Influential Marketing Blog

Facebook Bankruptcy: How (And Why) To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Facebook Page

FINAL UPDATE: This process did not go as expected for me and there are several downsides to converting your profile to a page.  Read my update at the end of this post for why you may NOT want to do this before you make a decision - it includes some things I wish I knew before starting this process.

For more than a year now, I have had a problem with Facebook. When I first joined the social network several years ago, I intended to be completely open.  I accepted every friend request and posted whatever I wanted. Over time, as my friend circle on Facebook started to grow, I found that I was less personally connected to the people who I was "friends" with on Facebook. Now, several years later, my Facebook page is a mashup of people who I am connected with for different reasons. As of today, I have 2434 friends on my personal profile and hundreds of friend invites which are sitting in my queue unapproved because I don't really know what to do with them. Sound familiar?

This is a problem that I know many others have, and one that Burger King brilliantly brought to life back in 2009 with their "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign which infamously called upon Facebook users to defriend people in exchange for a free whopper and had more than 234,000 people choose to defriend 10 people each. As the reasoning went, anyone you would trade in for a whopper couldn't have been that good of a friend, right?  In case you were wondering, I didn't dump anyone for a free burger.  Still, my problem of losing the separation between personal and business contacts on Facebook continued. This weekend I am finally going to fix that problem by declaring "Facebook bankruptcy."

"Facebook Bankruptcy" is the extreme act of either closing an account altogether or migrating it to a different type of account in an effort to reduce or better organize your friends. 

5 Good Reasons To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Page

This weekend, I will convert my personal profile into a Facebook Page, something that I read about doing some time ago in a Mashable post.  For me, I think this is going to be useful 5 reasons:

1. Leverage your best URL: I can start to use www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava as my official Facebook page URL instead of my personal profile URL, which is what it is now. This is a BIG motivator for me to make this change because I really want to be able to use a better and more logical URL at events (my current Facebook Author Page URL is www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor). 
2. More effectively segment people by relationships: It will be easier to separate my work colleagues and acquaintances from my closer friends and family who I know in person (and have generally met!)
3. Handle pending friend requests: It will give me a solution for how to handle all the backlog of pending friend requests that I have. I am going to approve everyone over the weekend and then convert the page. 
4. Allow relationships to scale: I will no longer be limited by the 5000 friend maximum that a personal profile has, which means my page will be able to scale over time. 
5. Enable better privacy control + Share better content: One reason I don't share too much about my family and kids is because I don't have a more personal way to do it. After this, I can share more personal thoughts and images with my smaller circle of friends - something that I have wanted to be able to do for a long time.

What Are The Risks?

There are a few big risks that I have been considering related to this, as well as how I might be able to handle them:

1. Multiple Facebook Pages: Given that I already have an Author page for myself, converting my personal profile will give me two pages for myself. This is not a problem that I have found a great solution for yet (so please let me know if you have one!).  There is a page on Facebook about how to merge two pages, but otherwise I may try to contact Facebook directly to find a way to do this and combine the fans.
2. Losing past content and conversations: The help page for migrating a page clearly says that all your profile photos will remain, but the other content such as wall posts and messages will be lost - so you need to download them before converting. For some people this may be a big problem, but I never tended to use Facebook messages a lot, and my wall posts are about moments in time so while I would love to have access to them, I am ok with losing them because the benefits of migrating my profile to a page are higher. 
3. Annoying friends by trying to turn them into "fans": This is probably my biggest concern, because of the inherent rudeness of turning someone who wants to be your "friend" into what is essentially a "fan" even though Facebook doesn't use that term anymore. Part of my method for dealing with it is to write this post and publicize WHY I am doing this so people who already follow me understand my reasons. The other better reason is because I think that the content I am able to share with people will improve because I can share what they ACTUALLY care about. Having a Facebook Page helps me to separate my more marketing related thoughts and ideas which MOST of my friends who are not in marketing don't really care about.

So, taking those pieces together - I have decided it's time to finally do it. In case you happen to be following me on any of these places, thanks and I hope you continue to stay there. If this change makes you angry or somehow otherwise unhappy, I'm truly sorry. And for those who just want to see how the experience goes, here are a few links to my existing Facebook pages:

http://www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava (Currently my personal profile)

http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor (Currently my Facebook Author Page)

NOTE: I will likely come back to this post after several weeks and share an update on how the experience went - in case anyone is considering doing the same thing in the future. 

Update: Why NOT To Update Your Personal Profile Into A Facebook Page

Let's just say I wish I had done a bit more research on this process before taking the plunge to migrate my profile.  After having a few issues, I read these two posts which I highly recommend you follow the links to read right now:

• http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/facebook-profile-migration-warning/
• http://www.zeldman.com/2011/03/05/migrating-from-a-conventional-facebook-account-to-a-public-figure-fan-page-%E2%80%93-a-report-from-the-trenches/

For my own experience, there were a few things that I wish I had considered before which might have impacted my decision to migrate my page.

