Tim Ferriss, Personal Branding at its best.

We’ve talked about the concept of Personal Branding, finding your Personal Brand, developing your Personal Brand, and the things to avoid when it comes to Personal Branding. In this post, I’ll point you in the directions of Personal Branding experts. Some of these guys were working on Personal Branding before anyone had a name for it.

Dan Shawbel wrote what some consider the Bible of Personal Branding, Me 2.0. It’s a fast read full of good information. Dan has created a business around Personal Branding. His success speaks for itself.

William Arruda is another professional Personal Branding guru. His book, Career Distinction focuses on how Personal Branding can improve your career and your career prospects.

Timothy Ferriss is another master of Personal Branding. He doesn’t advertise himself as such. Instead, he’s known as a best-selling author, champion kick-boxer, fitness guru, and chef.  Yeah, he gets around. And yet, he still manages to maintain a consistent high quality Personal Brand. He does this by being a source of good information and a champion of unknown experts. Tim Ferriss spends just as much time talking up people he looks up to as he does talking about himself. His first book, The 4-Hour Work Week changed the way I look at work. His second book, The 4-Hour Body changed the way I look at fitness. His next book The 4-Hour Chef will doubtlessly change the way I look at cooking. (Notice how he brands his book with the ‘4-Hour’ thing? That’s not an accident.)  What do these have to do with Personal Branding? The information in Tim’s books aren’t specifically geared towards Personal Branding. This is true, but using many of the ideas and techniques in his book, you’ll find that you increase your Personal Brand.

As Personal Branding gets more mainstream, there will inevitably be more books and articles about it (like this one). The most important thing to remember is that you are creating your personal brand whether you’re doing it purposely or not. You’re doing it by having a Facebook page. You’re doing it with Twitter and FourSquare. You might as well take control of it.

-          Jack Cameron

A common piece of dating advice is that you not talk about your ex. There are reasons for this. Some will say that it’s because they’ll think you’re still hung up on your ex. I say it’s because they are picturing you talking about them after the relationship. No woman likes it when you call another woman a bitch. And yet, if you go to any random Facebook, you will see people trashing their exes or having actual online fights with someone they’re dating.

Another common mistake is trashing your place of employment. Sure, you might work with a bunch of people who make brain damaged monkeys look like the control room at NASA.  You might be the only one there who isn’t on drugs. Or maybe just the job itself sucks. We’ve all had the shitty job with the stupid coworkers. Some of us have had that job for years. Complaining about it online may be cathartic, but it’s not going to help you get your next job that’s not as shitty.

Yes, it’s cathartic to just go off on a rant about all of the ways you’ve been wronged both personally and professionally. It feels good to get some of that off your chest. But trashing other people is never the way to get past them in the long run.

This does not mean you shouldn’t share your bad day with the world. There are ways to do it that aren’t going to hurt your future relationships or jobs. All you have to do is use this rule of thumb: Don’t post anything online that you wouldn’t say to your boss, your mom, or a cop.

If someone is being a moron at work and making your job difficult, it’s better to say, “Managed to make some progress on the project despite challenging obstacles.”  Really, when it comes down to it, Personal Branding is just good personal public relations. What you’re trying to do is say what you want to say without causing any unintended problems.

It’s fine to have an opinion. It’s fine to be angry. Just be sure that you’re in control of that anger and use it wisely. Count to ten. Then figure out the most creative way to say what you want to say.

This is the fourth part of my Personal Branding series. If you’ve come this far, you’ll want to read tomorrow’s fifth and final post where I point you in the direction of the Personal Branding geniuses. I know quite a bit about Personal Branding but it’s all due to reading and watching these guys. See you tomorrow.

-          Jack Cameron

You do not need a niche. You do need a center. If you’re a musician, then it’s your music. If you’re a writer, then it’s your writing. You want your Personal Brand to not just be about you but also about what you love. From there, you can branch out to whatever it is you want to do.

