To them, I point them here to my own blog and simply leave them with this notion; your blog will show up at any meeting, job interview, or other interaction before you step foot through the door.

This means that although you might be joining millions of blog posts every day. A certain subset of people will read it. Those who are your friends and family, and those strangers who find you via search. This is not something to be afraid of, but rather embraced.

One of the things that stands out to me the most during a pivotal second round interview I had at Union Square Ventures. I sat down with one of the partners Brad Burnham, and presented my resume. He told me to hang on to it and he just wanted to chat.

When I pressed him as to why, he responded with something I will never forget which went something like this; “You can work really hard on crafting a well written, organized, resume with bullet points of accomplishments – but you can’t fake 500 blog posts.”

I was struck by this because I had never thought of things this way before. He was more interested in how I viewed the world (and subsequently the companies in it) rather than my list of things I think went well. Furthermore, he had already done his own homework seeing my previous employment history on the web (on LinkedIn)

So to this day, I think of that meeting, and what someone will read before an encounter. This is not supposed to come across as self important – but rather at the time someone is searching for YOU in particular, craft something that helps understand your worldview. It will certainly provide a better context for your first conversation, and it might even help you get a job in the process as it did for me.

The other benefits of continued writing for me are numerous. I continue to get amazing comments and emails from people from posts that are now years old. It started with myself and friend Lee Jones being afraid to post at all – and has resulted in the both of us growing with the medium.

So the next time someone asks me “why write a blog at all?” I am going to point them to this post, and hope they are convinced.

I use this phrase quite often in my office, as Andrew can vouch for, as I am a newcomer to the venture capital world – but this is not quite the context I mean for this phrase.

I have seen people stumble through a bad answer or try to piece together a coherent thought when the clear answer to a question should be “I don’t know”.

Others have extrapolated on this thinking before, and I am certainly not the first to claim it is a smart thing to say, but word hasn’t spread fast enough.

Sometimes the best questions have no right answer and are a test of how you will answer them. To say you “dont know” something makes people feel weak and helpless, but I believe the opposite is true. I believe it is harder to say “I dont know” as it takes a tough person to admit that.

Once you have stated you don’t clearly know something, you can go down hypothetical paths, show competency in strategic thinking, and thought leadership in your area. This can be much more telling than a concrete answer with only one outcome.

Disclaimer: this is clearly not a good approach to every question and can only be sparingly used as if it happens too often, that is equally as telling.

This post does not come out of a specific meeting or person but rather my experiences in meetings over the last 5 years, and directly brainstormed over the past few weeks.

Guest post from Ben Johnson of LogoInn, custom logo design.

Personal branding is gaining popularity as it is opening doors to everyone who wants to benefit out of it in one way or the other. Recession is knocking everywhere and there are a lot of layoffs in many companies including the big ones as well. No one feels protected and there is no job security for anyone. Under such circumstances, I don’t need to wonder why people are putting their efforts in creating personal profiles online.

Personal branding has become very essential, you need to differentiate your brand in terms of your expertise/ knowledge, and social media provide that platform and power to reach out to people online and create a powerful and long lasting personal brand. Why it has become so important is because of the fact that you can portray your talents and goals to people who are pertinent to catering your purpose of personal branding.

There are countless ways you can create, communicate and maintain your personal brand. Doing so would help you out if you are in process of job switch, or if you are a recruiter of any company. Here are some golden ways to start off with:

Create a Blog

Blogging is a good way of creating your brand online. There are numerous blogging platforms where you can sign up. You can quick start by:

• Buying a domain name
• Creating a theme
• Compiling content
• Constructing your ‘About Us’ page

Make sure your blog domain is easy to remember and your theme should be according to what you are going to put up on your blog. For instance, if your interests and expertise are in the field of logo designing, your theme should be creative and has to have colors and designs incorporated in it. Moreover, assemble content relevant to your theme. Your content should be original, bold and should offer something unique in order to increase your readers. It is the most essential thing that has to be kept in mind while blogging, you can only stand out through your content. Be sure, whatever you write has to be authentic. And yes, don’t forget to include ‘Comment’ section and ‘RSS’ to your blog. Create an ‘About Us’ page in which you can give a brief description of yourself, your interests, your hobbies etc. Make sure your blog is well-defined for the search engines.

