Remoteness

Many people have asked me recently how to build your personal brand and get positive visibility when you work remotely and no one can see you!

Change

Organizations are changing so much and so frequently that many people have never met their boss or their peers. Many companies right now have zero-travel policy for internal travel.

So many people find themselves trying to build their credibility and their career without every getting face time with their stakeholders.

If you are a remote employee trying to exert your influence on the business, you can feel invisible, isolated, and powerless. And no one can see how truly impressive you are in your slippers.

The big issue for you Presence

Any leader needs to make their presence felt –  in the room or from afar.

If you want to build credibility and influence you need to build up your personal presence.  It’s harder as a remote employee, but not impossible. And it’s even more important.

Face time first

OK, so there is no substitute for face time.

Every time I have had a remote assignment or managed a remote employee I required a 2-4 week break-in period where the person begins the assignment in the office with the team.

If you “live” with people for awhile first, you’ll do MUCH better later.

You will build up some social comfort with each other, and then remote is not nearly as distant.  I would not accept a remote assignment if this was not how it began.

With travel budgets frozen it’s not always possible to spend time with the people you work with.

Consider footing the bill for your air travel yourself.

Find someone to stay with. Tell your manager that you are going to be in town for personal reasons (at no expense to the company) and that you’d like to work at the main office for a couple of weeks while you are there.

This is a very worthwhile investment you can make in your career. After you get the face time, you will be more effective and respected forever after.

If you can’t establish the face time, the additional ideas below are even more important.

Don’t Hide on Conference Calls

Don’t dial in 5 minutes late, do your email and not speak.  Instead dial in 5 minutes early.  Greet everyone who joins.

I knew a guy who worked remotely who took a picture of himself every day, and when ever he was on a conference call with the group at headquarters, he would email the picture of himself with a note that said something like, “thought you would want to see what shirt I was wearing today”.

It may sound silly, but he was exerting his presence. He was well known and respected.

Exert your presence in words too. Tell them about the weather where you are at and what you have been working on.  Learn about their life. Then don’t check out during the call.

Participate, interrupt, contribute. Make your presence felt.

Make people feel like you are “in it”.

Use Video

I have to say that I am blown away by Skype video.  I have clients around the world who I have never met, but after a few hours of conversation with and skype video I feel like they are colleagues and new friends that I know personally.

Unfortunately many corporate firewalls do not allow Skype. 

If I were a remote employee, I would encourage all of my key colleagues and stakeholders to take a Skype call with me from home once in awhile (convenient in their time zone), so we could connect “in person”.  It makes a huge difference.

Video Mail

If you can’t arrange skype, try sending a video mail once in awhile. It’s easy and it’s free. Google “free video email” to find options. Eyejot.com is one that I have used and works well. A 30-second video can exert way more presence than a bunch of email.

Lead things

Step forward when things need to get done.  Take the lead.  Put yourself in the center of a project even though you are not there.

Of course it needs to be something you can succeed at remotely, but don’t fail to ever take the lead just because you are remote.

If you want to be relevant — be relevant!

Network More

As a remote employee you miss the company lunches and the discussions around the coffee machine.  But you don’t need to miss connecting with people.  Identify people in the company you need to have a relationship with, and build a relationship with them.

You should spend at least an 2 hours a week (if not a bit more) just connecting and talking with people at your company.  Live connections = presence.

Get Personal

Reach out to people. Get to know them as people beyond the work discussions. Learn what they care about and enjoy. Contribute things of interest. Where you have key relationships with people, invite them to connect with you on Facebook.  Keep yourself current and present in their thinking. 

When you become a full person, you are far more visible than when you are just a work conversation.

Share your ideas and knowledge

Become a thought leader in your area of expertise.  Consider writing an internal blog.  Share interesting news that people at corporate don’t see. Seek out external information relevant to your business and be the one to share it.  Have a point of view.

Just because you are remote, doesn’t mean you need to be invisible.

Don’t wait for people to find you

Be the one to exert your presence, build relationships, share information, and engage. You can build a strong personal brand, even if you are not there.

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

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Personal Brand and Defense

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where your gifts and skills don’t line up with the type of skills that are valued in your environment.

