People buy People…NOT business plans!

We really enjoy reading posts and musings from people out there ‘doing it!’ – Sahill Merchant is one of those guys doing it! (take a look at his shiny new thing Mag Nation)

Sahil can also be found on Twitter, and is a contributor to Anthill Magazine with his musings on the Entrepreneurial Truth Blog..this is his recent article over at Anthill, which confirms for us even more that people buy people; forget about the numbers!

Raising Capital – who gives a damn about the numbers!

Most entrepreneurs I have met are naturally optimistic. I certainly am a glass-half-full type of guy. It’s sort of hard to risk everything to start a new venture if you focus on the likelihood of going broke. Yet we all know that most new ventures never make it…read more

(Sahil Merchant is founder of Mag Nation. Follow him on twitter:@sahilmerchant. His launch post can be found here)

Related articles by Zemanta

• 5 Milestones to Reach Before Raising Venture Capital (centernetworks.com)
• Startup Fundraising 101 (entrepreneur.venturebeat.com)

Tags:capital raising, Entrepreneur, Personal Brand, personal branding, Venture capital
Posted in Entrepreneurs | No Comments »

Worlds Highest Paid Sporting Personal Brands…

Forbes recently published the World’s Highest Paid Athletes for 2008.  And there were a few surprises for me in there…and some poignant lessons for personal brands!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fan voting selects Kobe jersey-tugging shot for NBA 2K10 box (destructoid.com)

Tags:David Beckham, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers, Michael Jordan, NBA Finals, personal branding, Tiger Woods
Posted in Executives | 1 Comment »

Who is Right?

Nassar v Telstra!

One man CAN make a difference!

For some time now, @fakestephenconroy has been one of our favourie contributors on Twitter.  We all knew he was fake – he told us!  But this did not stop former Tesltra employee Leslie Nassar entertaining us with such great 140 character gems as;

“Apparently LOL means ‘Laugh Out Loud’ and not ‘Lots Of Love’. Now I’m going to have to re-read all those internet comments about me.”

“about to board my flight to Melbourne .. nabbed seat 1B! a person in a wheelchair was going to get it .. lucky IM CONROY! Trump card played!”

“When I Googled for information on how to circumvent surrogacy laws in Victoria, I bookmarked the results so we could ban the sites later.”

“The filter is a community service; it’s not just about removing content, we can also repair content. We can make it truthier.”

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to compare the National Filter Network to a cure for Super-AIDS; both of them protect children.”

“Dear journalists; please do not continue to report on my enormous penis and ability to please the ladies. My personal life is off-limits.”

“Today I received an I-Phone. The IT people tell me that it is biometrically activated, but no matter how much I lick it, it won’t turn on.”

Sadly, Leslie was uncovered by Telstra, who have removed him from the organisation, and even asked him to remain tight lipped on the matter.

Well now, things have got a little awry for Telstra.  They appear to have tried to position themselves as social media savvvy, claiming that they had not asked Nassar to keep quiet or stop tweeting as @fakestephenconroy – Nassar, understandably is not impressed, and has called Telstra all sorts of names to defend his word!

There are many questions to be asked and points to be made here, but a few themes we would like to pick up on and discuss;

• Why did telstra ’sack’ him?
• Should employees be allowed to ‘tweet’ during working hours?
• Is a personal brand of value to a corporation?
• How could  have Telstra used Nassar for good (and possibly great!)

It would be great to sart some conversation on this..I don’t think we have heard the last of it!

Tags:Personal Brand, personal branding, Telstra, twitter, Victoria
Posted in Executives | 3 Comments »

Made redundant…now what?

Being made redundant is pretty popular right now…for corporations.

For those made redundant, this may be quite a difficult time frought with uncertainty and fear.

This may also be a great time for you to get a better understanding of your personal brand attributes, and strengthen your brand.  I am going to base my recommendations on some fundamentals of Human Needs crafted by Maslow, and since extended by guys like Anthony Robbins, and a great deal of other Personal Development legends!

In short – there are 6 ‘needs’ for human beings (starting from the basic CERTAINTY to the advanced GROWTH); let’s look at the first 3!