Once you’ve started blogging, you need increase the number of readers on your blog. You can successfully do so by updating your content regularly with quality and relevant content. Your knowledge and awareness in the area of your interest would be the gauging factor of how successful you are as a brand.
Enhance your online presence

Your job is not done here. Your efforts would be wasted even if you’re successful in creating a wonderful blog for yourself, unless you register your blog with the available blogs and web directories, claim with Technorati.com, and use Google Reader to store your searches. You need to increase your online presence. Hence, it is a good practice to get your blog easily indexed in different search engines. Check regularly who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Also, building connections with the experts by commenting on other blogs within your area of expertise would certainly be of great help.

Do successful branding on social networking websites

Besides blogging you can sign up to various social networking websites. The most popular ones are:
• Twitter.com which connects you to other social media practitioners
• Facebook which connects you to other social media practitioners
• MySpace which could be used for outpost and to stay in touch with friends; find new ones
• LinkedIn for professional networking which helps in exploring business opportunities and getting advices from experts no matter where you are
• Flickr for photo sharing
• YouTube for video sharing
• Digg for voting on articles, pictures, audio, video etc.
• StumbleUpon for voting on articles, pictures, audio, video etc.
• Upcoming.org for events updates
• Gmail for docs, readers and more.

Creating accounts on all these would certainly give you instant recognition on social media. On top of it, creating groups on social networking platforms would give you an easy mechanism for communicating with lots of people in one go.

Networking should be aggressive

Once you are on all the networking platforms, start interacting with relevant people. People who have similar interests and expertise. Gain knowledge from them and share yours. Allow them to reach you easily and make your availability most of the time. Interacting with them would make your network feel that you are active online and this would help you increase your brand’s credibility. Plus, your healthy participation would expand your networks.

I have shared my knowledge regarding how to create your personal brand through social media. Share in the comments section, if you have more to add to it.

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When you have been working for any amount of time your previous experiences all contribute in some way to your current situation. Whether you have been working for 1 year or 10+ years, the foundation of your decision making, persona, and abilities are lifted by a lifetime of experience. I call this the lifetime lift.

An example most recently was hearing about a killer sales guy that was able to broker deals between parties yielding his consulting company serious revenue in a month. Without relationships, pitch meetings, deck building sessions, determination, personality, experience etc… NONE of this would be possible.

The lifetime lift can be explained by taking a look at what happens when you attack a problem. Previous experiences contribute to how to hold, shape, play, and ultimately solve that particular problem. Even experiences dating back to childhood have in some way influenced your behavior in that moment or scenario.

One of the ways I benefit from the lifetime lift is in my ability to explain and teach people. I spent a large part of my time in high school developing a consulting company which was basically a PC fixing and tutoring service. I helped my friends for free and ended up charging parents and their businesses an hourly rate – but that is another story. Now when I attack a situation, go into a sales meeting, or connect the dots in a business development situation, I benefit from the patience and understanding of people that came directly from that consulting experience.

One of my favorite examples of what I call the Lifetime Lift is from Guy Kawasaki in a presentation explaining the building and launch of Truemors.com

Just a simple slide with a number…

Followed by a lifetime of lift to explain how a marketing budget could possibly be $0.00

Full presentation which is worth your time.

I think everything you work on gives you some foundation for the future.

Deciding between jobs and what steps to take next can be a daunting task, but looking further down the road can provide some relief that your first or second step will ultimately lead to something greater and step 3 will benefit from what you did before.

Sometimes it is hard to see how something you are doing or working on today can help you in 1 month or 1 year, but thinking about things at a longer timeline can have a positive impact. It can help you plot out what you want to ultimately do and map out the stepping stones to get there.

I have been lucky in my career so far in having good mentors to bounce ideas off of, creating platforms to ask questions on (like this blog), and learning from doing. Each of my experiences has created a framework and outline for going after what is next and it is lifted by my lifetime (albeit short!) of experiences.

