to give it wings. (Example: @careerrocketeer)

2. Custom Background Image – Integrate a visual image in the background that reinforces your personal brand and connects with your blog. (Example: @ChrisBrogan)

3. Polish your Avatar – Integrate a professional looking avatar that is consist across all your social networks that visually looks like you so that people can associate with you.

4. Strategic Social URLs – Choose your Twitter handle wisely. Choose a name that you are strategically planning to build brand equity with.

5. Be a Trust Builder – Twitter is more than a channel where you build a large number of followers. You are really building trust with the people who follow you.

6. Character 2.0 – Your tweets are a character stream that people can validate.

7. Think before you Tweet - All tweets are now archived forever by Library of Congress (LOC), all tweets from March 2006 going forward. http://bit.ly/dq5Wws

8. Profile Bio - Your Twitter profile should identify who and what you are (Example: @KellyLux)

9. Re-Tweetable Bio - Create a bio that is re-tweetable with 120 characters.

10. Create Touch Points – Each tweet is a potential touch point with a potential employer, business partner, customer or strategic partner so handle them with care.

11. Integrate into your web 1.0 Content - Integrate into your business cards other marketing literature.

12. Own Mindshare - Own Digital Real Estate: tweets, @replies and mentions allow you to position yourself in the mind of your target audience.

13. ROI (Return on Identity) - Over time you are creating return on identity so make sure you are re-enforcing the identity you desire.

14. Become a Sound Bite King - Tweeting forces you to think in little commercials (or sound bites)

15. Own a hashtag - A hashtag is a community of people. Owning the hashtag is a commitment to purposeful content on a selected topic. (For example: #journchat is the hashtag for the Twitter Chat founded by @PRSarahEvans which is an ongoing conversation between journalists, bloggers and PR folks.)

16. Be Focused – The focus or goals of Twitter account must be determined. Are you a personal or branded account (For example: @HajjFlemings vs. @BrandCampU .)

17. Biz Development/Lead Generator – Think about how you can create monteizable biz opportunities.

18. Searchable/Query – Query content and keywords that are relevant to your niche it will foster greater interaction with people in the space you are focused on.

19. Broadcast your Blog Post – Great way to syndicate your blog post to your community (Example: @problogger)

20. Blog Post Titles - It forces you to think about tweetable blog post titles. Integrating Twitter handles and titles that people will want to share. (Example: @thisissethsblog)

21. Master 120 – If your tweets are longer than 120 characters you are grounded your tweets and eliminating the more value aspect of tweeting the re-tweet.

22. Twitter List Barometer – Use it as a barometer of how your network views you. If you want your network to view you as a PR Specialist but you are only on underwater basket weaving list then you need to re-evaluate the content you tweet.

23. Attend Tweet-up – As you began to attend tweet-up it is your badge and your ID that is used to communicate. Connect with likeminded people.

24. Track Content – Use Bit.ly or Hootsuite to track to identify quality metric data.

25. Set-up Groups/List to Focus on Content from specific users.

26. Meet People in New Markets – When I travel I use Twitter as a tool to meet users/influencers in new markets using tools like WeFollow.com

27. Pay attention - Listening is critical respond to your @replies and mentions build reputation as being attentive and responsive.

28. Become a Case Study - Melinda Emerson (@smallbizlady) – She developed a strategy 20-months prior to being on Twitter. The end result is that she has used Twitter to develop a platform for people to connect with her on her book ‘Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months’. She realized that 60% of people who buy books buy it from someone they have had contact with.

29. Become Geo Loc Enabled – Geo location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are great at events like SXSW it helps you to connect with people that you want to network with.

30. Crowdsourcing – Your network is a diverse, geographically disperse community and is a prime target to crowdsource ideas to get quality recommendations and leads.

31. Mobilize – The use of smartphone third party apps allow you to be responsive and connect in real-time on opportunities you don’t the time to get in front of a desktop computer for.

32. Online/Offline – Focus on turning your online Twitter friends into offline interaction.

33. Don’t Argue – Don’t try to prove to someone you are smarter than them by arguing back and forth in a stream of tweets to prove your mental superiority. This will not add value to your brand. (This was birthed out of a tweet exchange between @claudinerenee and myself about Butler University. She responded to one of my tweets in which she had more information than me so we continued our conversation offline. I wanted to understand her position without filling my Twitter stream with our discussion. I walked away more informed.)

34. Online Reputation Management – Use Google alerts, Keyword searches and third party apps to manage and monitor your Twitter reputation.

35. Account Managers – Be careful who manages your account. Giving a third party access to your account could cause your account to be suspended, lose your account name or to destroy our reputation by tweeting something that is beyond repair.

36. Tom Peters & Seth Godin Rule - It is not about the numbers. As of 06/30/10 together Seth and Tom have 17,303 followers (Seth Godin-5 & Tom Peters-17,298) but they have more influence, a higher quality of life and they make more than most people with over 100,000 followers.

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MBA Chat: Personal Branding v Career Branding - 06/24/10 8-9pm EST #mbachat

The Michigan Tech – Tech MBA Online #mbachat has been moved to Thursday’s from 8pm-9pm EST.

