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Re-Brand Yourself. Stay Relevant.

I came across an old work ID that inspired this blog post. I looked at the picture and thought how much I had changed over the past 14-years since the picture was taken. I interned with New Balance Athletic Shoe in Lawrence, MA, which is just outside of Boston. I enjoyed my days at New Balance I was the first out of state intern they had in their intern program. I owe a lot to Edith Harmon-Wiess who was the person that took a chance on me. She still works at New Balance as the VP of Advanced Products. Enough reminiscing. It is time to learn something.

Re-Brand yourself. Every brand has a life cycle and goes through the following phases: development, introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Over time every brand hits a plateau where the brand matures and faces the reality of decline. This forces every brand to make some hard decisions to re-think strategies, channels of communication and their end game. If a corporate brands need to create a personality and take online human characteristics to be relevant to the connected customer, then how much more do we as human brands have to evolve? (For example: Corporate brands go through re-branding phases like Dunkin’ Donuts did in 2006.)

Have you Changed?

As a personal brand you continue to change: your worldview, the online channels you use to communicate, your career goals change, your work style (the way your dress) and the way you look. Anyone who is growing is changing. Over time we are developing, learning, and growing into the person we want to be and working in the career that we have a passion for.

• How do people experience you? Is it different today than it was 3-5 years ago? When I started online about 4-years ago I connected with people via MySpace. Over time that has evolved and people experience my brand through different channels.
• Online Presence – Your online content should be updated frequently. For example your Linkedin profile should evolve as your career goals, work experience, and the content you curate changes.
• WorkStyle – Does your dress style reflect your brand? I have moved from being a company man to an entrepreneur and my work style reflects that. As you evolve as a person your style should reflect the stage you are at in life.
• Visuals – Your profile Photos should be updated every 3+ years at the latest. Think about how much you have changed over the past 3-5 years.

If you are doing the same things you did five years ago you are probably not relevant. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Food for Thought: We are constantly in a re-tweaking phase.

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How You Spend Your Time in 2010: 22% in Social Networks

As the year is coming to an end it is a great time to review goals, financials and the value of our time. Which leads me to one of the most important questions how did you spend your time online in 2010.

A large portion of our lives are shared online: So between messaging, commenting, sending emails, blogging and conducting online searches, etc., as a society we spent approximately 25% of our lives online (this translates into 5.5 hours a day.) What did this mean to your personal brand? Did the time you spent online help to grow business, your career opportunities, or help you position that side project that you were working on. In the area of personal branding one of the key components is the value of your minute. According to Nielsen report in 2010 here is how we spent our time online.

The Breakdown

  • 5.5 Hours Online per day
  • 22.7% Spent on Social Networks (Facebook #1 destination)
  • 10.3% Online Games
  • 8.3% Email
  • 3.9% Videos
  • 3.9% Online Search

As we embark on a new year how will you plan your time management goals for 2011? Remember success is a planned activity it doesn’t happen by default. There is less than a week left in the 2010 and many people have packed it up for the year? Well the year isn’t over yet. It is the perfect time to prepare for 2011. Below are a few ways to start preparing for 2011

  • Brand Insights – An experiential personal and corporate branding workshop for 15-people in FD Lofts in Detroit Eastern Market – 01/20/11 with Hajj Flemings (Founder of Brand Camp) and Matthew Kruchko (Managing Director of Applied Storytelling). http://bit.ly/brandinsights
  • Mind Mapping – iThoughtsHD is a mindmapping iPad app that will import and export mindmaps to and from many of the most popular desktop mindmap applications such as Freemind, XMind, Novamind, MindManager, MindView, iMindmap and PDFs.
  • Goal Setting – Establish measurable goals for 2011.
  • Finalize Pending Projects – Many of us have projects that have been started and not completed.
  • Side Project - Start working on a New Project to launch the beginning of next year.
  • Re-Evaluate Resources – To increase your productivity in 2011 look to add a virtual secretary or outsource some functions to be more productive.

What did your time translate into in 2010? How does it affect your bottom line?

Let me know what you are doing to plan for 2011!!

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Social Media: The Relationship Economy


We all live in a global village in a community that is not bound by geography but trust, where Social Media and social sharing is redefining relationships. Our network consist of a mix of friends that we know in real life and E-quaintances that we have connected with online. It is a common occurrence to strike up a conversion with someone at an event and say aren’t we Facebook friends.

Connected World

In this connected world the line is blurring between the digital and real, professional and personal, public and private. We now spend more time in social networks then we do on email, according to Nielsen it consumes 22.7% of our online activity. This equates to approximately 5 hours per day, which means it is impacting our relationships and decisions. The digital landscape is changing the way we consume our news, build relationships, purchase products, and how we engage in conversations, ‘In the Real World.’

Today we can talk to brands directly online (20% of the tweets mention specific brand names.) When we go to restaurants we can check-in online with location based social networks like Foursquare. We can share with our network where we are eating and our dining experience in real-time.

Building Trust

Let me be clear nothing in the world will ever beat face-to-face interaction. Social Networks however have become a very powerful tool in building trust in an attention-based economy. One of the most valuable currencies that we have is trust and those that are digitally savvy can leverage the power of social networks to build genuine relationships in the real world.

The ability to view a person’s status updates in their social network, their tweets and their online activity tells a lot about their behavior and who they are as a person. Engaging in conversations in social networks has the ability to increase the speed of transactions in developing relationships, doing a business deal, or getting to know someone.