The key component here is consistency. If someone comes upon a page you created online, it should be easily recognized as one of your pages. There are a number of ways to do this. One of the simplest ways to start is by having your photo be the same photo regardless of what site you’re on. This makes it so if someone stumbles upon your twitter account and they already know you on Facebook, there’s no question that yes, this is the same person.

If you’re more into graphic design than I am, you can also help establish your brand by using similar color schemes. This is more difficult on some social networking sites where their company colors tend to be on your page.

When it comes to actual content, quality is much more important than quantity. If you have nothing to say, don’t force it. And if you write something and it isn’t up to your standards, leave it as a draft. Maybe you can rewrite it later.

Finding what you want your brand to be isn’t easy. Tomorrow we’ll talk about common mistakes and what not to do when you post things online. And then, finally, we’ll bring in the experts and I’ll show you some of the gurus of Personal Branding who’ve turned it into an art form.

-          Jack Cameron

Set up a Google Alert for your name. See what comes up over the course of a couple of weeks. For those who don’t know, a Google Alert sends you an email of new search results for a specific search. If you have a common name, you might want to put your name and the city you live in into the Google Alert.

You should also do searches with Bing and Yahoo and other search engines just to see if anything different comes up, but Google is where you want to focus most of your energy because that’s what most people use.

It may be that you have a name that is too common. Or it may be that someone else with your name has already done a fine job of creating a Personal Brand. If this is the case, you need to find a way to make your name unique. For example, the name on my birth certificate isn’t ‘Jack Cameron’. It’s ‘John Cameron’. When I checked a few years ago, I was able to find six John Camerons in my hometown of Tacoma alone, including my own father. JohnCameron.com was already taken by a Canadian singer. There’s a John Cameron in Hollywood who frequently works with the Coen Brothers. From a Personal Branding perspective, John Cameron was a terrible name.

However, Jack Cameron had less clutter. Oh there are plenty of Jack Camerons out there. The Cameron Clan has had no problem breeding and we’re not all that imaginative when it comes to names. But when I started online, there was a distinct lack of Jack Camerons with a significant web presence.

Once you’ve found the name you want to use for your Personal Brand, it’s time to claim it. Purchase the domain of your name. You may even want to purchase the variations such as .net, .org and the like. However, this is a lot like Google in that if you get .com, the rest doesn’t really matter. Yourname.com is what people are going to go to first.

Go to http://namechk.com/ . Type in your Personal Brand name. How many of those are available? You don’t have to take them all, but it’s good if you can at least get Facebook, Twitter and other massively popular social networking sites. Many of these you’re going to want to log in and register simply so no one else can. You don’t necessarily have to use every one of them. You just want to attempt to avoid any branding problems in the future.

Inevitably, there will be some sites where your Personal Brand name is already taken. That’s okay. Just add one word. That word should be the one thing you want others to know about you. If you don’t know what that is yet, that’s okay. That’s what Monday’s article is all about.  Now that you’ve established what your Personal Brand is called, it’s time to work on what your Personal Brand is. This is the most important part of Personal Branding and it takes the most work. In the meantime, you can find me at:

jackcameron.com

facebook.com/jackcameron

twitter.com/jackcameron

linkedin.com/writerjackcameron

- Jack Cameron

You don’t have to be selling something to have a personal brand. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, you have a personal brand. Your personal brand is what you tell the world about yourself online and offline. It’s you’re reputation. You’re creating it every day whether you mean to or not. Personal Branding is taking control of your personal brand and making sure that you project what you want people to know and eliminating the things you don’t.

Before we go much further, please take a look at the image below.

Every now and then you’ll hear people freaking out about online privacy. The simple truth is this: If it’s online, it’s not private. You can play with your privacy settings all you want. And it is good to check them from time to time.  However, if you’ve gone to the trouble of posting it online, someone has probably bothered to read it. If they can read it, they can link it or copy it and send it on to others.