1.  Certainty - your job may well have provided certainty.  The certainty of income, and the certainty of relatioshipss and routine.  Well now this is gone.  So what to do?  The best advice here is to create certainty in OTHER parts of your life (these may not address the certainty of income immediately – but we will get to that!)

• Establish routine early – get a gym membership, 
• arrange to meet with friends every Wednesday morning at 7:30 for breakfast,
• Start a blog – or just write on a regular basis.  This helps with creatvity, organising your thoughts, and if you blog, it will introduce you to a whole new group of people!
• Take a moment to be grateful for the things you DO have, and recognise that unless yo do something REALLY bad, they will always be certain (like your family, friends, your health, your experience).

2.  Importance – Many of us love our work because it makes us feel important!  Really, this is a pretty fickle motivation; but for a large amount of the population, this is often ALL that keeps them at work.  So, if you have lost that perceived ‘importance’ brought by your job, then replace it by;  

• Design and print your own business cards.  Create a fun title that sparks conversation like CEO (Chief Enjoyment Officer) or CLO (Chief Leisure Officer). Give these to everyone you know
• Start a project to change something in your local community – like painting the bus shelters or collecting rubbish or cleaning the beach.  This will bring large levels of self satisfaction, and will make you feel more important than you ever have felt!
• Get a room – these days, for about A$30-40 a month you can get a ‘virtual office’ at a swanky address.  This will look good on your business card, and can come in handy for meetings,
• Reinvent your ‘look’ – you may not be needing those drab blue suits again for a while, so study some fashion mags (or get professional help form people like The Australian Image Company) and reinvent your style?
• Run for local council – this may seem brave (or stupid) but instead of complaining about local issues; do something to fix them!

3.  Choice – One of the comforts of ‘working for the man’ is that it gives you a regular income, and ultimately provides money; which gives you freedom (to a degree!), variety and choice! For the first time, you may now realise that being employed full time did NOT actually give you very much variety and choice at all! Now is the best time to get more variety into your life, so take up some new challenges!

• Join a new club; like the local RSL or the local LIONS,
• Book yourself into a dance class, or photography school,
• Take time to reconnect with some of your childhood passions – like making models, or collecting Star Wars characters!
• Sell some of your household clutter and used artefacts on eBay,
• Learn to swim or play tennis…

In general, there is so much you can be doing right now if you have recently been made redundant.  Recognise that we have not mentioned anything about looking for work or doing up your resume!  This is all good advice, but unless you take this time to recognise you have needs, and address some of these needs, you will be back in a job in no time that satisfies very few of you needs; except at best certainty…which is not a good place to get stuck!

Take note of each of these experiences as you try them; they will form an important part of your personal brand, and these experiences will ultimately make you more valuable!

Over the next few days, we will explore the final 3 needs in this hierarchy; CONNECTION, CONTRIBUTION and GROWTH.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 8 Rules to Live By That Will Help You Survive – Even Thrive – in 2009 (with Guest Blogger John DiJulius) (myventurepad.com)

Tags:career planning, Certainty, Health, personal branding, redundant, Tony Robbins
Posted in Executives | No Comments »

What I learnt from Ben Self…

Who is Ben Self you ask?

Ben Self was the Digital Strategist for Barack Obama in the US Presidential Campaign; and unless you have been living under a rock – this guy was at the centre of raising over US$300m online (Barack Obama raised over $700K in total, and 47% was raised online).  Ben’s thinking, strategies and team were at the centre of the single most successful online campaign in our history!  He is also a Partner at Blue State Digital in the US.

We were lucky to have Ben out here in Australia for the last week, and hear him share some insight from the Obama 08 Campaign.

