This is somewhat a groundbreaking week when it comes to women and technology. This morning, I participated in Women Who Tech, a telesummit for women in technology. I served on a panel titled, Tooting Your Own Horn,with Megan Fitzgerald of Career By Choice, and Angie Chang of Women2.org. Podcasts and slideshows from the panel will be available at a later date, but there was an amazing amount of women in the room asking questions about how to build your brand both online and offline.
Fitzgerald's information was invaluable, she offers a tool called the Online Identity Calcualator, which helps you to determine your online identity score based on what Google tells you about yourself. If you're aiming for a certain career and a higher career level, then your score should be a 10, otherwise you have some work to do.
Because my score is a 10, I served as an example, during the panel, of how best to build your brand online. Some of the pointers I shared included:
Your name = Your brand - register your domain name as your own name, or the closest thing to your name. If you have a common name and it's already taken, add a dash, or your middle initial, or your professional degree.
SEO your brand - use search engine optimization techniques to make sure your name/your brand comes up in google searches when people are look for you. Link to yourself from social networking sites where you can list your bio, like this site.
Your voice = Your brand - let your voice speak for you. Leave relevant comments on the blogs and online media sites that are most relevant to the topics that are affiliated with your brand. Write a blog, or signup to speak at conferences.
Keep it real - stay on brand. Make sure your message is focused in clear. You can contribute to many sites, but each site should reflect the brand you want to be.
Build community - use your own site, or any number of social networking sites to build community for your brand. But keep it real. Don't be a poser. Be a real participant and don't signup just to talk about yourself. People will respect you for the quality of your ideas.
Monitor your brand - set up Google alerts for yourself and your doman, and claim your site on technorati. This way you can monitor when you're being writtin about online. You can also go back and interact with the people who are writing about you.
If you've visited the WWT site, then you've seen that a lot of women in technology were involved. It was a major event that was sold out. And the event isn't over, tonight there will be after parties in NYC, D.C., and San Francisco. I plan to attend the New York event.
But WWT won't end my women and tech week. On Thursday and Friday, I'll attend BlogHer Business, that will focus on stripping away the hype and hyperbole and getting to the heart of what will make social media work for your organization. Stay tuned for reports from BlogHer.
Once in a while politicians break through the noose that keep them on message and speak in a way that transcends the daily grind to hit fundamental truths. Senator Barack Obama did so yesterday, and in doing so, seized the moment. Regardless of your political persuasions, it’s hard not to be touched at some level with his vision, leadership and unflinching look at the problems of racism in America.
Obviously, there is a very long, steep step from personal branding to a politician’s speech about racism. And, yet, as personal branders, we can learn a lot from how Senator Obama seized the moment and reframed the issues moving from racial stereotypes to a broader, more nuanced understanding.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
As personal branders, it’s easy to remain rooted in a narrow vision of who we are and how we work. The daily rat-a-tat-tat of work and personal demands can leave us little room to look up and around us. And, yet, if we truly want to excel at what we do we need to leave a little room around us to think big and boldly. We need to be prepared to reevaluate what we do and how we do it and, if necessary, fine-tune our messages and sharpen and expand our skills.
Obama in his speech talks about the need to change and move beyond the racial stereotypes of both whites and blacks. In doing so he challenges us to change the dynamic that leaves so many behind in crumbling schools and overcrowded emergency rooms.
While most of have our sights set on a much narrow field of vision, we can nevertheless, think a little bigger. We can reach out in our work to people we don’t ordinarily reach out to. We can see that the same way of doing things isn’t always the best way. We can embrace people who are different from us. None of this is going to solve the country’s problems. But it can be our own small way of emboldening ourselves in our workaday lives and insuring that each step we take is a little firmer and stronger. This may make us better personal branders, and, I trust, better human beings.
What do you think?
Wendy Marx, Personal Branding and Public Relations
Last week while at SXSW, I sat down for an interview with Chris Brogan, as he guest hosted John Havens's New Media Havens show on BlogTalk Radio. Ronald Lewis of lijit was also there, for a discussion that focused on media making, building community, and the new age of advertising. My responses were mainly geared toward what we're doing here at FastCompany.com.
In the pre-Google age, it was common for recruiters and hiring managers to vet a job candidate with a phone call to references. Today, that process is almost quaint. Why bother to pick up the phone when the online world provides access to a wealth of information on many of us, welcome or not.
Welcome to the Googlization of identity, an all knowing eye that makes George Orwell’s Brave New World seem so old hat. Or does it.
As PR and SEO guru, Sally Falkow puts it, “Google has become the new resume,” and used proactively, that can be a boon.