Once people actually accept this, the natural reaction is to not post anything at all. I mean when you think that every little comment you make might be read by your boss, your next potential employer, your boyfriend, your girlfriend your mom, or stalker you might get a little shy about posting anything that might tell others where you live, what you’re doing, where you like to go or any of the other fun things you’ve been posting about. While this reaction is perfectly understandable, it’s not very useful.

No matter what you do, people who might employ you or sleep with you are going to Google you. They are going to look for you on Facebook. They are going to find what they can find from the comfort of their computer and smartphone. Welcome to the 21^st Century. Now rather than trying to hide or being afraid of what they might find, why not give them exactly what you want them to find? This is the digital equivalent of showering and putting on good clothes.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what Personal Branding is. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how you get started taking control of your Personal Brand.

Person 1: You seem cool. What do you look like?

Person 2: Why don’t I just send you my photo? What’s your email address?

This happened all the time. And it tended to happen to the same people. So I told everyone to send me their picture and I would put up a website with all the photos of the regular chat people. Now, when someone new came on, we could just send them to the site where they would find that they too can be on the site if they send me their picture.

This was my first encounter with social networking.  At the time, the only thing you had to choose was whether or not you wanted to share a photo and if so, which one. That site no longer exists now. Neither do the chats. I’m not even still in contact with any of the people I met on the Tom Leykis Show chat room in person or online. It was something that happened and then it was gone, like most things in life.

Then there was MySpace. It was nice and simple. Post your picture, write what’s going on. Exchange messages. The choices were fairly simple. Share your name, age, hometown and whatever was on your mind. You could post what you were thinking. You could blog. You could comment on what other people were thinking or blogging. MySpace was an interconnected blogging site for people who didn’t want to code.

In 2007, everything changed with Facebook. Initially it seemed like a MySpace clone. Then Facebook began evolving. And it never stopped evolving. MySpace quickly became something that kids were into. Facebook became the place to be online.  Suddenly you were in contact with people you knew in high school. Suddenly some ex who you forgot about is sending you a friend request. Suddenly your mom is your friend on Facebook. This year, Facebook passed half a billion users. More people you know have a Facebook page than don’t.

With something that popular, there were inevitably going to be others who wanted a piece of that pie. Twitter carved out a niche by being incredible simple and easy to use. Before everyone had smart phones, you could send a text to 40404 and tell the world what was going on. It also became the place to connect with celebrities. LinkedIn showed up saying they were the Facebook for work. And like work, they were boring, but still kind of useful. Google came out with Buzz, which faded. Then they came out with Google+. G+ would have been a contender three or four years ago back when people were getting tired of MySpace and trying out Facebook. But it’s too late now. I know some people with G+ accounts but every one of them has a Facebook account that gets updated more often.

As soon as G+ came out, people began wondering how Facebook would respond. Initially it seemed like they weren’t going to do anything major. Then they came out with Timeline.

I’ll get into the whole Timeline thing in a minute, but first I want to back up and explain something. It doesn’t really matter how cool or flashy your website is. It doesn’t matter who is involved or what company it represents. What matters first, before all of that, is content. Content is king. Your site can be easy to navigate, pleasant to look at and on the cutting edge of what any browser can display. It won’t matter if you don’t have quality content.

Most companies pay people like me to write informative and entertaining content for their websites and social networking pages. What makes a company like Facebook so ingenious is that they don’t provide the content. They let their users provide the content. It has been said that “If it is free, then you are not the customer, you are the product.” Facebook has a billion eyes looking at Facebook.  And you and I are providing the content. This is what makes Facebook so powerful.

Facebook doesn’t just encourage us to post our thoughts, pictures, links and whatever else onto our pages. By linking us with our friends, it lets us share these things with the people we care about. And the people we care about love that. Facebook makes sharing our private stuff fun. That’s the magic of it. It gives us connection even when that connection might actually only exist in our heads. I mean it’s not as if every one of our friends looks at every one of our posts, but we still imagine that they do.