In the final analysis in the digital world that we live in it is not about the Technology. As you look to navigate life on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and in other social networks remember the basics. You are having a conversation, you are connecting with people. How would you talk to someone face to face? Would you walk up to someone for the first time and say hey follow me and by the way would you by this product?

Tips to Remember

1. Talk to people online like you would if you were face to face.

2. Be Authentic

3. Relationships are fragile so treat them with care.

4. Remember that everybody has ulterior motives just make sure your building relationships that are mutually beneficial.

5. Relationships are not measured in quantity but quality.

Remember with every tweet, status update, comment, blog post and face-to face interaction you are either building or tearing down relationships.

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The SparkNotes of Personal Branding

Building your brand is a continuous process that will last you your entire lifetime and there are countless ways that you can build and communicate your personal brand both online and in-person.

However, to get you started, I have put together what I’d like to consider a SparkNotes guide for establishing your brand and credibility in today’s career marketplace in 3 easy steps:

1. Get active and get visible online and offline:

If no one meets you or sees you, it won’t matter how strong your personal brand is. Therefore, it is critical that you get both your name and yourself in front of your target audience. Here are some ways to increase your visibility:

o Create a LinkedIn profile and follow the suggested steps to complete your profile 100%, making sure you include your personal brand and pitch in your subtitle and summary sections

o Create a Google account and profile for improved search engine optimization

o Include your personal brand on your resume, cover letter, business cards, email signature, voicemail message and across your other social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook

o Consider creating a personal website or blog site where you can store all of your professional information, including experience, education, skills, honors, entrepreneurial efforts and more

o Join associations or networking groups within your industry, both online and offline, and try attending their events to meet new contacts and build your target network. Be sure to share your personal brand with those new contacts you meet

o Conduct informational interviews with contacts in your target industry or companies (whether or not you’re seeking a job) and share your personal brand with them in your introductions

2. Offer consistent value:

Make sure that everything you contribute is valuable to those with whom you share it and also relevant to and supportive of your personal brand. Consistency is key, for the more consistent all of your own marketing efforts are both online and offline, the more powerful and memorable your personal brand impression will be on all current and prospective stakeholders in your career. Here are some ways you can start contributing value on a daily or weekly basis:

o Tweets

o Comments on other blog posts

o Blog articles or articles for print publications

o Discussions in LinkedIn Groups or in other forums

o Advice via LinkedIn Answers and other forums

o Book or product reviews

3. Develop thought leadership:

As you grow the quantity, quality and uniqueness of your contributions, you may be increasingly considered as an industry thought leader. Here are some ways to support and even expedite your rise to thought leadership:

o Start your own blog with a unique POV on your industry/area of interest

o Found a company with relevant and valuable products/services/resources for the industry

o Publish and offer print and/or electronic publications

o Get quoted in the media by joining HARO (HelpaReporter.com) and contributing advice, experiences and insights to writers and journalists seeking expert sources

o Find ways to bring fellow industry thought leaders together on a project or at an event

o Find ways to contribute to the projects or events of fellow industry experts

o Get recommended on LinkedIn and any other networks where you or your offerings are available and/or collect and display testimonials from customers, clients and partners

Chris Perry, MBA is a Gen Y brand and marketing “generator,” a career search and personal branding expert and the founder of Career Rocketeer and Launchpad.

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Negative Campaign Ads and Their Impact on Personal Branding

What can we learn from negative campaign ads? We can clearly see the mentality of our society. A society that lacks accountability, that blames others for things gone wrong versus one of introspection that is hardwired with a moral compass. As the campaign season has come and gone (November 2nd) this fall I wanted to reflect on the impact of negative campaign ads and personal branding.

The Influence

The influence of negative campaign ads reaches beyond politics and the campaigns that a particular candidate is running. Let’s break it down. A candidate that develops a negative campaign ad is basically telling you he/she is incapable of winning the political race with a safe margin without running the ads and there is data to support that. Any candidate that can win a political race without negative ads will run clean campaign ads, period.

Good to Great (Level 5 Leaders) - They take responsibility when something goes wrong and deflects the praise to their employees when things go right.

The Pink Elephant in the Room

It is easy to find fault with someone else and to point out their inefficiencies. It is much harder to focus internally on what value you bring to the table, communicate your true expertise, and give clear examples of how you have solved problems that benefit people other than yourself.

I look at personal branding through a different len/worldview. Personal branding is more than who you are between 9am-5pm. At it’s core personal branding it is driven by your value system. There hs been no other point of time in history when a person has had more control over their career than today with the invention of the internet and the real-time web.

As a personal brand it is time to lose the negative ad campaign mentality. Your career or life in reality are a reflection of your choices and decisions. Your career path is not the responsibility of your supervisor to mentor you, nor is their annual review of your job performance the reason for your annual salary. It isn’t HR responsibilities to put you on the career fast track. If you don’t like your reality you can change it by doing something about it by running your own clean campaign ads. Let potential employers know why they should vote for (hire you), market your value and track record of being a proven leader. Quite living an undervalued life!

Note: The video that I have included has absolutely nothing to do with negative campaign ads I prodcued it two years ago and I thought you would enjoy it.

I am your personal brand strategist Hajj Flemings and I approve this message.

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