One of the lessons that I received over the weekend, had to do with keeping your faith young. In most cases when we reach maturity in things we do, we are at our best. However being young in something doesn’t always have to be a direct correlation with immaturity.

I recently came a across a slide show that I put together for a really good friend’s wedding. On the soundtrack is a great song, called Forever Young, by Rod Stewart. Although the lyrics seem to be targeted towards a relationship with a son or daughter, I felt the song generally inspires us to stay young.

I strongly feel this is how we should approach our personal brand. Staying young in heart and mind allows you to stay invigorated, passionate, and most important – teachable. As we mature in life, some of the ways to maintain youth is to continue to learn different things that allow you to sharpen your skills and your knowledge base. Here are a few more things to consider:

Pay Attention to Accidental Inspiration
Although I think it is necessary to be purposeful in everything we do,inspiration and creativity many times is accidental. For instance a combination of experiences allowed for me to be inspired to write this post as explained above.  I think it is always good to keep the juices flowing by mixing up the monotony and allowing yourself to be inspired by your experiences. Allowing yourself to be open to different genres and creating new relationships are good ways to mix things up. Just like a fruit smoothie, if you don’t mix it up you will find that all the good stuff is at the bottom.

Be Prepared for a Pivot
Good entrepreneurs are always ready for a potential pivot. Sometimes you start a business or initiative going in a specific direction. However things in the market could change or your customer evolves and you find that you have to take your idea in a different direction. To be prepared for a pivot you have your hand on the pulse of the market and be prepared to make a pivot in another profitable direction. Changing directions sometimes requires energy; it helps to stay young in the mind and be able to learn new things. This can apply to career’s and passion projects as well.

Maintain Momentum
Sometimes it is natural for us to get comfortable and on auto-pilot with our day-to-day responsibilities. Keeping our batteries charged through rest and recuperation, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and constantly staying in practice allows us to keep up with the pace of our purpose in life.

These are things that can edify your day-to-day duties on-the-job or business, relationships with your spouse and kids, and in our friendships. Stay Invigorated and Forever Young.

Do you want to be influential or are you comfortable with being mediocre? As a personal brand, there is no prerequisite saying that you have to be influential over millions of people. However while maintaining a personal brand online, you are secretly charged with being a curator of content or solutions for the people who follow you. This is the value that you offer to your audience, regardless to if you have 1 million followers or 300.

As a curator, you share the best content or solutions online for your followers and advocates to consume. For years, news organizations, magazine editors, radio disc jockey’s, and fashion stylists have curated pop culture for us and when we sniffed, bit, and accepted what they offered, many brands have reaped major success in return. With social media giving some of that power back to us, we have individually been able to take on the role of civilian editors; sharing and publishing content links. Doing this successfully, can pay considerable dividends for your personal brand. We have 7-Tips, that we think will help you do this effectively to maintain a healthy brand and establish influence with your audience.

Passion
The internet oozes with passionate people. Everyone online usually stakes the house on what they believe in. Passion is necessary in order to get people to believe in you and the things you share. If you recommend content, products, or any type of solution online, you better show them with strong conviction why you think it was great. Otherwise they may perceive your offering as a waste of their time. Inject energy and passion into anything you publish and share.

Don’t Ride the Wave of Fads
Fads come and go like the wind. If you want to have a personal brand that is relevant, make sure your recommendations have substance that transcends fad status. There are also many things you recommend that naturally have short life cycles. So for instance if you recommend the iPhone 3GS and the new iPhone 4 comes out, that is a natural progression in that product. This doesn’t mean they are in fad status and as a curator you have to be able to decipher which is what. For example, Myspace wasn’t necessarily a fad, however the company failed to innovate, which helped it secure it’s approaching spot in oblivion.

Fan-boy-ism is Allowed
Fan-boys and fan-girls are mocked and ridiculed; many times rightful so. Heres the skinny, if you are crazy about a brand or a good piece of published works — sing its praises to the roof tops! However, be able to recognize any faults of a brand you recommend. Don’t be a blind lover, see the truth and the truth only.

Regurgitate Excerpts, But Only With Your Personality
One of the tenets of being a curator of content online is that if you are going to recommend or share existing published works, do so with respect. When you do this, it is good to link back to the source. Regurgitating someone else’s good work, gets your personal brand card revoked real quick. When referencing someone else’s work, point back to that content through linking and give your own personalized twist on why you thought it was a great piece of work.

Quality is King
Museum curators are heralded because of the great body of work they manage to source in their museum. This is no different for your personal brand. Share and present works to your followers that is tasty. It helps if the content or brand you are sharing is relevant and current to the times. Reality is that quality is in the eye of the beholder, but if you have a good handle on who your followers are, you will hit the mark most of the time. Which brings us to our next point…

Know Your Followers
When engaging your followers, its best to know the make up of the group. If you don’t have a connection with many people that are super tech savvy, it wouldn’t be wise to talk about computer motherboards or microprocessors. It’s not relevant to them and the information doesn’t add value to them.