You might get shut out or pushed down because of it. It is stressful and uncomfortable.

When this happens, there is a tendency to go on the defense — to prove that you belong there, and to try and show that you can be more like them.

But you’re not.

When you try to do this you put yourself on a back foot.

You are not at your best. You are caving into the pressure and expectations of the group, and trying to win them over by being something false, that you are not good at.

Use your brand to turn the situation around

When I talk about the value of building your personal brand, solving this problem is one of the big payoffs.

Having your personal brand defined lets you put your best foot forward with great confidence all of the time, especially when you are in a situation or environment where you are not comfortable.

If you are clear about your personal brand, you don’t need to be defensive when you don’t fit. You can use it to sell your strong points.

You’ll be more confident and more impressive.

Confidence and Advantage

Here are some examples of ways people have used their personal brand to go on the offence, build confidence, and get an advantage.

Example 1: “Boring old person” in an internet startup

I loved this feedback from a woman who heard me speak on personal brand, and put the idea into action.

She found herself bidding for work in an internet startup company full of hip 20-somethings. She was initially concerned that she would not fit with their culture — like she might be viewed as their mother! As a result, she was concerned she would be under-valued even though she believed she could help them.

Don’t even try to fit in.

But with her Personal Brand in focus, she decided not to even try and fit in, and not to worry about it. Instead she decided go in unapologetically with her personal brand which was about focus, achieving clarity, and translating ideas into revenue.

Staying on brand made it easy for her to engage this group. It removed the stress and the uncertainty. By focusing on her brand, she gave herself the opportunity to sell her strengths without hesitation. She was able to demonstrate truly authentic confidence.

Instead of being cautious and defensive and trying to earn their respect on their terms, she wowed them on her terms.

She got the job.

Example #2: Business Person in a Technology Organization

This was me at various points in my career – Although I have a technology background and an engineering degree, I am a business leadership expert, not a technology expert.

I know many people who have this particular problem in technology companies. The environment doesn’t respect you because you are “not technical enough”.

What I did, is to go back to my brand, and build my confidence from an authentic position of strength. Instead of defending my right to be there by trying to convince them that I was technical enough, I went on the offense.

“You don’t need another one of you”

I would say, “the last thing you need is another technical person. We have plenty of them around here, and I’ll never be as smart as you on technology.

What I contribute is an understanding of the people who use our products and what motivates them. I can translate all this technology into things that they not only care about, but want to spend their money on. I can help bring revenue in. You don’t need another technical person, you need one of me.” (Implied, respect me. I’m different, but I can do things you can’t.)

It put me on solid ground. It made me feel confident. I didn’t’ care if they thought I wasn’t technical enough, because I had real value to offer. It gave me strong executive presence, because I was using the part of my brand of being straightforward, business-focused, and making real and useful connections with people.

I did not need to be defensive. (or technical). I became respected.

Example #3. Program Manager in an Engineering Organization

Another non-technical person I work with used a similar approach in a highly technology focused engineering organization. She was being challenged on her lack of engineering pedigree. Did she really belong here? Many people thought not.

Pedigree doesn’t matter. Results Matter.

Instead of getting defensive she said, basically, “you’re quite correct I am not an engineer. That’s a good thing. I wouldn’t be as good at my job if I was an engineer. What I contribute is an ability to drive complex projects through to completion. The fact that I don’t get involved in every technical detail is actually an asset. I can keep the program focused on the finish line, and get it out on time and on budget. That’s what you need, not another engineer doing a deep dive on technical detail.”

Steady Confidence

When you have your personal brand defined you are more powerful and more impressive for two reasons.

1. You are leading with your strengths, so you’re good at what you are doing and it truly impresses others.

2. But even without that, by using this approach you give yourself the gift of confidence. You give yourself solid ground to stand on. You define the terms you are going to interact on, and it’s a place where you feel comfortable. You give yourself an advantage no matter what the situation. Your executive presence soars when you are confident.

Next time you feel like you don’t fit, and people are under-valuing you, don’t try to be like them. Lead with your brand. Lead with your strengths.

Being clear about who you really are, and what you are naturally good at and building that into your personal brand is a great way to increase your confidence and your value.