In it they describe 6 ways you can get new customers (as an ad agency) which really speak volumes about any organization whether you are an ad agency or a simply trying to sell a product.

1. Network Innovatively
2. Show your social media savvy
3. Adopt a recognizable platform
4. Be willing to contort
5. Write a book
6. Offer a direct line to the CEO

I do not agree with the definition of each by AdAge but the general gist it simple communicate. I provided my thoughts on each of these 6 below and how they may translate out to a larger group beyond simply ad agencies.

Networking is key, but doing it properly can mean the difference between being labeled a thought leader and a sales guy. I agree with what John Coleman does, and participate personally in these types of small innovative thinking sessions that are sparked by a single topic. This provides a non-invasive way of getting to know people without much pretense.

Showing your savvy and accepting one platform There are many ways to do this – but I think adopting multiple platforms is a great way to learn and understand a market. If your goal is to get clients, make sales, close business – than understanding what is out there and having an agnostic approach will serve you better than sticking to one platform. Showing your savvy will happen as your expertise develops across multiple platforms and you are able to make agile jumps to new things that come out. Nothing is worse than being pitched on a platform simply because there is no knowledge of other options.

Be able to contourt – this screams COMMUNICATION to me. As the world changes, so should your ability to adapt to customer needs. The cited example is building up an agency around a large brand (Dell). IMHO this should happen EVERY time there is a new brand brought in and account team formed. On a more realistic scaling front, this can be done in the form of listening to the needs of the potential customer and making sure you can meet them. (For those naysayers that state you cannot fit everyone into your business and stay strong against customizing all jobs – take this advice with a grain of salt as I know it will not work for everyone.)

Write a book Everyone jumps at the ambitiousness of this statement. It should read Write an E-Book its simple to do (.DOC to .PDF) low cost (Time) and free to publish (Ill let you publish it here if you want on Marketing.fm)

The work involved will be worth the effort even if nobody reads it (which will not be the case) as you will learn valuable lessons about your ideas and how they really look once they are structured in a publishable format.

Offer a direct line to the CEO Once again the genesis of this idea is communication. You should have open channels and folks that want to be concise, clear, and honest. Hopefully CEO contact will happen as a result of wanting to praise the work vs. move up the chain to be mad at a company. The overall point is that you should empower your employees to solve problems so that speaking to the CEO will be a nice bonus, but not a requirement for solving an issue.

If any agency, or individual wants to pursue one or more of these topics and needs a platform to do so (read: guest blog) feel free to reach out.

As the social media scene unfolds there is now more opportunity than ever to join a variety of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, WordPress and so on. The problem now more than anything is having the ability to manage all of those accounts and still remain effective at networking. Having the ability to reach your customer, clients, friends and followers wherever they are is critical to building connections.

The folks over at Ping.fm designed a site where you have the ability to update your status on dozens of different social networking sites. I use Gmail for just about everything and Ping.fm allows you to add its updater to your Google Chat list. So anytime I want to update my status, I click on the chat and type is my update. A second later I get a response that my status have been updated. If I were to log in to all the different accounts I have and manually update my status it would probably take 10-15 minutes (given I don’t get sidetracked being on those sites).

This begs the question, “What good is it if you update your status but don’t get the replies or see others’ updates?”

Glad you asked. The second part to this social networking management is having the ability to subscribe to most sites like Twitter and Facebook via your RSS reader. With one chat box you can update the status on all your social networking sites, and in one RSS reader you can see all your followers’ or friends’ status changes as well.

All of this automation might seem like it defeats the purpose of joining those sites to begin with, but in the end you are saving a lot of time while increasing your social networking capabilities. In my book I would rather be able to participate in 5 conversations well versus those same 5 conversations well but at a huge loss of time. Play around and see what other ideas you can come up with to increase your online footprint while managing to stay on top of all of them.

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I use this system so that I can get my own thoughts down about something but also to get comments back about my opinion from readers like you.

The system works because it allows me the filter of processing time as well as “popularity” of something to mature.

What is your system for writing or blogging?

In the latest Marketing.fm podcast, we had the pleasure of speaking with Penelope Trunk, columnist for the Boston Globe, Yahoo Finance and author of the new book

The Brazen Careerist: The New Rules For Success

.

