Your Brand - Person or Product?

Do you see yourself as a brand or product? Interestingly, some people brand themselves and others see their brand as product, service or new idea. Recently I saw a Twitter post which read, "Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me," I did a double take. What's your reaction? "Few welcome Me 2.0, as in Ego 2.0," Valeria Maltoni contends. "I'd think about it more in terms of Us 2.0," she adds.

Dan Schawbel summarizes it in, Guest Post: Me 2.0

The same rules that apply to corporate brands apply to personal brands. The successful brand YOU marketing model has the proper mix of confidence, passion, likeability, determination, and focus. When you look at successful business leaders, such as Warren Buffet or Rupert Murdoch, you realize that each has a self-purpose, a call to action, and a desire to win. They all shared this marketing model, and you should too.

While others have focused on branding in general, Dan's target audience is the millenials generation, but I think it's chock full of goodies all of us can learn from.

If you read Dan's story about how he got his book deal, you'll see the perseverance and unwavering belief in himself and his work that lead to his book, which was officially released yesterday.

Choosing to brand ourselves, product or service in the marketplace links to our intrapersonal intelligence. Here's how...

Intrapersonal intelligence stems from our genes and from exposure to many environments over a lifetime. Individuals who have high intrapersonal intelligence have

an effective working model of ourselves, and to be able to use such information to regulate our lives.

an accurate self-understanding, and can use this to their advantage in problem-solving

high introspective and self-reflective capabilities, highly self-aware and capable of understanding their own emotions, goals and motivations

an ability to use their own experience to guide others such as novelists, counselors, psychologists

Ellen Weber, who built her work on brain based research and Multiple Intelligences shows practical ways to gain more savvy in this area...

Want more intrapersonal intelligence? Need intuition for better decisions, common sense for keen insights, contentment in your own company, simple ability to laugh more on a busy day? Thanks to neurogenesis, we now know this intelligence too will grow with use. Simply put, whenever you do tasks related to introspection or personal intelligence, your brain begins to rewire brainpower for a more clever you.

Put your unique smarts to work in your personal branding. Looking at ways people create brands helps us evaluate what works best, whether it be our own name or service or product or something entirely unique. Here are some examples of

Personal Brands:

Angela Maiers
David Airey
Jackie Cameron
Seth Godin
Charlie Fern
Troy Worman

Service or Product:

Conversation Agent
The Marketing Spot
Making Mediation Your Day Job
Branding and Marketing
Logic + Emotion
Marketing Profs

Combination of Name and Service or Product:

Drew's Marketing Minute
Eide Neurolearning Blog
Laura 4 Literacy
My Name Is Kate
Fryer's Blog in the Mountains
Meryl's Notes

As you make color, logo and branding choices you bring in more of your personal style stemming from your intrapersonal intelligence!

Like it or not, "the reality is, many of us may not have the option of staying in a company, unbranded, according to Alina Tugend in "Putting Yourself Out There on a Shelf to Buy" in New York Times. "We have to create our own job security, and branding is part of that." Ms. Tugend offers seven savvy tips as you think more about how to go about establishing a brand...

1. Start small so you won't be overwhelmed. Choose either LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, the sites most often recommended by branding and job search specialists.

These sites can help in other ways. Twitter alone offers jobshouts.com (job openings are tweeted to users.

2. Join a few sites that are oriented toward your field, but don't go crazy and throw your profile up on dozens of sites.

3. "Finding your niche is the key," said Dan Schawbel, author of Me:2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

He espouses a four-step process -- discover, create, communicate, maintain.

4. "It's about building a community," said Veronica Fielding, president of Digital Brand Expressions. "You want to find groups -- alumni, former employees of your last jobs, trade groups."

Start branding yourself as someone insightful in that particular area, Ms. Fielding said, so "When people are thinking about filling a job, they think of you."

5. "Develop Brand Me by thinking about three things I am good at, three things I am passionate about (eating ice cream doesn't count) and three things other people think I'm good at," Sherri Beck Paprocki, co-author of the forthcoming book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Branding Yourself (May, 2009).

6. Blogs and personal Web sites. "They're certainly another way to promote Brand You. But don't create them with no purpose in mind or with no intention of keeping them updated. A boring blog or an unprofessional Web site is worse than none at all, Ms. Paprocki said.

7. Branding should continue in the offline world too, she said. It's also known as presenting yourself well.

Lots of tips to chew over and if you see gaps in your personal branding, you now have opportunity to see how to polish Brand Me more.

I'm going to find out even more by picking up a copy of Dan Schawbel's Me.2.0. You?