Personal Brand Grader

3 Reasons You Should brand yourself starting today

Written on August 24, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Personal Branding

Why might you want to start your personal branding efforts today ? There are a lot of positive things in favor of that idea, few against. The usual reason for NOT seriously considering is inertia. Scarcity of good info is sometimes the reason. Other times it’s fear of the unknown. Often it is not know how and not knowing how to find out how. Sometimes it’s just not knowing the real benefits.

Good information usually helps to clarify things. That’s logical. So let’s get more info. Let’s look at three good reasons why you might actually want to brand yourself starting today.

Reason Number 1, Be the first to claim your brand and place in the world and on the internet. Yes, I hear your objection that you are not a celebrity and you do not need an internet brand. I concede your point, but your friends and connections need to be able to find you. When you need to find something these days you go to Google. So do your friends when they need to find you or information about you.

Second, It will take some time till your efforts will show results. The sooner you start the better. Plus, the older the information is, the more authority it gets. And it ranks higher in search engines. This means that you will appear before your competition when you do a search in Google.

Third and last, if you are the first to claim your profile you get the chance to choose your vanity URL or user name. This will most likely mean that in Twitter you will be @yourname and not @yourname76 because your first choice was taken. Once again, you will benefit of being the first and you will keep this advantage when employers will search for people with your qualifications an experience!

Consider those three reasons, evaluate them, think about them. Once you do, I’m betting that you will easily see that they are more than sufficient to justify trying to brand yourself starting today. Do they convince you?

Seriously now, just think about it for a moment. Don’t those reasons apply to you? Perhaps you really should start your personal branding efforts before it’s too late.

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How can I get rid of bad press?

Written on August 6, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Personal Branding

Bad press, articles and blog posts that are not helping our brand or comments that will damage our reputation online and offline are the main concerns of every newcomer to Social Media. Have it ever happened to you or have you ever seen this happening to somebody you know? How can we tackle these situations? In my professional life I was dealing with bad press in several cases. The good news is that whatever happened, even if we do nothing in time it will go away. Most of the times we cannot afford to wait until it goes away so here is how we can speed up this process and turn it into an opportunity.

From a pure technical point you have to choices, either ask the person who published the article to take it down (if he wants and you agree with the price) or you can sweep that article under the carpet. In the last situation you need to create and promote other articles so that Google or other search engines will list the neutral or good articles first and the one you are concerned about will stay under the radar and will appear after the 3rd page of search results.

In most of the cases the first option is not available so we need to use the second one. Here are 5 steps we have to do in this case:

1. Determine the words for which the bad press article was indexed and appear in search results in the first 3 pages.

2. Identify content that rank worse than the bad press article but it’s ranking can be improved with some simple SEO

3. Create content that is optimized for those words

4. Post the newly created content on highly influential sites

5. Digg, StumbleUpon or tweet the articles above

For example if a prominent blogger writes about your site that is not updated (which may be true) and your business is a scam (which for sure is not true) here is what I suggest to do:

1. Comment on the blog post, apologizing for what happened, thanking the blogger for the free site review, asking him about tips how she/he thinks you can improve your site and offer a free sample of your services or products for the blogger so she/he can be fully informed about your business.

2. Take this opportunity and improve your site based on the feedback obtained. Post the improvements to your blog.

3. Determine the words for which her/his blog post rank in search. For sure your business name will be one of those.

4. Look in the search results which articles rank lower than that article. Go to your account in social bookmarking sites and bookmark those articles. Also promote those articles on Twitter and Facebook and ask your friends to re-tweet them. Link your site with those articles. In this way some of those articles may rank better than the bad press blog post.

5. Create your own articles. You should create at least one of the following: a video about your business, a presentation on your business, articles about your business and interviews with some clients telling about their experience with your product or service.

6. Post the articles, videos and presentations with prominent sites. For example put your vide on YouTube and Vimeo and tag it with the keywords identified at point 2. Do the same with your presentation when you post it to SlideShare and Google presentations. Optimize the articles you write for the words you want to rank higher.

7. Create a Google profile of you and one for your business, create profiles on social networks (the more the better)

8. Bookmark your articles, videos, presentations and interviews in social bookmarking sites. Ask your friends to do the same. The more the better.

9. See who you know and who can be your ally. Offer to give interviews to prominent bloggers and newsites in your niche.

By this time you already have contained the crisis and things look a lot better.