Be Right.
If you say that something is good or encourage people to try a brand, your recommendation has to be right. Are you going to knock it out of the park all the time? Probably not. Will people the click links to every single article you send their way? Probably not. But the higher you’re batting average, the more people will be eager to listen to what you have to say.

Go out and curate, I am looking forward to being influenced by you.

Here are what I think are five compelling reasons why I think youth should establish their personal brand online:

1. Domain name
According to a Market Watch article, as of 2009 the Internet has surpassed a total of 193 Million domain names registered.  With that stat being said, it is very important for youth to dip into the pool of names left and register the domain that matches their personal name at least.  This way they don’t have to cobble together a URL, because nothing that resembles their name is available.  Using their name as a URL is important for branding on a resume or for SEO (search engine optimization), which we will get into later.

2. Content Creation
Teaching your kids while they are young on how to create content on the web could advance them light years.  The story from the proverbial book of “The Internet” is telling us that content consumption is moving from the TV to the Internet. Although the jury is out on whether content will completely move to the Internet, it appears that this is the trend. Knowing how to maneuver and establish themselves online could be the difference in whether your kids land career opportunities in the future. Obviously the content that a young person would create would ideally be targeted to their respective age group. The goal is not to teach them how create a huge audience, but to teach young people how to create relevant content to the audience they would want to focus on.  Whether their audience is their friends from school or as small as their family, the experience they would gain would be very beneficial.

3. Good SEO out the gate
Google has made SEO (search engine optimization) a very important term on the Internet. Having a presence online early would allow search engines like Google, who crawl the Internet to find everything that exists, to populate the content that your child creates in its search engine results.  Having an early start could be the difference between a young person with a common name like John Smith, having optimal search engine results online.  Although you would have to maintain fresh content for these results to remain, a good linking structure on the website or blog would allow for decent results over a long period of time.  To learn more about SEO, this article at searchengineland.com is a good start.

4. Seasoned Virtual Appearance
You may have aspirations for your child to become a million-dollar entrepreneur, however even if they become a worker-bee at a large organization, having tenure online can help.  With a track record of providing content online, when the young person becomes an adult, people can see a past history of their contribution to a subject matter.  Seeing an evolution in a young person can also show their potential, which is very important for employers.

5. Education Value
Creating a personal brand online through contributing content, allows a young person to prove that they can commit to something other than school.  It could expand on their experiences whether social or educational. Additionally, when kids go off to college knowing how to create content online, they will have the edge of being able to express themselves via the Internet and will also have had the opportunity to establish a social network that could be valuable to them later on.  Most importantly, they will have knowledge on how to use tools for content creation.  Tools such as WordPress and Blogger for blog platforms, as well as social media tools like Twitter and Facebook that help them connect with other people and content creators online.

The Internet can be a scary place to let kids run wild and until they are mature enough to handle the responsibility, they may need a personal shepherd.  If you are shepherding them along as they embark on this experience, you can curate their interaction and places they visit.

I feel whatever negatives exist for the personal branding of young people; the positives far outweigh any negatives that could pop up.  A professor that I learned a great deal from, the late Professor Dr. Dale Haywood (creator of The Economics of Private Enterprise in a 12-cell Matrix)  taught every student that they  should create a Self-Designed Supplemental Curriculum (SDSC) and reach beyond our educational requirements.  By encouraging young people to establish a presence online, it allows them to start training on how they want to present themselves to the world professionally, recreationally, or through creative contribution to the world. Personal Branding? For Kids? Yes.

Lawrence Riddick is a small business consultant and marketer at Clarity Consulting & Design and blogger at The Ideas That Stick.

You are a business because everyone you are connected to expects you to yield something, in some form or fashion. Whether it’s your spouse or family with love and relationship or your boss and coworkers with on the job production and results –we are all created to produce.

The same goes for a business, its no different. A business is built to yield profits, yes, but businesses are not around to just yield profits. Although that is a large part of the end result.

My reason for this post is driven by an article I read in the February 2010 issue of Fast Company. In this issue was a great cover story with Steve Nash, point guard, for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. The title of the article is, “Rules for Winning: How Creativity Can Beat Chaos in Basketball and Business.”

Great title, right? Its actually a good article. But here is my disagreement with Steve. He makes a point to say in the article, that these days “…professional athletes think of themselves as a brand, but thats not my way of thinking.”