Timeline is everything that Facebook was and more. We’re no longer contained by the fact that Facebook didn’t exist before 2007. We can now post pictures, thoughts, ‘life events’ and everything else at any point in our lives beginning with the day we were born. If you really wanted to, you could use Timeline to tell your entire life story in a way that no journal has ever really been able to capture and share it on a global scale.

The potential here is extraordinary. It used to be that if you met someone new, you could look that person up on Facebook and find out what they looked like, what their relationship status was, what their interests were and how many Facebook friends they had. Now, with Timeline, it’d be possible to learn everything you might learn on a date just by going to their Facebook page. Facebook encourages you to post where you worked, who you were married to, how long you were married and what day you had a kid. In fact, Timeline has made it remarkably easy to fill in your entire life with words and pictures. Your autobiography could be a click away.

Remember what I said about content being king? This is the Holy Grail of content. Sure, you might not decide to share everything with Facebook, but the more you share, the more you feel connected. The less you share, the more people will think you’re hiding things. The one bright side of this is that at least it is letting you write your own autobiography. It’s not cross checking this with employment statistics and public records.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Timeline. I think the one thing that people might not be noticing is the fact that Facebook essentially owns everything you post there. For most people this doesn’t mean much. There’s not a lot of call for autobiographies of random people. However, let’s say you’re not random. Let’s say that you become someone who is in the public spotlight. Let’s say you become massively famous. And then let’s say that spotlight of fame burns you and you flame out like Charlie Sheen. And you do it publicly. On Facebook. What is to stop Facebook from taking your entire profile, publishing it and not giving you a dime?

Okay, that’s a worst case scenario. It’s unlikely to happen because you’re probably not going to be famous and Facebook would encounter a mass exodus if they started publishing ‘Facebook Biographies’ without the consent of the main characters. A more likely possibility is that with publishing becoming cheaper and cheaper, you decide to publish your own autobiography and you decide to use a bunch of your Facebook posts. For whatever reason, your autobiography takes off and is a best seller. Facebook could potentially sue for their share of your riches despite the fact that you wrote every word. Again, it’s probably not going to happen, but it could.

The most likely scenario in a world where you decided to share your entire life on Facebook goes something like this. You spend years creating your Facebook page with daily posts of random things that interest you. You comment on things. You share pictures. You share your life online. From time to time you might add things that happened before you joined Facebook into your Timeline. You create a snapshot of what your life was like day by day. And then you die. Two hundred years pass. And somewhere in the Internet archives, your Facebook page exists. More permanent than any hardcopy book that can be lost or destroyed. More accessible than an old relative that knows your family history. Your Facebook page becomes the Testament of You.

Strangely in this last scenario, Facebook owning the content actually helps you. Because jackcameron.com only exists as long as I or someone else pays for it. I’m betting my great grandkids won’t give a shit about keeping Great Grandpa Jack’s website up. But I don’t have to worry about my Facebook. It’s owned by a multibillion dollar corporation that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon and even if it does, it’ll likely just be sold to another company that will keep it going. Sure, there’s the possibility that Facebook will one day charge, but it’s unlikely. There’s no reason to. We aren’t the customer. We’re the product. And I’m okay with that.

- Jack Cameron

The goal of a good Christmas commercial is to show that your company  has great gifts for good prices and encourage a behavior of giving. You want the customer to feel good about what their purchasing.

This is a current Best Buy commercial:

It succeeds in advertising gift ideas for good prices. But then instead of encouraging a behavior of giving or making people feel good about themselves, it appeals the competitive nature of people. Worse, it appeals to competing against someone who is basically universally liked. It’s like having an arm wrestling competition against a baby. We don’t really want to be the customer in the commercial. And if we don’t want to be the customer, then why would we buy the product?

A better way to use this same concept in a commercial is to take the focus off of Santa. We like Santa. We don’t want to beat him. We want to help him. So instead of ‘Game On, Santa.’, why not focus on Santa’s helpers? I mean if you’re hellbent on appealing to humanity’s competitive nature for a Christmas ad (which I don’t think is a very good idea), the way to do it is to show Santa asking his elves what they’ve made for gifts for a family. They show little wooden toys they’ve cobbled together. Then have Mom there with the Kindle Fire and various other gadgets from Best Buy. Now Mom has helped Santa by shopping at Best Buy.