I made it to Canberra to hear Ben speak about his experiences…and I got the following ‘nuggets’ from the presentation;

• Money, Message, Mobilisation – these are the 3 ‘end games’ for using the internet in a political campaign!
• The starting point for all activity online is ‘to get an email address’ – then you can develop a relationship with a reader/supporter and mobilise them to make a real difference!
• Grass roots match – we have all seen the campaigns where if you give $1 to a charity or cause, a celebrity or organisation will suposedly match this donation; ultimately doubling your contribution and fundraising effort.   This is supposed to make us feel great about our donation, however Ben (rightly so) suggested that we don’t really trust this.  And so they adopted a ‘grass roots match’ where any supporter who wanted to donate money was matched with someone ‘down the road’ or in the same community who had not donated, and they would then match the original donation made – this made the fundrasing effort very real, and connected like minded people who could then talk online and share their reasons for donating…SUPER initiative!
• Clever Adwords campaign – especially for the Fight the Smears website.  The beauty of this initiative is that the Google ads appearsall over the web; including in your Gmail Account inbox!  These ads are of course content sensitive, and so the ads you see in your gmail inbox will be related to the contents of your inbox.  So if you received an email from a Republican supporter laying claim to the latest (supposed) Obama slip up…fair chance an adwords ad would be on your gmail account pointing you to the ‘Fight the Smears’ website…VERY CLEVER!
• Using Google Maps to recruit offline support –  The other tactic I simply loved was the use of Google Maps.  When you registered your support, the Democrats would request your address, and match your whereabouts with other registered supporters online.  You would then be sent a Google map with the details of other Obama supporters in your local area, and you would be encouraged to go and knock on their door to meet face to face – a simply CLEVER use of an under utilised technology to help people connect.

The final few thoughts from Ben were the most profound and were what mean the most to me;

“The concept of engaging with people does not just apply to politics” and Ben reminded us all that technology is all about focusing passion!

Ben’s team defintiely used technology to focus a passion – a passion for change, and they managed to engage with the voters like never before!

(I was just chatting with Ben on Facebook, and he has been run off his feet with a mad schedule – we hope to chat on the phone further when he gets back home next week!)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Will an Obama win be a win for social media? (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
• Obama team chose Apple on election night (tuaw.com)

Tags:Barack Obama, Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008, ben self, Blue State Digital, Gmail, Google, GoogleMaps, luke harvey-palmer, personal branding
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Do you need more prospects right now?

There is that magical formula again..the power of 3!

We have all heard the notion of the 6 degrees of separation?  The definition as explained by Wikipedia is;

Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth.

Recently, Harvard University finalised a piece of research (covered here in the Harvard Business Review, and the article The Dynamics of Personal Influence)  that suggests that people are only influenced by those who are 3 degrees away?

The article quotes;

“… a person’s influence progressively diminishes as the degrees of separation increase. For example, the risk for smoking in a person connected to a smoker (that is, at one degree of separation) is 61% higher, on average, than would be expected as a result of chance. It is 29% higher if the friends of that person’s friends smoke, and 11% higher if the friends of the person’s friends’ friends smoke. By the fourth degree of separation there is no longer an increase in risk.”

What does that mean for your personal brand, and your marketing efforts?

“Efforts to foster creativity or innovation might depend on the degree of separation of the relevant parties. And groups of customers – including customers who have online connections – might be strategically targeted so as to take advantage of their influence on one another.”

Is this really that surprising?  This research just confirms what we have always known at Buzzle…that people buy people, and the more people know about you (and like) the more likely you are to influence them, persuade them, or meet their needs; in other words SELL.  

The opportunity for you is to think about those you are connected to; or 3 steps away from you, who know you and what you stand for?  Do they know you at all, and if they do, how close is your relationship with these people?  This should form the basis of an extremely effective networking plan for you (online or offline);

• Who is 3 steps away from you,
• How do you access these people,
• What is your message for approaching these people in the first instance?
• What is it you are going to do to develop a relationship with these people?
• What are you selling?

How targeted is your networking? How great are you (and your people) at seeking out and developing new relationships? How much do you use LinkedIn, ecademy, Facebook or other social networking sites to connect with these people? How many potential prospects are there in your 3 degrees of seperation (if every person knows 250 people, then I guess this is 250 to the power of 3!)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Six Degrees of Separation- Land A Job Through Volunteering (advancingwomen.com)

Tags:buzzle, Creativity, Facebook, Harvard University, LinkedIn, networking, Personal Brand, personal branding, Six degrees of separation, Social network, Wikipedia
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Leadership | No Comments »