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An important part of my brand

I was in LinkedIn updating some information and seeing what was going on with my network when I spotted this question “How can personal branding help entrepreneurs?” After reading through the responses, I decided to weigh in with my $0.02.

I have reproduced my response here, please feel free to weigh in in the comments here, or on the LinkedIn question itself:

I echo many of the sentiments expressed here. Having just launched my first entrepreneurial effort I have seen, first hand, some of these benefits.

However, I believe that anyone who interacts with an industry or business community already has a personal brand. There may be a question as to how you have maintained it and if you have groomed it.

Having a name and a brand has already been immensely helpful to my efforts. Not only has it provided exposure, but it has helped to grow my network and provide more credibility to my work.

So I would say that if you call yourself an entrepreneur, then you *already* have a brand, just maybe not a good one or the one you want. Get out there and introduce yourself to the world.

With respect to business brand. I firmly believe that it is something you need to think about out of the gate. You don’t need to invest serious time and/or money in it. However, you need to think about how you will be perceived by the market.

Understanding your target market can greatly influence the brand you attempt to build with your early efforts. It can take quite a bit of work to dig yourself out of perceived position if it’s not where you want to be.

Again, I can’t stress how helpful my personal network of business contacts has already been in working on ArgyleSocial. That network was created and maintained as part of my personal brand. It’s one of the best investments I’ve made over the past few years.

So what do you think? Where does brand fit into start ups and entrepreneurial efforts?

peter_shankman_at_tima
Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.

I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.

You can’t make something viral, but you can make something good but it helps if you enable it


Talking about Where The Hell Is Matt (showed the video)- You forward this because you want to, not because he asked you to. You’re gonna go home and find it and send it to all of your friends. You’ll be 4 months late, and a bit of a loser, but that’s cool. I love this guy – he’s hilarious

In ‘96 people though the internet was AOL, people would say “I use AOL to DL pics of Pamela Anderson, how could you do something for business with that.

In order for something to become viral 10-15 years ago it had to be really good. You couldn’t just copy and paste it, you had to work to spread it on. this goes back to what I said, it’s about enabling
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Kipp Bodnar (@kbodnar32) over at DigitalCapitalism.com, links to a very inspiring and frank talk from Gary Vaynerchuck in a recent blog post. Let’s watch it here, it’s worth the 15 minutes…

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4[/video]

Kipp calls out what I also feel is the most important part of that talk: Be Yourself. Well Kipp actually goes a bit beyond that, his point is that if you are yourself and are not hyper-concerned with pleasing everyone then you will piss a few people off – and that’s good.

I’m not sure you have to piss people off, but I agree that you have to be willing to allow that to happen. Part of being yourself is being passionate about something. Being passionate lends to having very strong opinions and being able to stand up to others with differing strong opinions. And that’s where you provide value.

So where are you providing value? Who are you arguing with?