Today if you’re online, the simple fact is that anyone can pry into your life.
“Other people, some of them complete strangers, mention you on their blogs, publish your marathon results on local websites, tag you in photos on Facebook, upload YouTube videos in which you appear. And the stuff they post – true, untrue, embarrassing, upsetting or misleading – becomes part of a permanent worldwide record that can have a devastating career impact,” according to Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author, as quoted in the March issue of Money.
That’s the downside. However, unlike a Big Brother world where we poor slobs are powerless, the Internet can be a terrific enabler of reputations.
“It’s not the great evil empire out there watching every move,” says Falkow. “The key is that you need to manage your reputation.”
And, in managing your reputation, you have the unprecedented ability to make a name for yourself.
Here is some advice on how to do just that, courtesy of Falkow, who is president of PR and SEO firm Expansion Plus and co-developer of Press Feed, a PR and marketing social media tool (will link to that):
First, Google your name and see what if anything appears on the first few Google pages. If you don’t find anything, or you don’t like what you see, it’s time to get to work. Here are some action items:
• Write articles weekly. Link from your articles back to a page about you. And when you do that don’t fall into the trap of saying, “for more information , click here.” As Falkow says, “You don’t want to be known by “click here” but by your name.
• Start a blog. Be sure to have a page on the blog about yourself.
• Search on Yahoo News for keywords relevant for what you do. You’ll quickly see what publications are writing about topics relevant to your audience. Once you know that, pitch content to the sites.
• Create profiles of yourself on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook that are readily indexed by the search engines.
Education traditionally focuses on knowledge acquisition and retention. However, it usually misses a key element. That’s the element of speed. In other words, how fast can you recall information and how fast can you apply it?
While there is usually a time limit on tests, it’s usually not at the speed of rapid recall. You usually have ample time to think of the answer or to figure out the answers based on how the test is written.
If you really want to know who knows their stuff, try cutting the time you have to take the SATs in half. Try cutting the time allowed for a multiple choice test to the time it takes to read all the questions and circle the answers.
So why the concern for speed? If you have a fluent knowledge of something, it shows itself in terms of speed. Think of learning a foriegn language, you have to get to the point where you know all the words well enough to keep up with a conversation especially when others start to speak quickly. In fact, keeping up with a conversation is a good measure of how fluent you are in a language. The same can and should hold true for other subjects. With speed comes competences or vice-versa.
Our latest announcement is the launch of FastCompany.TV, a new online video network featuring coverage of bleeding edge technology trends, interviews with leading executives and business people, reviews of the latest technology products, and lifestyle programming. Robert Scoble, one of the most popular technology bloggers in the world, will join us to serve as Managing Director of the site, slated to launch in March. FastCompany.TV will debut several programs over the course of 2008 featuring Scoble and other well known personalities. (Read our press release for more details.)
Scoble is already a member of our family. He writes a regular column in Fast Company magazine about how technology is changing business, which is integrated into our site at Scoble on Tech, where we also feature his calendar from Upcoming.org and his Google Reader feed of daily tech reads, along with video interviews.
About joining Fast Company, Scoble says:
"I decided to join up with Fast Company because I wanted to work with a brand well known for covering innovation and technology in an authoritative, provocative manner. And I’m excited that the Mansueto Digital websites are innovating in the social media space themselves."
When Scoble talks about our innovation in the social media space, he's referring to how we plan to integrate viewer participation into FastCompany.TV, as well as Mansueto Digital's open-source build in Drupal of IncBizNet, an online business networking community and database created exclusively for private companies. He's also talking about the Company of Friends, one of the first online business networks that debuted in November of 1997. Unlike other social networks, where it's about showcasing your resume and playing games, the Company of Friends has always been about bringing people together to share ideas -- both online and offline -- about the core themes central to our magazine, such as innovation and social responsibility. We'll announce more news about how we plan to grow our social media efforts later this month. And don't forget to look out for FastCompany.TV in March.
Fast Company's Most Innovative Business People of 2007
From the pages of Fast Company and FastCompany.com, we examine the creativity and innovation of great minds elevating business, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Timothy Ferris, author of the 4-Hour Work Week, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. >>>
The Best Business Books of 2007
A roundup of Fast Company's picks for the best business books of 2007, including Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, as well as Fugitive Denim by Rachel Louise Snyder, and The No Asshole Rule by Robert I. Sutton. >>>
Best of the FC Blogs: Business Trends of 2007
We review the technology, innovation, and business trends of 2007 with this roundup of blog entries written by Fast Company magazine editors, FastCompany.com staff, and members of our expert blog. We found out that Twitter could both ruin lives and save lives. There's also a look at branding yourself in the Web 2.0 era, design in dubai, and more. >>>
Lately, I've been reading a lot of news reports about Rupert Murdoch's intentions to lift the pay wall from The Wall Street Journal online and I've been wondering if this is a good idea. During the course of my research about the proposed plan, I even came across two Motley Fool's reporters who were battling out the pros and cons of the idea.