Building your Personal Brand

If you want some help building a strong Personal Brand based on your natural strengths, you can use my Personal Brand Building workbook.

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Why a Personal Brand is useful

1. It gives you more confidence and energy in your work.

2. You consistently position and sell yourself better

3. You get a professional advantage

BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND VALUE

In this month’s business leadership webinar we covered how to translate your personal brand into value that other recognize.

Listen or download the webinar to learn more.

Here are some of the things we covered in the webinar:

What’s the advantage?

More Confidence and Energy. Having a strong personal brand makes you feel more confident because you’ll use it to always put your best foot forward. You will feel less defensive, and more decisive in difficult situations.

Sell Yourself Better. We talked about how your Brand gives you the speaking points to be very clear about why people should value what you offer, and get that across quickly, clearly and consistently.

Professional Advantage. The most successful people have a knack for being able to talk their way into good situations. Because your brand gives you certainty about how to position yourself, you will be more persuasive and influential more of the time. That’s good for advancing, selling, and negotiating.

Your Current Brand

You Have Brand Today. You have a Personal Brand right now whether you know it or not. Do you know what it is? Do you know what are you known for? Is it want you want it to be?

Behaviors and Consistency. Aristotle once said: Excellence is a habit, not an act.
Your brand is granted to you by others based on the behaviors they experience from you most consistently. We talked about how to build your brand through behaviors.

Building Your Brand

Build on Your Strengths. The best way to build your brand is to start with your natural strengths. As humans we tend to undervalue our strengths. We discussed why that is, how to overcome this, and how to zero in on your natural strengths and build them in to your brand.

Be YOU. Your Personal Brand should be based on who you actually are, not a marketing-version of some other person you think you should be. It needs to be something you can live up to consistently. So if you define your brand with a big gap to reality, it will never actually be your brand because you won’t do it.

Find the Intersection. To translate your brand into what others will value, you need to get to know what is important to your audience, and tune how you speak about and behave your brand values to align with what they care about.

Define Your Playbook. A big part of putting your brand into action is to focus on your playbook. We all have one. Think about what you did the same in every job you ever had. We talked about examples of personal brand playbooks and how to create and use them.

Using Your Brand

Work in your power alley. Part of the reason that having a strong brand gives you more confidence and energy is because when you combine it with your playbook, you end up working in your power alley. You are doing great at what you are good at and it feels great.

Your Brand and Interviewing. Think about the power this brings to an interview. You can quickly establish your credibility. You build confidence in yourself and your prospect when you can articulate why you are good at what you are good at, and give compelling examples from your playbook of being at your best. No stumbling!

Your Brand and Your Company’s Brand

Does your brand ever change? Your core Brand values don’t change much, but the story at the intersection changes depending on your company or customers’ culture and what they value.

What if you don’t fit. If you feel like your brand does not mesh with the culture of your company this can be painful. In the discussion I gave some examples of how to use your Brand to put you on the high ground and go counter-culture in a productive way.

Want more?

Listen or download the podcast – Build Your Personal Brand Value
Download the complete webinar – Build Your Personal Brand Value
(includes the presentation and the worksheets from the webinar)

Join Now and Get 3 Months Free

Why not become a member of Azzarello Group and get all the good stuff for free.

A personalized program for you

Membership provides a personalized leadership development resource for you or your team. You can learn and use the resources at your own pace, on your own schedule.

Members get access to everything in the Member Library, and personal, live coaching from me in a monthly member-only conference call.

At only $179/year, it is an exceptionally good value, and the quality and usefulness of the content is unmatched.

If you join by June 30, you get 3 months free. Your membership won’t expire until Sep 30, 2011.

Learn more or Join Now

Contact me for group discount rates and corporate licenses.

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If you found this useful, you can subscribe to this blog for free and get updates in your email or RSS reader.

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RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.
Free eBook Download

Here is a useful checklist of the things that make the difference between careers that break through and careers that stall.

Feel Free to forward it to others!

DO Better

Are you working on the right things?

• Can you explain how your company makes money?
• Can you show specifically how your work is adding value to the business?
• What percentage of time do you work on key initiatives, vs. stay busy with tactical activity?  What should it be?
• Do you have the ability to stop doing things that have a lower payoff?