Have you ever had a bad comment or bad press? I would love to hear about your experiences. What do you think is missing from my list above?

Photo credits: striatic

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Your company URL in LinkedIn

Written on July 16, 2010 by Adrian Chira in LinkedIn

Today I’ve just stumbled upon the following situation. One of my connections in LinkedIn works at Island Holiday Rentals but when you move the mouse over the current position she appears to work for TinyURL. You can see this in the attached picture. I tried to figure out what happened and why LinkedIn decided that she works in some other place and here are the results:

1. Her company site is a Facebook page. The link to that page was shortened with TinyURL. The link to her page is

http://tinyurl.com/yfl55cr .

2. I went to the TinyURL company profile from LinkedIn and I found that there are 285 other people that are in this situation: they appear as working for TinyURL but they are entrepreneurs.

3. There are others that appear to have worked at TinyURL but in their profiles appear other companies names.

4. I’ve gave a look to the bit.ly (another URL shortening service) and here I found other 253 “employees” that have in their profiles other companies. I even found somebody that appears to be working at Google when in fact his profile says he is a freelancer. Luckily for Google there are a lot of people that work really for them.

5. I did also a search for Facebook. The first results were people that used their company Facebook page instead of their site. I total there are just 89 results for Facebook.

In conclusion it seems that if you enter a web address for the company you work for and this is shortened with an URL shortening service you may appear as working to that web service instead of the one you work for. It will also index your profile based on that service name. LinkedIn looks at the domain name of the company URL and trims everything that is after the domain name. For the example above the link http://tinyurl.com/yfl55cr gets trimmed to http://tinyurl.com and this is the employer that will appear when you go with the mouse over your current position.

My advice is to take some time and create your company profile in LinkedIn (even if you are the only employee) and buy your own domain and use it as your company address.

Did you find this useful? Would you please leave a comment below?

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10 places where I get ideas for tweets and blog posts

Written on July 15, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Blogs, Twitter

Everybody is going through this from time to time. Either when you start blogging, or when you are on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and you want to update your status but you have no idea what to write about. I read a lot of posts on topics like Social Media, Online Marketing, Personal Branding or Online Identity and everybody mentions in a way or another that you have to create compelling content. But where you can find ideas for compelling content?

Here is my top ten places to find inspiration:

1. Google Alerts. I have setup a few alerts for what topics I write about. I have alerts for Social Media, Personal Branding and for my name. I use the alerts to tweet and if I find a good idea I write it down for the moments when I have no idea what to write.

2. LinkedIn Groups. I have joined several LinkedIn Groups on topics relating with Personal Branding, Social Media, Inbound Marketing. I get from these daily e-mails with the most active discussions which are a god source for inspiration.

3. LinkedIn Answers. Couple of times each week I search the LinkedIn answers section for the keywords I am interested. I get a lot of insights related to what people are interested to find out and how I can help others.

4. Inbound Marketing Scoops. A lot of the topics I am interested in, appear on the news section on the Inbound Marketing site.

5. Twitter. I search on Twitter for keywords related to my niche and get ideas for new posts or simply I just re-tweet those messages.

6. My Idea journal. I keep an idea journal where I write the title or just the idea of a new post when I get it. It is the only way I found for not forgetting them.

7. My blogs watch-list. In time I have built a list of the blogs I follow on regular basis. I look on the topics from their archives (they give me an idea on how needed is that piece of information).

8. My or Other blogs/sites comments. I found a couple of great ideas coming from the comments. And they end up being some great posts.

9. E-books, podcasts, videos and audiobooks. These are a great source of inspiration. I read/listen/watch a lot these days and I extract ideas for business or posts from them but I need to write them down immediately, otherwise I forget them and here comes point 6 above (my Idea Journal)

10. Things that I stumble upon daily. Like this post, it happens that I find solutions to my daily problems and then I write about them.

Do you have other sources of inspiration? Where do you find your ideas? Would you please leave a comment about that?

Photo by: dan paluska

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How to increase your Twitter followers

Written on July 4, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Twitter

About a year ago I decided to give Twitter a try. I have opened an account and started to follow different people which were interesting. I wanted to tweet but I didn’t know what to tweet about. Then I joined IMU and I started to tweet about the sessions and the great things we learned there. So I got some new friends and chat a little with them. Then I graduated IMU and I came back to my previous question: What should I tweet about? I have tried several things till I got to the experiment I will tell you in this post.