Show Notes:

Introduction: Penelope’s Story

The Role of Penelope’s Blog: Conversation with readers, promotion, awareness, new ideas

The column is interactive, the blog is conversation, the book = the perfect extension

Networking: Eric and I met Penelope through her blog.

Penelope: “I meet the coolest people through commenting and interacting with the web.”

The ideal benefits of a blog = conversation and interaction

Self-Marketing 2.0:

Penelope’s blog = advice; a new way to think about the 21st career landscape

What advice would you give someone who is satisfied but not fully fulfilled in their job?

Steve Rubel – the blog evangelist – sit next to the CEO b/c the blog is so powerful

Blogs = “the great equalizer” and even playing field where good ideas and quality matters

Take the small steps to increase your presence and “searchability” online

People need to be aware of their online presence – WSJ Article

The newself-marketing: through blogs, social networking -> more short-term benefits
Networks and Skill sets are getting built faster and faster
Penelope’s book: The Brazen Careerist

Core: 45 tips on personal responsibility, commitment to personal development and consciously developing your peer group

Advice? BE NICE! A Smile will go a very long way.

Authenticity is winning

The Future? Values are changing : Discrepancies between young and old. Gender divide is eroding. People value time, happiness and people over money.

[tags] penelope trunk, self-marketing 2.0, the brazen careerist, marketing.fm, podcast, marketing podcasts, [/tags]

Linked-In and Career-Focused Social Networking

Linked-In is a career-focused social networking service that allows one to communicate, connect and reach out to colleagues, acquaintances, and old friends. On a personal level, Linked-In helps people stay in touch like never before. One might argue that Linked-In has revolutionized professional networking for both employers and prospective employees.

On a business level, Linked-In allows one to search for contacts at any company in the world. One can look for people to reach out to and connect with those who maintain similar interests. After an in-person networking event, it is also common to connect with others on Linked-In after exchanging business cards as well.

If you have an interview at a company, in many cases, you can find out crucial information on the person or company that you will be meeting with via Linked-In. For example, if you were interviewing for a job at Marketing.fm, you would be able to find out important information about Eric and myself from our profile. Perhaps we have a friend in common or at the very least, you may have a better understanding of your interviewer. Recruiters can use the service to find ideal candidates through advanced search features.

It is worth noting: while Linked-In is very much embraced by those in the interactive space, the network has spread well beyond the seemingly tech-savvy. It is has participants in all industries and professions.

If you don’t have a Linked-In profile yet, sign-up here: LinkedIn.com
View Lee Jones’s profile

Related Links:

Self-Marketing 2.0 Part 1: Job Search & Personal SEO

Self-Marketing 2.0 Part 2: Blogs

Marketing Podcast #8: Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed.com

[tags] linked-in, marketing.fm, social networking, networking, linked in, self-marketing 2.0 [/tags]

While some people have referred to blogs as “the new resume,” I would argue that blogs have become the new personal reference. For example, if a job candidate has a blog, you should check it out! At the very least, it will let you know very quickly how he or she thinks & writes. If the blog focuses on a certain topic, then you can also see how much the author really knows.

In terms of self-marketing, I would argue that blogs have become an essential tool for developing credibility. If there is an industry or topic that you feel passionately about, why not take some time to write about it? Document your thoughts and engage in conversation with other bloggers with the same interests. In many ways, the blogosphere is a very even playing field when it comes to discussion and opinion.

In the best case scenario, your blog will re-enforce the expertise that you claim on your resume. A blogger doesn’t have to be an A-List author. Rather, a personal blog will allow one to show that he or she has initiative, writing skills, and/or even expertise on a subject (in other words, you’re not full of crap!).

That said, if you are going to use a blog for self-marketing and networking purposes, it is wise to take the time to polish each post. Your articles or thoughts do not have to be too formal, however, if you want others to read your work, at least make it look good!

Related Links:

Self-Marketing 2.0 Part 1: Job Search & Personal SEO

Marketing Podcast #8: Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed.com

[tags] self-marketing 2.0, blogs, resume, advice, references, marketing.fm, marketing blogs [/tags]