Are you working in the right way?

• Are you a work-horse? Does the work just keep getting piled on because you do it so well?
• How much time do you schedule for yourself to think?  How much should you?
• What things do you do things specifically to make more time and make room?
• What do you do to manage your energy?

Are your working at the right level?

• Do you delegate well?  Do you jump in and do work for your team?
• Do you ever “cover” for work your team does that is not good enough?
• What are the top 3 critical leadership tasks to be done at your level?
• How do you measure if you are creating value in the business or just delivering work?
• Do you find ways to reduce the cost of doing what you did last year?
• What are you learning about this year on top of your job description?
• What are the learning goals you have set for your team this year?
• Do you have the right team?  Do you need to upgrade your team?
• What do you do on purpose to build trust through your behaviors and communications?

LOOK Better

• How do you create positive visibility for the work you and your team do?
• Do you know who all of your stakeholders and influencers are?
• Who are the people who have a say in what happens to you (even if you don’t interact directly)?
• Do you know what you are known for?  Is it what you want?  Do you know why?
• Do you do things to build your credibility on purpose?
• How well do you know your boss’s boss? Your boss’s peers?
• How do you learn what is most relevant to your business stakeholders?
• Do you know how they would describe it?  What words would they use?
• Do you focus as much effort on how you sell your ideas as the ideas themselves?
• What is your process to regularly communicate with people outside your organization?

CONNECT Better

• Do you have mentors?
• What sort of mentors are most necessary to help you meet your goals?
• Are you a mentor?
• Do you regularly GIVE things to people in your network?
• Do you do networking naturally?
• How much time do you spend doing proactive networking? How much should it be?
• Do you have relationships with people who challenge and fuel your imagination?
• Do you regularly interact with people in other organizations an industries to get fresh perspectives?
• Do you tend seek out help when you need it?
• What is your strategy to grow your network?
• What kind of network is expected for the next job you want?
• How many people who don’t work for you, would do work for you if you asked?

Want some help with all this?

If you’d like to get some more insight and support for how you can attack this list to position yourself better, be more effective, and get a bigger payoff in your career, I offer a unique opportunity to a small group of people to spend a day with me.

We work on building your personal plan to grow your career, raise your game as a leader, create your Personal Brand, increase your influence, and grow your network.  It’s a small group, so it is personalized to you.

I can’t do many of these workshops any more, due to the rest of my business commitments, so I do only two public sessions per year now.   

I have only 6 seats left in my next session on October 22 in San Mateo.

If you come I guarantee you will get at least one life-changing idea, and dozens of practical things you can start doing tomorrow to get more of what you want out of your work.

I share, from my personal experience, and everything I learned from smart people along the way, what things will have the biggest impact on your success, and which things are a waste of time and will get you stuck.

It’s been wonderful to hear the stories about the big promotions, and the career and life changing events that people have been able to create for themselves as a result of this workshop.

If you are interested, don’t wait.  Sign up Now.

There are only 6 seats left and the next session will not be until April or May of next year.

If you can’t make it to San Mateo, you can also get this workshop on DVD.

Thanks,

This month our member webinar was on
the topic: Relevance & Personal Brand.

                           TOP 10 IDEAS
          ON RELEVANCE & PERSONAL BRAND

What you do

1. The reality is that you won’t be respected and appreciated automatically.  You need to increase your awareness and sensitivity to others, and tune your communications and behaviors to align with what people already care about, if you want them to care about you.

2. Relevance is about credibility plus value.  Relevance gets to “what have you done for me lately?”.  Credibility is necessary, but you have to show you are adding value to the business if you want to be relevant.  You don’t want to be one of those people who is always really busy, but no one knows what value you are adding.

3. Do a bigger job, find your place to add additional value over and above your job description.  Getting your work done well does not make you relevant.  That keeps you from getting fired. Think about how you can personally impact revenue, efficiency, quality, customer care, or people development.

How you communicate

4. If you need to explain what you are doing it is by definition not relevant.  Stop spending lots of energy explaining and educating, which is frustrating for you and them, and start mapping what you do to things that are already important to others.