"Brand: People believe that "you get what you pay for." By removing the price tag that tells people what WSJ.com's value is, Murdoch will devalue the brand."
"By freeing the site, the trusted financial news source will attract more readers. How many more? If you believe Murdoch, 15 times more. He believes his 1 million online subscribers can be enlarged to as many as 15 million readers by ditching the cash register. And with more readers come more advertising dollars, especially if they turn out to be, in Murdoch's words, "the most affluent, the most influential people in the world.""
Certainly any numbskull with half a brain could see the potential in numbers of readers to be gained if the tariff were lifted. And there's also a potential cross-content strategy with the recent launch of the Fox Business News Network and MarketWatch. So if I can see what a numbskull can see, then what's my problem with Murdoch's plan?
Well, I think I'm hanging onto something that Rich Smith wrote about the brand. With a tried and true brand, both the audience and the advertisers know what they're getting when they do business with WSJ. But with a free-for-all -- even though Murdoch has stated that it will be an influential audience still -- I'm not sure what either the audience or the advertisers will get. Would WSJ.com just turn into some sort of portal á la Yahoo! or AOL? Is this the correct competitive landscape for such a product as the WSJ -- to run up against the likes of the Goliaths of content on the Web? AOL's target market was America -- in its entirety, after all. That's a wide market to cater to, and even harder to define a sweet spot for. Often being everything to everyone simply means being nothing entirely good at all.
But we could be looking at the Financial Times and The New York Times as the WSJ competition. That lot might make better sense, and ultimately set the objectives at keeping the product and brand a lot more pure.
But if traffic spikes to the extent that Murdoch predicts, then a serious content challenge will be faced. Will 15 million world readers be interested in the current content brand identity of the WSJ? Or will the content become totally diluted in order to reach this wider audience base? I'm opting for that latter on this one. And if that's how it's going to go down, then it's going to change the nature of both the content and the audience overall. Courting middle America isn't necessarily going to land you that BMW or Fidelity account. But I could be entirely wrong. Why go after less dollars spent in online advertising from luxury brands when there's more money being spent (and a better understanding of online) from lower-end brands?
I don't know, I'm torn on this one. I suppose that after the WSJ print became smaller, I've become more and more concerned about the demise of a stellar brand.
The Google Phone isn't really a Google Phone or GPhone after all. What it will be is an open-source operating system for mobile phones. The project is called Android and it's a a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.
The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, is developing Android: the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. To help developers get started developing new applications, we're offering an early look at the Android Software Development Kit. [Android]
In this YouTube video Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo some applications.
The following is a live transcript of highlights from Mark Cuban's closing keynote @ BlogWorldExpo.
Connection between Dancing With the Stars and blogging. Dancing With the Stars taught me value of different mediums. People complimenting me for blogs is nothing like little old ladies telling me i should have won and that I was cheated on Dancing With the Stars.
I started my blog in 2004 because I did an interview with the Dallas Morning News about the Dallas Mavericks. I expected to see a write up that equated with the conversation. What was written was different than the email exchange. I decided it was time to start a blog. I put up a link to the article and then put up the email exchange. The response was amazing and was an accelerator for me to start blogging.
All of a sudden they realized they weren't in charge of me. They had to realize they had to pay attention to people. Blogging isn't just about people getting things off their chest, it's a way for ideas and the truth to come out.
Over time I understood what blogging meant to me. Before kids and marriage I knew I could call up my buddies and we talked about everything on our minds: sports, tech, politics -- but it was limited to the 5 or 10 drunks I knew
I got to talk to a whole universe of people. It was about how everyone was responding to me. More than 1 million people read the blog in 2004, and the software couldn't support the comments. But it was the response coming back that mattered.
Are you honest in what you write or are you not? Are you just writing to get people to read. If you do that than you're no different than mainstream media.
I learned you have to be brutally honest. Once you are honest you can define your brand.
If you're gonna go the corporate route. MSM is trying to introduce blogs. If you're a reporter for the newspaper -- you're a reporter. Either you're a reporter or you're not.
