Personal Brand Ideas

Mirror mirror on the wall...

User generated media, blogs and discussion forums have changed the flow of information about your company forever. A new emphasis on reputation management, even for the tiniest of companies, is essential. The following list of covers a lot of the websites you can use to manage your personal brand.

Manage Your Identity

claimID.com - Works along with openID to verify your identity on multiple websites.

FindMeOn.com - Link all of your networks together and verify your identity so people know it’s your profile.

FreeYourID.com - Uses .name address to sign you up for sites.

Garlik.com - Searches the web looking for mentions of you that might involve identity theft.

MyOpenID.com - Use one username to verify your log in on sites that use OpenID - great for sites where you might otherwise have multiple log ins.

Spyshakers.com - Identity Management System that allows users to access their websites and passwords remotley.

TypeKey.com - Another provider of the OpenID standard.

WordPress.com - Sign up for a free account and use as OpenID

Manage Your Reputation

Naymz.com - Sign-up and invite your invite people to write reviews about you and your work.

Rapleaf.com - Look up your reputation, rate others, and they will be invited to rate you in return.

RepVine - Reference and reputation management combined.

ReputationDefender.com - A service that attempts to help you get things being said online about you removed

TrustPl.us - An online reputation service that ranks based on trust scores.

List of message board tracking services: BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, MSN Money

Places to find groups to track: Yahoo Groups, AOL Groups, MSN Groups, Google Groups.

Monitor This allows you to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines.

Keotag.com A service that allow you to search for tagged blog posts across multiple blog search engines.

Manage Your Online Profiles

Comwat.com - Put your online identities in one place to make it easier to show and find profiles

onXiam.com - This site lets you link all your online identities into one account making it easier for people to find you across the Internet.

OtherEgo.com - Another way to display you online profiles.

ProfileBuilder.com - Very function heavy profile builder that shows off the parts of your profiles you select.

ProfileMat.com - Pull all you profiles together and allow commenting on your profile mat page.

SimplifID.com - One ID for all your online profiles

SocialURL.com - Simple URL to show all your profiles

Venyo.org - Lets you add all of your online activities, including blogs and comments to one page.

Zoolit.com - A landing page to show all your social networks

Fun Friday Video

Kick back and enjoy the weekend..

Better e-mail techniques

Dear special friend, please give me all your money...

Click for larger image

Here s a great collection of links to great e-mail advice and information. If you use e-mail (I do no 2 people who do not have an e-mail account) this information is critical to your success as a business owner. Don't forget to e-mail me with your apionion.

E-mail for begineers: Email is cheaper and faster than a letter, less intrusive than a phone call, less hassle than a FAX. Using email, differences in location and time zone are less of an obstacle to communication. There is also evidence that email leads to a more egalitarian information structure.

E-mail for "not" beginners: If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with.

E-mail advanced techniques by Guy Kawasaki: Most of the time I am, but I have strong feelings about email etiquette and what it takes to get your email read--and answered. As someone who gets dozens of emails every day and sends a handful of emails every day to get strangers to do things (“digital evangelism”), I offer these insights to help you become a more effective emailer.

E-mail to Clients: I don’t think he even read my email. This type of response could just have easily come immediately from an email auto-responder. But it didn’t. It came from a third-party customer service provider after several days of waiting.

E-mail to clients #2: Being on the receiving end for thousands of support and customer service requests I’ve learned a thing or two about how you should go about putting a customer support request together.

Transactions and e-mails: Email is one of a website's most powerful tools for strengthening customer service and increasing user confidence and trust in both the site and the company.

I hope you have found this information helpfull and that you take up some of this information to make yourselves better communicators.

Why Social Marketing is a Must

The fact mam just the facts...

77 percent of the US fastest-growing companies use social media

Looks like the social media is coming to the US business world sooner than many had originally anticipated and it is the valuable sign for the European entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations.

The “masternewmedia.org” reports about the staggering results of a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US. The use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking grew in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007 – 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

In early 2007 the results of a groundbreaking study into the adoption of social media within the Inc. 500, an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States, were released.

Now, approximately one year later, that same group was studied again in an effort to look at longitudinal change in the adoption of these digital communication tools.

Coming from the conventional marketing world myself and looking back to my first impression of social media, I can appreciate the retailing and B2B marketing establishment’s legitimate skepticism.

My top ten reasons to take social marketing seriously:

1. Social marketing is a logical extension of the multichannel marketing strategy of diversification. Social media sites can extend a company’s web presence far beyond the limits of its e-commerce, lead generation or information sites.

2. Social media builds awareness of products and brands by attraction rather than interruption, and by pulling rather than pushing. Consumers enjoy the discovery process and don’t feel annoyed by it.

3. Social media employs a community and list building paradigm that’s much more comprehensive, natural and intimate than conventional databases and autoresponders.

4. Social media marketers engage customers in dialog. They talk with the customer rather than at the customer as is generally the case with conventional media. Social media can also facilitate post-sale support and dissemination of valuable product tips to customers.

5. Social media used properly can build frequency less expensively than conventional media educating and informing the consumer over time.

6. Social media can help reach target markets that are too difficult or expensive to reach using conventional means.

7. Reach doesn’t determine cost, so social media can target a narrow vertical market while at the same time casting a wide net. Efficiency doesn’t really matter much in the context of social media reach.

8. Search engines like social media, and social marketing leverages free high-quality search exposure which is preferable to paying for low-quality pay-per-click or banner advertising.

9. Social media sites and your e commerce websites are available 24/7 more or less indefinitely. It’s much like having an ad run in every issue of a publication or like having a catalog or sales letter retained until the customer is ready to make a buying decision.

10. Using social networking sites it is often possible to connect directly with B2B decision makers without interference from protective gatekeepers.

Socail Marketing as a Tool

These things are on my mind

Researching your ever changing market niches is now much more realistic for the small to medium size business compared to a decade ago. Managing a limited strategic selection of social websites will enable you to interact with key or targeted knowledge communities and enable you to discover what the new trends are and who needs them. These days it's not how much money it will cost to implement these strategies but how much time can you afford to invest in them to get returns that will help your business flourish in a recession.

However if strategic marketing is the new paradigm for great marketing it all hinges on the new service provided by the internet. The trick is how to get it to work for you and get it working fast. Social marketing through social support sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter are all great tools.

However you will still need to participate in actual networking events held in your businesses community. Finding relevant events is easy using a service like Meet-up or your local Chamber of Commerce. The new social thinking in sales in not to "always be closing" but to be on the lookout for like minded people and businesses who you can "work with" so you both can benefit.

Bob Garlick has been in the marketing and advertising industry for 30 years. He has worked with small medium and large businesses all over the world. Since returning to Canada 5 years ago he has focused on Social Marketing since it is the new mega-trend in marketing.