5. Ask your stakeholders what they care about and look for two things, 1- their list of business drivers and  2 -the specific vocabulary they use to describe them.  This becomes your roadmap for how you communicate with them to be relevant – use their list and their words.

6. Be a translator – keep the jargon of your department within your department, use the business language to explain what your team does and show the value your team adds.  Presenting our internal success measures with your internal jargon is not relevant.

How you behave

7. Use your personal brand to help you act consistently in support of what you want to be known for.  Once you decide on what “extra value” you are going to add to the business, make sure you are supporting that with consistent behaviors.

8. Use your brand to negotiate work with your boss and your team.  The more you understand your brand, and what you are naturally good at, the more you can tune your job description to put yourself in a position to add the most value.

How you interact

9. People don’t wake up in the morning worried about you and what you are doing.  They are fighting their own “dragons”.  Their dragons define what is relevant to them.  You need to help them fight their dragons before they will have any energy to even think about yours.

10. Stepping outside your job description can be politically challenging if you want to add value in an area someone else owns.  Start with a long term desired outcome that is relevant to both of you, and then show how you can help by doing a part what is required to get to the agreed outcome alongside whatever the person is doing.

The Coaching Hour:  We had a great member conversation during the coaching hour that followed the webinar.  You can look for a transcript of that discussion later on the Azzarello Group website.

Download the Podcast of this webinar
Download the presentation & worksheets

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Related BLOG Posts:
Be More Relevant
Do a Bigger Job
Are you a Work-horse?

Many people are asking me how
to become more relevant — how
to stand out and be seen as more
central and critical to their business. 

If you want to increase your
relevance there are a few key
realities to consider:

 1. No one cares what you do. 
The sooner you accept that reality, the faster you can be more relevant.  Relevance is about being relevant to the things that others care about, not making others care about what you are doing.

2. Everybody is fighting dragons.  If you are finding that no one is embracing whatever it is you are talking about  (which is you fighting your dragons), step back and consider what dragons they are fighting. 

You need to either help them fight their dragons first, or show them why they can stop for a minute without getting killed. 

Say you are a program manager.  You go into a team to propose something strategic – a change of course that is much better for the business.  No one listens to you.  The reason is that they are already working hard to deliver commitments they are on the hook for (their own dragons).  They simply can’t care about your dragons while they are currently engaged in battle with theirs.

Your only choices are to either help them fight their dragons first , or make sure their boss calls off the current dragons. If you do neither, your strategic mission will not be relevant to them.

If you are the boss, and it’s your team that you need to change course, remember to explicitly show them that you have made the world safe from the old dragons so they can stop fighting them, and that they need to start fighting the new ones.  People do not naturally or easily give up their dragons, once they are in battle.

If you are selling your idea upwards, make sure you understand what dragons your management is fighting, and show how your proposal helps that particular fight.  You can’t be relevant unless they think it’s important. 

To make them think it’s important you are much better off to start with something they already think is important, than to try and educate them on something new.  To the next point…

3. Don’t try to educate people about your function – remember point #1. they don’t care.  Instead find out what is important to them and translate everything you say into THEIR vocabulary — not yours. 

For example:  If you are trying to educate a business unit about your brand campaign or data center investment, or vertical market program, remember they only really care about their business unit.

Trying to educate them to the value of what you are doing in your terms will waste time and annoy both of you.  Instead learn about their business and translate everything you say about what you do into their language and the specific benefits for them.  Your “data center investment” becomes “improve customer service for your specific products”.

4. Put the business in the center of your thinking and conversations.  If you always talk to the CEO only about your function, you will not be building credibility and relevance to the business.  If you are only ever advocating about your plans, your budget, your functional objectives, you are not being relevant to the business.  You are being relevant only to your function. 

Your conversations should be centered on business initiatives like quality improvement, customer loyalty, geographic expansion, channel optimization, etc.  If what you are really talking about is needing more computers, investing in a partnership, doing demand generation, etc.  keep those terms within your function and translate your language to the vocabulary of business initiatives when you communicate external to your function.

