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fake, but in fact, personal branding is just a way to make sure you are telling people what is great about you. The key is to keep it real and truthful, so that your personal branding reflects who you really are and what value you can provide to others.

Personal branding doesn’t only have to be about branding for public speakers or celebrities. For example when I teach my MBA students at Florida International University, I teach them that there is no escaping managing their personal brand online and setting expectations in the workplace is crucial.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the focus of this article and he is a great example of someone that leveraged who he truly is into a powerful personal brand. He is rough and outspoken and a little crazy, but rather than try to push a fake personal brand, he has used his personal brand to turn the world of wine selling upside down.

What is your personal brand and what personal stories will help your portray your personal brand. Start with what you do and what you are best at and then get into asking other people what they see as your personal brand. This is a crucial step, because more often than not our personal image of ourselves is not what people see when they think of us, so it is imperative that you get the truth from others. It can be a difficult and painful step, but if you want to succeed at promoting yourself, then you must understand how people interpret and see you.

Tied into personal branding is understanding who you want to be and soul searching to determine if what you are is what you ultimately want to be. Imagine yourself now as you want to be and believe in that vision and that it is already clearly now and change will be a much easier process.

I have a marketing and personal branding client here in Miami that I am coaching, that presents himself as a dumb ole boy from Alabama, but he is brilliant in business. He uses self-deprecating terms about how he thinks he is on a personal level to make people feel more comfortable with him. What he means by that though is that he isn’t afraid to admit what he doesn’t know and that is one of the key successes to personal branding. Being able to be honest with yourself and your prospects about what you know and don’t know will save you a lot of hassles later. Too many people spend too much time trying to brand themselves into a corner, that they don’t really shine and then they have to spend all of their time trying to recover when people understand who they are.

What is your personal brand? Who are you?

Think about a few key stories that define who you are today. Write them down. These can be simple things that you remember from your childhood or entertaining stories from your adult life.  For example, one of the questions people often ask me is how I manage to do so many different things TV, writing, speaking, parenting. I could reply that Im just gifted with an unusual amount of energy, but the truth is that working is something I started very early on in my life.

via Mastering The Uncomfortable Art Of Personal Branding | Fast Company.

Related articles

• Personal Branding Your Way Through A Career Pivot By Rebecca Rapple on the Personal Branding Blog (leavingthepublicsector.net)
• Should Companies Embrace Personal Branding? (brandmc2.com)
• Personal Branding: When To Call In The Pros (personalbrandingblog.com)
• The Urgent Necessity for Personal Branding (foodstaycation.com)
• Return of the personal branding (pbadvisor.org)

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This BNET article couldn’t be more timely for my own life and my opinions on empowering employees, flexibility to retain customers and general arrogance from management oh and not to mention general greed and scams when it comes to business models and I lump mobile, satellite, and cable providers all together in the scammers categories for consumer rackets.

In my own case though, my experience is with DirecTV, but the BNET piece is very similar as it relates to Delta Airlines blaming the workers bad manners for creating a crappy airline with crappy policies, crappy services, and a crappy attitude that is rotting the entire fish from the head down. Do you really expect employees to have a friendly customer focus when your corporate policy is to screw your customers and your workers every cchance you get?

It is a typical response of big corporations when they get bad marks for customer service: blame the front line and the people who have the most public contact. But what about an examination of the age-old argument that in the end, the fish stinks from the head?

What management should change

If Delta doesn’t change its checked bag policies, and its change-fee policies, and its ticket penalty policies, no amount of pleases and thank yous will make much of a difference.

Charm has nothing to do with on-time performance or baggage handling. There’s nothing remotely polite about getting a bag onto a plane — and then off of one.

Back to my experience with DirecTV. I gave them 4 different opportunities to save me as a client, but none of their people were empowered to save my business. I pay a nice premium every month to them and I also have been paying a $6 per month warranty on the boxes I already paid upfront for at $199 plus I then have to lease their boxes. This is a nice scam that I will deal with in a later post. In our bedroom we have a standard definition(SD) DVR, but we recently upgraded that television to HD. When the SD box started to have hard drive problems, I decided it would be smart to have them use my warranty coverage and swap it out for an HD DVR. Well, there is the rub… not only doesn’t the warranty cover it, so I would have to pay out $199 for the box, plus continue to pay the lease fee, they also require that I renew my account with them for an additional 24 months to replace their crappy equipment. They are trained to equate it to cell phones, but the difference is I believe the cell phone may cost AT&T $200 or more, but I don’t have any believe that these cheap boxes cost DirecTV more than $50. Its all a big scam. Anyway, not a single one of the 4 reps I spoke to and made clear they were going to lose me over this was empowered to just give me the box. So, I started looking around a lo and behold I found out that Dish Network has a better Sling loaded DVR that lets me watch live tv and recorded shows on my iPad. I also get all of the premium movie channels for $20 less per month than the standard package I had with DirecTV.

Bottom line is you better empower your customer service people to retain customers, because in 2011, I am armed with too much information to stay a customer if I find out you are trying to rip me off. Service is marketing and you better be able to deliver on it.

Update: Now I have received multiple calls from DirecTV offering to give me the box I want and save me money. They cal trying to belittle Dish Network. The hilarious thing is they are still not empowered to override the renewal process nor can they beat the monthly price I get from Dish Network nor the technology of the DVR. Dish Network did my install within 15 hours of my call and I suspect it was because I was switching from DirectTv. They know that DirecTV will call and call trying to prevent the cancellation. Too late and too little as far as I am concerned.

via Delta To Workers: You Need Charm School | BNET.

Warrillow | Weekly News

In this day and age, everyone who owns a company has a website, right? Surprisingly, less than half of small business owners have an independent website representing their business, according to a recent Warrillow study. Amidst all the discussion and appeal of social networks and iPhones, it’s easy to miss the fact that most business owners have not yet established a basic presence on the internet.

Hiring a 5th employee appears to be the tipping point for a small business owner creating a website; website ownership for businesses with 5-99 employees approaches 70%. Small businesses with one to four employees are evenly split on the factor, while only one-third of sole proprietors have a website for their business.