My expertise is in marketing and branding so I decided to tweet about marketing, social media and personal branding. This drove me to the next question: where should I find subjects about my area of expertise? At that time I have already set some alerts on Google. I used them to learn more about my interests and I was reading a lot. Then I thought that if I read something interesting why not tweet the link and the title of the article or a line that I found interesting. This led me to another challenge. How to tweet so that my audience would read my tweets. Because I use to do the reading in the evening for 1 hour I was tweeting only in the evening and this didn’t got me too far. Only the people who were online at that time could benefit of what I was telling to the world. It was a very narrow window. Couple of weeks later I learned that Guy Kawasaki was repeating his tweets and he was using Objective Marketer to schedule them. I gave it a try and a month later I got more than 1000 relevant followers and here are the steps you need to follow in order to increase your followers with relevant people.

If you are not on Twitter yet go and open an account
Fill in your profile (bio, location) and upload your photo. People are more likely to follow other people than to follow accounts that do not have a photo.
Select the things you will tweet about. Focus on a niche, do not try to tweet about everything what is trendy. People want to connect with other that have original content not with those that are following the trend. Try to find out what your audience want to know and help them out.
Get ideas on what to tweet about by setting alerts, searching on the web or on other social media platforms. I recommend LinkedIn where you can find groups that serve your niche. Join these groups and you will get plenty of subjects to write about.
Schedule your tweets. You do not want to upset your audience with your tweets. If you tweet 3-5 times per minute, I will not be able to listen to others. From my experience I found out that 2-10 tweets per hour work just fine.
Repeat your tweets at different hours. I repeat every tweet 2-6 times at different hours so people that are on different time zones can get them when they are checking Twitter.
Use a tool like Objective Marketer, TweetDeck or Hootsuite to schedule tweets. I like Objective Marketerbecause I can use it for Facebook and LinkedIn, not only for Twitter and has some great analytics.
Follow back. As a general rule you should follow back the people who follow you. Before following you should check what that person is tweeting and what followers she/he has. I do not follow people that have 0-10 tweets and their accounts are older than 2 months. If they start sharing more I would reconsider. I have also decided not to follow people that tweet about getting hundreds or thousands of followers and they have just 60 followers. I have also decided not to follow people that discuss about MLM (multi Level Marketing) because I am not interested in this. I am sure they have their niche but I am not in their audience.
Don’t be afraid to un-follow. Recognize when you did a mistake and followed somebody who is spamming you.
Thank people that re-tweet you. Thank people that include you on #FF or #FollowFriday. Follow these people (if you didn’t do this already). They are more likely to follow you back.
Re-tweet your followers messages if you find them interesting for your niche. This will help establish long lasting relationships.
Engage your audience. Don’t leave your followers questions un-answered and ask them for help. If you do not know the answer to their questions just re-tweet them. May be one of your followers can help. Enter the conversation if you have something to say, don’t let it go.

Do you have other ways to increase your Twitter audience? Drop me a comment bellow.

Photo credits: wonderferret

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10 reasons to start blogging

Written on June 12, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Blogs

A lot of people are blogging. We read their posts, sometimes we comment on them, other times we tweet them or launch a discussion on LinkedIn. But should we start blogging? Why should we start blogging? Bloggers have a lot of reasons ...

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Delivering happiness

Written on June 7, 2010 by Adrian Chira in books

Today Delivering Happiness, the book by Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO is ready for shipping. I've been lucky enough to get not one but two copies of th is great ...

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5 LinkedIn frequent mistakes that damage your personal brand

Written on April 30, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Personal Branding

Couple of days ago I looked at my LinkedIn connections profile and activity and I've noticed some mistakes that keep on repeating. Here are my findings: 1. Not completing your profile. From my connections 41.1% have no recommendations and 26.3% have no photo on their LikedIn profile. The truth ...

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Delivering Happiness through your brand in 3 ways

Written on April 22, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Personal Branding

Two days ago I received a small package from the US. When I opened it I saw two books. They were two copies of "Delivering Happiness". I applied for getting an advance copy of Tony Hsieh's book that will be released in June with not too much hope, mostly because I live on ...

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5 Personal Branding Lessons from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Written on April 12, 2010 by Adrian Chira in Personal Branding

Recently I have watched the Disney’s version of Snow White and the seven dwarfs with my gorgeous daughters and it made me think about personal branding. As I was arguing previously,

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