5. Be the voice from outside the company.  You must keep educating yourself, watching for examples of how others do things, and learning from customers.   Bringing the external voice of the real world back into your business sets you up as highly relevant.  But make sure there is a point to it.  It’s not just about sounding smart.  It’s about bringing high value, real world input into the business that causes positive action – so connect it with what the business cares about before you talk about it.

6. Deliver your work AND Do more.  Deliver excellent results — that is a must.  But don’t expect that alone to make you relevant.  Doing your job keeps you from getting fired.  What makes you stand out, and makes you highly relevant is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description.  Otherwise you are just one more person doing what is expected of them.  

I will be writing more on why you need to do a bigger job and how to do it in my next blog post. 

Also you can join this month’s member webinar/podcast on Relevance and Personal Brand

Now more than ever it is time to stand out build your value and increase your relevance.  There is no better way than to keep the business in the center of your thinking, stay focused on what other people care about, and help them with their dragons.

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I get a lot of questions about how to best use various online tools and social media for effective networking and managing your Personal Brand online.

If you find yourself “out there”, looking for a job, developing a partnership, selling a big deal, looking for funding, people will look for you online, and develop impressions and even make decisions based on what they find.

It’s important to understand and manage the impression your cumulative online behaviors leave.

It comes from both from your online presence and your email behaviors. 

There are two outcomes worth avoiding.  1) They find nothing  2) They find the wrong things.

As with everything else I talk about:

 Do whatever you do online, on purpose!

Here FIVE ideas to get a basic, positive online presence established, and add value vs. annoy people.   

Those of you who are already blogging, building communities, and have jumped in with both feet, please also share your comments and ideas.

ONE: “Can you endorse me?”  UGH!

LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to send an email message out to your entire network saying “Can you endorse me?” I can’t tell you how many of these I get. 

Remember the number one rule of networking: Give more than you take. 

Using this feature is a MEGA-TAKE. 

In one moment you ask every single person you are connected with to do something for you, without offering the slightest value (or even saying hello) in return.

Here are some better ways to do it.

Better: Send a personal email, with personal content, requesting a specific person to write a recommendation.  If you are asking them to take the time to write a recommendation you can at least take the time to ask them for it personally.  And say thank you when they do it.

Best: Write recommendations for other people.  On one of my monthly member calls, someone contributed the idea that he spent a day writing LinkedIn profiles for other people.  That is one of the most brilliant and useful ideas I have come across for networking by giving vs. taking.

You will find if you do this, people will write a recommendation for you in return.  Even if they don’t do it automatically, if you then ask them to write one for you, you have given them something of value before you ask.

TWO: How to approach mass emails

Every once in awhile you want to reach out to all your contacts to ask them for something — like when you need a job.

Again, sending one big “ask” out to your whole database is not good online behavior. 

You couldn’t do that on the phone, you’d have to call people and say hello first.  Just because you can use email, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reach out to people in a personal way.

Develop a strategy for sending mass emails that is driven by personalizing as much as possible, and focusing on what you can “give”.

Here is how I have done it:

I went through all of my contacts and divided them into 4 categories. 

I think these categories can work for anyone, but it’s worth thinking through what makes groups of people within your contact database distinct from one another. 

1. Professional contacts:  We’ve met, but do not know each other well
2. Personal-professional contacts -  people I worked with directly, we knew a bit about each other’s careers and lives
3. Close Professional Contacts.  People I have current relationships with or had significant relationships with in the past.
4. Close friends and family.

I then developed a strategy for each group.  I’ll use an example for a job search, but this approach can be used for any topic where you want to reach out to your whole database, and not be annoying.

Group #1: Strategy: Professional-Only Tone

Hi [person’s first name],

I wanted to let you know that I am out exploring, seeking new opportunities that match my skills. I’m looking to offer a company [what I specifically offer]. 

If you can think of any good matches, I would greatly appreciate a pointer or introduction.

I’m interested in learning how you are doing, and how I might be of service to you as well. 

Group #2  Personal/Professional tone

Hi [person’s first name],

Life has certainly been interesting since we last talked!  I’m on the hunt again, seeking new opportunities that match my skills and looking to offer a company [what I specifically offer]. 

If you can think of any good matches, I would greatly appreciate a pointer or introduction.

It’s been awhile since we connected.  If you get a chance it would be great to hear what you are up to, and what you are working on.  And please let me know if I there is anything I can do for you.