Marketing is fairly simple. Too often marketers try to get too clever with it and fail. Answer these questions in as quick and entertaining a manner as you can:

Why does the customer need the product?

Where can the customer get the product?

Why is yours the better product?

Necessity, availability, quality and value. That’s what it comes down to. These Best Buy commercials fail right out of the gate by not giving you that necessity. You don’t need to beat Santa. You need to BE Santa.

- Jack Cameron

It’s easy to think of life without enough money. For most of us, that life IS our life. But trying to think of life without money at all is actually somewhat difficult. If you need food, you can go to the store or you can go to McDonalds. If you need food but you have no money and refuse to take charity in the form of money or friends giving you stuff, this simple need becomes a bit of an adventure. What do you do? You can grow some of your own food if there is a community garden they’ll let you use. You can go dumpster diving or ask local businesses if they’re throwing anything out. You can forage in the forest. The thing that this book illustrates time and again is that there are options without money.

It begins with a fantastic and simple description of finances, banking and debt. He explains clearly how he’s not against the concept of money exactly. He’s against debt. He’s against what world currencies have created. He’s against financial institutions that only exist to make rich people richer. Some protest these people who seem to have rigged the system. Mark Boyle makes an interesting choice by walking away from the game entirely.

It would be easy to pick this book apart if I wanted to. I could point out how much stuff he got simply because he was lucky. (Not everyone who reads the book is going to be able to put a donated trailer on a community garden and live rent free.) Or I could say that he violates his own rules again and again. I mean he goes on about how he doesn’t like to eat animals and doesn’t want to use cars because of big oil companies and whatnot, but he still has a cell phone and a laptop. However, none of that really matters. This isn’t a book about living like a monk. It’s about what’s possible even without money.

This isn’t new thinking. In fact it’s very old thinking. The idea of trading and bartering for goods and services is as old as humanity. I think that’s why it’s so appealing.

For me, the problem is that I am really nothing like Mark Boyle. Towards the end he says, “We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, while simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water, and a stable climate.” I disagree with this. I think that science and technology are the problem and the solution. I think that technology can make things easier and better. The problem isn’t so much the technology and science as it is the profit.

There was an interview with a record executive that I can’t find now. In it, the executive talked about how it used to be that you’d find a band. You’d help them create a voice. You’d help them create an album and a sound. You’d help them tour. And you’d help them work on their next album. You’d let their career be your career. Now though, most record executives don’t care. They find someone they can make one number one hit with, they push that as hard as they can and make a million damn dollars and they’re done. It’s fine for business to be about money. It should be. But it should be about more than just money. It’s the WalMart-ization of the world. Price and profit over quality and innovation. This is where our real problem lies.

- Jack Cameron

“I don’t think I was going that fast officer. I think the BMW was the one that was speeding.”

“Well, he was gone by the time I turned around.”

“That’s because he was speeding.”

“License, insurance and registration.”

I already  had my license and insurance card pulled from my wallet. Before reaching in the glove box for my registration, I said, “I’m going to take my right hand and grab my registration out of the glove box.” And then I slowly did exactly that.

He walked back to his car with the information and came back with a ticket for $154 for going 15 over the speed limit. He handed me my registration and insurance card back. It would be a few days before I noticed he did not hand my license back.

There was a time in my life where I was dealing with police officers on a weekly basis. There was also a time in my life when I worked for them in police records. I have had friends who are cops and former cops. So I know a few things about how to deal with the police. I even wrote a chapter about it in my book, Ruin Your Life. But there are some new rules since then and there are situations I didn’t cover.