The MBA Chat (#mbachat) is a 1-hour discussion on Twitter where anyone can participate in our open source conversation. The Twitter Chat on Thursday, May June 24th 8:00pm-9:00pm EST will include Ryan Rancatore (@RyanRancatore) and Hajj E. Flemings (@HajjFlemings) who will answer questions.

Topic: Personal Branding vs. Career Branding

Noted web strategist Jeremiah Owyang recently posted this article debating the merits of “personal branding” and “career branding”. Understandably, Owyang is a proponent of building a career brand, as he has utilized this method for more than a decade. Let’s explore the differences between personal branding and career branding, and determine which path is right for you.

Show Bios

Ryan Rancatore – www.PersonalBranding101.com

Ryan is the advertising creative coordinator for a Fortune 500 financial services firm on the West Coast. His experience building the brand of a globally respected firm helps provide a unique perspective on the world of personal branding. Read more from Ryan at Personal Branding 101 .

Ryan’s role as advertising coordinator for a major financial services firm allows me the opportunity to work on both media plans and ad production – the science and the art of advertising, respectively.

His real passion is in the creative development of ads. I’ve helped develop television spots, print and online creative, social media strategy, and more.

Hajj E. Flemings – www.BrandCampU.com

Hajj is the founder of Brand Camp University and author of “The Brand YU Life: Re-thinking Who You Are Through Personal Brand Management.” He has been featured on ESPN.com, BusinessWeek.com, BlackEnterprise.com and travels nationally speaking as a branding expert enabling personal and business brands to remain relevant. His branded clients include Walt Disney, NFL athletes, Ford Motor Company, Skechers Footwear, U.S. Department of Defense (Telecom Division) and numerous colleges and universities to name a few. His book was selected as one of Fast Company Magazine 2008 Readers Choice Business Books of the year.

How to Follow and Participate:

To participate you can use http://search.twitter.com or http://tweetgrid.com/. Watch for tweets with the hashtag #mbachat and follow the conversation on the @TechMBAOnline Twitter account.

This chat is sponsored by Michigan Tech MBA Online program: www.mbaonline.mtu.edu.

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#mbachat 06/07/10 7:30pm EST Topic: “How do I Become a Subject Matter Expert?”

The #mbachat is a 1-hour discussion on Twitter where anyone can participate in our open source conversation. This Twitter Chat is on Monday, June 7th 7:30pm-8:30pm EST with host Hajj E. Flemings and the topic is “How do I Become a Subject Matter Expert?”

How to Follow and Participate:

To participate you can use http://search.twitter.com or http://tweetgrid.com/. Watch for tweets with the hashtag #mbachat and follow the conversation on the @TechMBAOnline Twitter account.

This chat is sponsored by Michigan Tech MBA Online program: www.mbaonline.mtu.edu.

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i Finish: The app that defines Personal Branding

One of the biggest challenges in life is not starting but finishing. Anybody can start something but to the finisher goes all the spoils. What if Fred Smith founder of FedEx stopped with his term paper at Yale, when his professor told him overnight shipping would never work? Fred is a finisher and the impact of his start is still being felt today.

History chronicles those that finish. We rarely talk about the runner-up, second place, or the 500-page book manuscript that you wrote but never published. Personal branding is captured in one word is finishing. One of the people that I have a great deal of respect for is Seth Godin who has talked about this topic at length and has packaged it as shipping.

Reasons Why we Like Starting Stuff

  • Big Bodacious Teams: At the start of a project, leaders and teams are galvanized and inspired to change the world.
  • The Shiny Objective Syndrome: People love working and focusing on new task, projects, and the flavor of the day. Even entrepreneurs believe that they can do the impossible.
  • Excitement – Launching an idea is typically very energizing.
  • Drinking Bathwater – People who would drink your bath water because they think you are the greatest thing since sliced bread gassing your head up.

What is the value of finishing?

  • Building Mindshare: Mindshare is owning a slice of mental real estate in the mind of your target audience. Building a strong personal brand is established over time by finishing projects that are consistent with your personal brand objectives.
  • Creating a culture of execution: You begin to approach projects, ideas, and businesses with the mindset of starting things that you are intentionally planning on finishing. Your life becomes a series of completed projects or ideas that slowly build or speak your consistency. People began to identify you as a person that executes.
  • Conversion: Finishing is about converting objectives into strategies. To complete anything that is significant you have to create small victories on the road of completion. Finishing forces you to strategically approach your work in a way that will result in measurable objectives you complete.

Tips for Finishing

  • Set measurable goals and objectives.
  • Validate the objectives align with your personal mission and purpose. The end result should add value to your personal brand.
  • Shorten your list: You are not creating a list to sound or look important.

What Finishing Means to your Personal Brand

Finishing is not about being a rocket scientist or throwing junk together but about establishing clear objectives and aligning strategies to make those objectives a reality. Personal Branding taken a step further is about completing projects that are mission and purpose driven and align with your passion, the way you are wired and your personal brand DNA. The end results is attaching your name and your legacy to finished projects, ideas, or products that aligns, builds, and strengthens your personal brand.

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