By the way: here is a link to some new music I discovered, [or great books I read, etc.] this past year, and a recent photo of me and my family, I thought you might enjoy.

Groups 3 and 4: Individual Personal Mail

For me this was about 150 people.   I wrote a personal email to each of them.

You can easily write 10 emails a day till you are done.  It’s well worth it.

Something very amusing happened with this group.  The email obviously included some elements that were for that person alone – How is life in your new role as a GM? How’s Jill? Still surfing? Remember the time we were at that weird restaurant  Pittsburgh?  – and some elements that were common to everyone. 

I got several responses that said, what system are you using?, I was really impressed at how you were able to merge personal information with common information.  I kept reviewing your message to find the “seams”.  It must be a really powerful system, would you mind telling me what you used?  I smiled as I replied about my great “system” to each of these… “Typing”.

THREE: Tune Your Basic, Minimum Online Presence

What Impression do your online profiles give people?

LinkedIn is one of the easiest and most frequently used places to find people.  Having a respectable profile on LinkedIn is a minimum.  But take some care in writing your profile.  Don’t just casually answer the questions or leave things blank. 

Come up with an interesting  “Professional Headline” (the text that appears right under your name).  Build a compelling description of yourself through how you describe your roles.  Make sure you are managing the impression you want to give people.

It’s also worth checking and updating ZoomInfo.  Recruiters look here to research people.  Search for yourself.  If you find nothing, put your information in there, and if you are there, you’ll need to correct and update whatever ZoomInfo has automatically guessed at.

Use a good photo. 

1. Use photos.  2. Make sure they are good ones.  If you don’t want to invest in a professional photo, at least use one that is current, in focus, and taken by someone other than you pointing the camera at yourself with a dopey look on your face, or a low quality awkward snap captured from a webcam.  

I’m amazed at how many attractive, impressive professionals have blurry, boring, unflattering photos for their online profiles.  It matters.  Your photo needs to be interesting, engaging, and high quality.

FOUR: Build your online presence over time

Online Resume

Look at sites like VisaulCV.  These sites let you post your resume, photos, videos, articles.  You can create an impressive online presence easily. 

Just think how far ahead of the game you will be if you are networking for a job and you can include a link in your emails to an online profile that shows you in a high-impact way: your skills, your ideas, your accomplishments, your references, your interests, and what you can offer.

I recommend starting this now, and adding to it over time.  Write articles.  Tell your best stories.  Have an opinion.  Post your references.  Over time you can build up a library of marketing tools for your career that will impress the people you point there, and gives google a lot more of you to find.

Blog?

If you have the appetite to write a blog, it’s easy to get started.  Check out WordPress.   A blog lets you self publish online.  It gives google a lot more content to associate with you.  It’s an effective way to build thought leadership and a more relevant online presence.  Put a link to your blog in your email signature, so people can find it.

Caution: But make sure you have a strategy first.  Make sure what you write in your blog is supporting your Personal Brand and adding value to your career.  It’ doens’t need to be all business, but you should be proud for any potential employer, partner, or customer to find and read your blog.

You.com?

And if you want your own website and url: www.YourFullName.com that is really easy and inexpensive to do.  Just go to GoDaddy.com.  It’s not a bad idea to own the domain for your name in any event. You can do it for $9.99/year.   If you do this you can integrate your blog into your own site so your blog address will be www.yourfullname.com/blog . This will give you an email with your own url address too.

FIVE: Build your contact database

It is important to build and maintain your contact database.  If you have let this go over the years, it’s pretty easy to start rebuilding it through tools like Linked in and Facebook.  And it gets better and better once you get started, so don’t wait.

I do three things: (I am not suggesting these are best practices, but they work for me.)

Plaxo:  Plaxo embeds itself into MS Outlook and helps keep contact information current.  If you and another person both use plaxo, when either of you updates your contact information, it will automatically update in the other person’s Outlook contacts. 

LinkedIn is very good for finding people. Once you sign up, you can start finding people and people will start finding you.  I used linked in for professional contacts.  I occasionally accept linkedin invitations for people I don’t know. 