Why? What’s wrong with thinking of yourself as a brand or a business? He brings in $13 Million a year from the Suns (not including endorsements and business ventures) and I am sure he employs people. That kind of sounds like a business to me. Isn’t he a brand? Would he establish these business ventures or opportunities if it had not been for his reputation (brand) on the court.

I am not going to beat Steve up in this post, he’s definitely entitled to look at things this way, but it made me look at a bigger picture on why he may feel this way. To some people being a personal brand and business is still a progressive way of thinking. Some may feel a brand represents ego or chest pounding, a “THIS IS WHO I AM” syndrome. I think its because with this media-crazed advertising world we live in, we have managed to de-humanize the concept of a brand. We tainted it with corporate scandal and sensationalized branding to the point the concept seems very plastic and unreal. Or the thought process of, “If you are a brand, you are trying get one over on me, or you selling me something I don’t want.” Well people this is not always true. Those realities are there and it is the very reason our large corporations who have failed to care for their customers in a very human way – are collapsing right before our eyes.

I like Steve’s approach to the game of basketball and I like his off court persona. He works hard and he is about his team receiving limelight, not just him. He goes out and play’s the game well, produces day in and day out, and in result excels in many of the categories respective to his position. Sounds like a good brand to me. What do you think?

Real Or Fake?, originally uploaded by Sam Knox.
During recessions, market prices can fall on anything with a dollar amount attached to it. I like to look at mostly everything in regard to value. How much value am I getting? I think when we go through these tough times; this concept should be applied heavily. Which has helped me raise this question to you – how do you value your personal brand?

There are many schools of thought on the value of money. When asked, “What is the value of a dollar?” some people would say the value of a dollar bill is 100 pennies or would be confused by the question. Technically the face value of a dollar is 100 pennies, but the true value of a dollar is what you can get with it or what goods can be exchanged for it. Establishing value is a comparative analysis against what the market says something is worth. When valuing a brand, how do you do the math? Is associating a dollar figure the only way to value a personal brand?

It would be difficult and morally questionable if someone put a dollar value on a human life, however, some would say that your employer places a monetary value on you every day. Your employer pays you a salary based on your skills sets and performance, but I believe your salary also represents much more. A good employer would base your salary on your brand, in which I think represents the true value of a person. Let me give you an example on what I mean. When Coca Cola purchased Glaceau (maker of Vitaminwater) in 2007, they paid $4.2 billion dollars for the company. However in 2006, according to reports , Glaceau had only grossed $350 million in revenue. Why would Coke pay so much more for Vitaminwater when they could only garner 8% of what Coke offered them in revenue? The answer, BRAND. Now I am sure there were other proprietary reasons why Coke valued Glaceau at that price, but their brand had a huge part of it. Coke bought into the current equity and potential of that brand. These are things that do not have an absolute value (or dollar value) but a perceived value. When you apply that example to your personal brand, know that the value or your brand is being placed on your potential and current brand equity mixed with perceived value. Your employer not only looks at your current performance and skills but also evaluates your potential input into the company.

So you want to know how to value your brand? I truly believe it boils down to this equation:

Current brand equity + Potential x perceived value = Brand Value

Here is what that equation means:

Current Brand Equity
What are your current skill sets? What are your current successes and accomplishments? What do you have in progress that is setting you up for the future? Do you have a good reputation now? Do you have solid connections and a good network of people that are loyal to your brand?

Potential
There is no absolute way to define potential, but there are some really good indicators.

What is your personal capacity? Have you completed levels of higher education? What are you doing to continually to learn and expand? This is a knowledge economy; you have to be constantly learning and expanding your horizons.

Do you have expertise in certain areas that could open up the doors to other things?

Do you have a track record of following through on potential success? (HUGE)

Perceived Value
This is where the rubber meets the road. How do people perceive you? Do they hold you in high regard? Reputation is a huge factor into your brand. Just think about how many times you have told someone about a product or service, good or bad. This same concept applies to your brand. Perceived value is in the eye of the beholder, however the challenge for us each day, is to control how we are perceived. This does not mean we should try to manipulate how we are perceived. Managing public perception is starting to show that it does not work anymore as we talked about with Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods’ brand prior to his recent woes, had a high value. However the perceived value in his brand by the public and sponsors declined at a rapid rate once his scandal evolved.

Very honorable mentions to this equation
Some other good indicators to stay on top of are the areas of integrity, attitude, and morality. People will evaluate your brand heavily based on these areas. Sometimes your brands worth or value could be based solely on those key areas. Always keep those top of mind.

So in closing, I wanted to present this perspective to get you to see a different side on how value could be placed on your brand. Businesses deal with dollar figures everyday when valuing brands, but we have to remember it’s the qualitative data that makes the numbers work. The market as a whole will dictate price, however we as individuals dictate the value. Most of the time those are synonymous, but not always.