DON’T POKE BEARS WITH STICKS

This is something my grandfather used to say. It can easily be applied to dealing with cops as well. Here’s the thing. A few years ago, it seemed like it was open season on police officers. Locally, a couple of cops were shot and killed. And then the four Lakewood police officers were gunned down while drinking coffee before a shift. The result of these killings has been that police officers are taking their chances with a shooting investigation rather than waiting to see if a suspect is definitely a deadly threat.

Some people think this is wrong. And make no mistake, there have been unnecessary tragedies due to this increase in police violence. But if you’re paying attention at all, you can at least understand why. I’m getting a bit off topic here though. The point here is that police are now more than ever willing to use deadly force if they feel it is necessary. You’re not going to fix that social problem in a confrontation with a cop.

So the thing to do is make yourself as little of a threat as possible. If you have anything in your hand, drop it.  Don’t wait to be asked. If you need to grab something, tell them what you’re going to do before you do it. Do not let them have a chance to guess wrong what you’re doing. Move slowly at all times. And do what they tell you to do.

You may not like what they’re telling you to do. They may not be following the rule of the law. They may be complete dicks about it. They may be absolutely wrong on all levels, but you are dealing with someone who will very likely not see any prison time if they kill you. So it’s best not to do anything that can be construed in any way as threatening. Do not think about what you’re doing. Think about what someone could say you were trying to do.

PEACEFUL PROTESTS

The Occupy Wall Street movement is the latest but far from the only protest that has been forcibly broken up by the police in recent weeks. When this happens, the police tend to not be nice about it. There are reasons for this.

One is that there are members of every police department who joined the police department simply so they could hurt people and get away with it. Believe it or not, they are in the minority. Most cops, believe it or not, simply want to do their jobs and go home at the end of their shift. However, if you happen to run into one of those dicks who just wants to hurt people, you should know that the second you retaliate violently towards one of those dicks, every good and bad cop will be more than happy to beat the living shit out of you.

Another reason is that ‘shock and awe’ tactics tend to scare the shit out of people and when you’re outnumbered, that’s usually the best route to go. It’s not pleasant, but the cops are like any other authority figure. They have bosses and the bosses give them orders. Their job is to follow their orders the best way they can.

Understand this. You will never beat the police on the street. They are going to do what they’re going to do. You can witness it. You can document it with pictures and video. You can post it up on the web for the world to see. And none of it will matter the second you are violent.

The police know how to deal with violent people. They are very good at it. Non-violent people are very difficult to deal with and control. Especially in this age of youtube.

REVOLUTION

The police are there to enforce the law. They aren’t in charge of what the law is. They don’t have to agree with the law. They don’t even have to follow the law themselves. But they aren’t going to change the law or how they enforce it to accommodate you.

If you’re looking to change things. Whether it’s a traffic law or the way the world works, you don’t start with the cops. You can’t. You save them for last. If you eventually find a way to change things, then the cops will be on your side.

Now don’t get me wrong, if a cop is wrong, you should fight the cop, but don’t be so silly as to play his game. A cop will beat you on the street every time because that’s his home. You beat the police in court. You beat them online.

Just understand that regardless of the situation, the second you are violent towards the authorities, they have won.

I didn’t argue too much with the cop that pulled me over. I disagreed with him politely and took the ticket that he gave me. I didn’t admit to any wrongdoing and mailed the ticket in so I can have my day in court.

-          Jack Cameron

The same month, Molson placed the ad below in Playboy, FHM and Ramp magazines. This ad talks about the ad in Cosmo. It says that they’ve placed an ad in Cosmo to make the women who read it think positive things about Molson drinkers.

This advetising is both interesting and effective. (Molson’s sales increased 30%.) It doesn’t matter if the ad actually managed to make women think nice things about Molson guys. It only matters that men think that. On top of that, even if you’re a guy who doesn’t believe the ad, it’s still original and highly amusing.

The key thing when it comes to marketing is to make a positive impression. This campaign does that effectively. What’s really interesting is that this is a beer advertisement that doesn’t involve any women in bikinis.

-Jack Cameron