As exciting as we think our opinions are -- we're gonna run out. I think I'm gonna be able to whip something out in 15 minutess and I say someone is going to call me on that. I wrote a blog recently about facebook about opening its api vs what google is doing for opensocial. As i started doing more homework I realized I was not only gonna look like an idiot to readers but I was gonna feel like one. It becomes stronger when you do the work behind it.
The blogosphere is changing and becoming corporatized. You have to compete with nonbloggers; it's your opinion vs The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News. You have to understand where you fit. As others enter your brand starts to dissipate.
Replenish yourself through good old fashion research and work. Decide if it's full time or part time. Is it who you are or not who you are.
When you take the step to get paid to blog you're going to lose ability to be perfectly honest. Someone is going to want something for paying your bills.
Bill O'Reilly is a moron. I've fallen into that trap. I've done my f you blogs. The hardest ones are the ones where you scream and yell at someone. It feels really really good. Then you remember these blogs are forever. The Internet archives are there forever. Whatever you write is going to be there forever.
What appears to be an honest answer that brands you today may not be in 2008. People Google you. When we hire people we Google them.
I don't hold myself back but I've got a lot more money than you. I don't care. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I can sit up here and not care. But not everybody is that fortunate. But I'm not saying muzzle yourself. Just be honest.
Mark Cuban takes questions from the audience.
Q: When starting should you worry about ads?
A: GoogleAds cheapen it. They need to be appropriately placed. Once you start getting some traffic and you realize you can turn it into a business then you can make decisions about it.
Q: Have you ever considered turning off comments because of haters?
A: I've turned them off; deleted them. Anonymity makes people say the darndest things. They say I can't dance because my toes are funny.
Q: How do you marry your business with blogging?
A: I have this site called Sharesleuth where we investigate companies. I'll take a position in the stock prior to publishing. I'm open and transparent. We are factual. We haven't been sued or questioned.
Q: Did it work asking people to vote for you on your blog?
A: I was a complete whore. I put it on facebook and on my blog. I spent more time on trying to get votes than my dancing.
Q: Future of blogging -- what can change it? What can take over?
A: The history of all of this is the Website. A lot of people were setting up sites in the 90s. People were putting up sites and speaking their mind. There were forums in Compuserve and Prodigy. Then it was an application that changed it all Don't think the game is gonna change all that much. I'm not a huge fan of UGC and YouTube. Whenever it is easier to create everybody does. The longer and longer the tail becomes. MSM is also adopting easy tools ... other things will come up. It's gonna be hard to have more than just the ultra long tail. Viewers or readership impact. Look at the music industry. It's so easy to create a song right now, everybody does. It's harder to stand out. It will come down to content is king, with marketing being a major part of it.
Q: What about facebook's new advertising?
A: It's an advertising forward. It'll be okay the first couple of times. Then everybody turns into a super spammer and they ain't your friend no more. Someone will get paid to send and someone to receive. There are much better alternatives.
Q: Do you write your own blog?
A: Yes I do unlike Donald Trump. See I always go back to the people I pick on. Yes I write my own blog.
Q: Do you find Bill O'Reilly's attacks on you to be a net plus or a net minus?
A: It's neither. I've been putting my e-mail out in the public since 1986. I put it up on the JumboTron. I've said it on Letterman and and Leno. It's the same 25 people saying the same thing. He says I'm gonna get you. It sounds like my 4-year-old daughter.
We put together HDNET and Magnolia so you can see it before it goes to theaters also DVD releases same day. Sneak preview on HDNET. Redacted in limited theaters -- theaters don't want what we're giving free previews of . But at the end of the day, even if you have large screen, you're going to the movies -- it's a different experience.
Q: What do you think about UGC now? Do you still think YouTube is not a real business?
A: If the media writes about it, then more media writes about it. YouTube is subsidizing any video you want to put on the Internet for free. Because they hide behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- Google can't get in trouble if someone puts up South Park. South Park has to find it and request it be taken down. They don't know what's there. They are hiding behind the DMCA. they can't put ads around what they don't know is there. Let Google pay. They can't sell ads around non-licensed content. If it were any other company in the world, they'd be gone. But they can subsidize a lot of things.
Q: Is facebook overvalued?
A: It's cheap at the value Microsoft gave if they ever really get to monetize their members. Facebook is the only place where there's all that information about me. Facebook has the opportunity to be gianormous. But the biggest opportunity is a new OS right now. Microsoft is like 25 years old. Mac is great but you can only use it on Apple. It'll be great to have something like what Google is proposing with a mobile OS.
Q; If facebook were for sale would you buy it?
A: Yeah I'd buy it but I can't afford it. The two companies I would buy are Verizon and facebook.