Facebook:  More and more professional people are joining all the time.  Facebook gives you your own broadcast platform.  You post updates with ideas, thoughts, photos, links, videos.  The main screen for facebook gives you a news-feed of what all your friends are posting.   On Facebook, I don’t become “friends” with people I don’t know.  Facebook is not great for finding people, but it is very good for keeping up those all important weak connections with people you know.

It is a good idea every now and then to go to your own Facebook home page and assess: what is the overall impression I am leaving with my series of updates?

A note on twitter:  Twitter can be very useful and important if you use it in specific ways, but I would not say twitter is mandatory for having a relevant online presence.  (And it’s not useful for finding people.) There has been so much written about twitter, I won’t add to it.  If you’re interested in what I do with it, you can follow me on twitter. 

The bottom line – online
 
I talk a lot about building and managing your Personal Brand.  Your online presence is an increasingly important channel where your Personal Brand needs to be supported.  It’s about how you show up online and how you use email.

The bottom line is that it is no longer acceptable to be invisible online if you want to be relevant and stand out in the real world.   And it’s important to manage your online presence on purpose so it reflects the right image of the person you want to be known as.

Executive Job Search Workshop

I am hosting a workshop to help people go after and win their next executive job.   It will be in the Bay Area in May.    You can learn more about it and sign up early here.  If you’re interested don’t wait.   I am limiting attendance to 10 seats.

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Top Brand Myths:

• Brand is a Marketing job.
• Brand is about your “look” – your logo,
  your colors, etc.
• You build your Brand by advertising it
  (and spending lots of money)
• A good Brand = a logo you see all the time

Top Brand Truths:

• Behaviors communicate Brand.
• Consistent behaviors develop Brand Value.
• Brand Value builds Shareholder Value

An example:  Brand = Customer Care

If you want your company to be known for providing excellent customer service – having marketing do an advertising campaign with inspiring examples of great customer care will backfire if:

• You have bottomless voice menus instead of people answering phones
• You have sales reps or support staff that are not trained well enough to know how to serve customers
• You have support processes which are hard to navigate, or punish the customer
• You have a website that is slow, confusing, or does not easily accept feedback
• You do not respond to customer feedback
• You have annoying, complex, internally focused contract/licensing processes

Brand is not just a Marketing Job.

Another example: Brand = Innovation

If you want your company to be known for innovation, and you have marketing produce an exciting video that plays in your lobby, it will backfire if you:

• Make people sit in old, ugly, or generally beige furniture, to watch the video.
• Have an archaic process to greet and manage visitors to your company.
• Do not make room in your budget for new initiatives and ideas that may or may not pay off.
• Are not demonstrating new thinking in customer service, and communication processes.
• Are not using the latest technologies and social media to gather the best thoughts & feedback from the rest of the world.
• Do not have development programs in place to motivate your most talented and creative  employees.

Brand is not just a Marketing Job.

So what should you do?

CEO’s/Companies who want a strong Brand need to:

1. Make it a priority.  Realize it is the only thing your competition can’t eventually copy, and that it’s your most effective insurance for the execution of your strategy.

2. Explicitly connect your Brand and your strategy.  How you execute your strategy is as important and valuable as what you do.

3. Galvanize your team to stand for something – decide/define what the company really stands for.

4. Develop and commit to “brandable behaviors” to support it, for every function in the company, particularly those that touch the outside world in any way.

5. You need to involve employees across the company, and make sure you can sell it “inside” too – or you will never get the consistent behaviors necessary to build the Brand.

6. Incent and measure the whole organization to reinforce those behaviors, so they are consistent.

7. Remember it doesn’t need to cost a lot of money to build a strong Brand. (behaviors are free)

Don’t just delegate it to Marketing (and Marketing is not free!)

Marketing is just one voice in chorus across the whole company who needs to do its part to promote the Brand once it’s defined and committed.

But you can’t just market yourself into a strong brand, you need to behave it.

And you need to behave it consistently across the whole company.

• Behaviors communicate Brand.
• Consistent behaviors develop Brand value.
• Brand value builds Shareholder value

Did I mention that Brand is not just a Marketing job?

More:

Building Your Company’s Brand

Building Your Personal Brand

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