1. Facebook URLs don't transfer - One of the main reasons I wanted to change my profile to my page was so that I could use the URL I had registered as my public facing URL. When you convert your page, you lose the URL - a strange policy since anyone who has a profile and wants to migrate to page would probably want to keep any URL they have.
2. The "Facebook Suicide Moment" is painful - When you first migrate your account and it shows up, your profile is gone right away, but your new page has 0 likes. The immediate result is that you think you just killed yourself on Facebook and lost all your friends. Eventually after a couple of hours your friends come back as likes, but it's a traumatic experience - be warned!
3. Profiles can't be added to pages - Once you convert your account, if you then want to create a separate personal profile (as I did) then you will need to create a SEPARATE account in order to do that.  I wanted to keep all my accounts under one umbrella, and though I could create a new profile and then make that an admin on all my pages to control it centrally, it is still a unwanted extra step.
4. Friends can't be easily re-added to a profile - Perhaps the toughest thing about this migration, as Christina Warren shared in her post linked above is that you can't add all the friends that you want to because Facebook thinks that you are spamming people even though you actually know them.

So I am going to try and find a Facebook connection who can help me migrate my page back into my profile (I already submitted an online request).  After that, I will likely take the manual step of trying to reduce my friends on my personal profile to only family, friends and those whom I have met in person.  Wish me luck.

Final Update: How My Experience Ended Up (11/11/11)

After trying unsuccessfully to get my page converted back, I have moved ahead with my original plan.  So now the fans on my official Page have doubled and that is now going to be my page moving forward.  I created a separate personal profile and now have made that mostly private and am only accepting friend invitations there from family and people that I know in real life or have an actual personal connection to (rather than just a shared interest in marketing, for example).  Here are a few things I've finally learned about this process, as well as a few ongoing sources of frustration:

1. Page name is lost - I have officially lost my original URL that I had associated with my personal profile when that profile was converted to a page.  I am working through a Facebook connection to get it back, but in case you are very attached to the URL you currently have for your personal page, you may want to reconsider converting that profile into a page because you will lose that URL.
2. Friend network is tough to rebuild - You can add your friends based on Facebook's suggestion tool to your new personal profile, but after adding a few - you will continually be blocked because Facebook assumes that you are spamming.  The end result is that you may have to wait months to add people who you legitimately know because you can't send them invites and they don't realize that you are no longer friends and have converted them into "likers" of your page instead.  There seems to be no way around this. 
3. The "Admin" Hack - One workaround that you will figure out quickly is due to the fact that your profile that you now converted into a page will only let you log into the page and not add your personal profile to the same account.  That means you will now have two accounts, but the hack to get around this is to add your new account and profile as an adminstrator of any pages that you manage.  Then you can manage all your pages from your new personal account directly.

Ultimately, the entire experience of doing this was useful to get all my fans onto a single page, but has exposed some serious usability problems with Facebook when it comes to doing a more complex task like this.  That coupled with the near impossiblity of using Facebook to accomplish a simple task (such as letting any of your friends or family who live in NY know that you will be there next weekend) makes Facebook a major pain to use as a primary social network.  It is not surprising several people I respect like Chris Brogan are actively moving away from Facebook to Google+. One bottom line result of this entire experience is that I will likely start to do the same myself. 

Why Personal Branding Is So Misunderstood

Personal branding has a branding problem. If most people in business today were asked to describe someone who had a personal brand, the first image that often comes to mind is of the often-ridiculed "social media guru" persona - someone who talks endlessly about social media and is well known online for it, but has little real experience at anything beyond talking about themselves. Others might think of someone with a big personality who has used social media expertly to amplify their success. Earlier today a journalist for CNN/Fortune ignited this debate about the value (or lack of value) in a personal brand through an article that featured Scott Monty from Ford*.

In the piece, Scott was portrayed as someone whose "personal brand doesn't take a back seat to anyone else's -- not even that of Ford Motor Co., his employer." Many commenters have already jumped on the article throughout the day to defend Scott as a great guy and not the "sanctimonious self-serving asshat" as one commenter felt he was portrayed as in the article. This is not the first time that a debate about personal branding has erupted pitting the believers against the skeptics, and it likely won't be the last.

Is personal branding becoming a catchphrase to describe those who are using social media as a drip pan for their overflowing egos or is it just misunderstood? As someone who has spent considerable time building a personal brand while working at a large company, this is a question I have struggled with before and I believe it comes through to six main assumptions (some truth and some fiction):

The FICTION About Personal Branding

1. Personal branding is about ego instead of reputation. Ego is a dirty word, which carries with it the notion of a misbehaved, arrogant, generally pompous individual. The truth is, we all have egos - but a good personal brand is all about reputation. When you have one, people know something about you before you walk in the door. Hardly anyone would argue that your reputation is important, but somehow the label of "personal brand" became disconnected from that.
2. Personal brands are only grown at the expense of corporate brands. A main point from the Forbes piece seemed to be that if Scott Monty was growing his personal brand, then he was not doing everything he could be doing for Ford. Yet when we look at successful sales people or executives who post record sales or perform well and move on to bigger and higher paying jobs ... generally they are not lambasted for building their own reputation while successfully contributing to the company they work for. Personal brands are the same.
3. Only certain types of individuals have personal brands. When it comes to discussions of personal branding, there are certain types of individuals that you might point to as having strong personal brands - when the truth is that we all have personal brands. In an age where our virtual identity extends beyond just who we are in person and also encapsulates our profile on LinkedIn or the networks we join on Facebook - each of us has a digital reputation and that equates to a personal brand. Already, this personal brand impacts how people are searching for jobs and is likely to extend further to more parts of business as well.

The TRUTH About Personal Branding

1. Many personal brands START egotistical. As I have shared in blog posts before, it is much easier to be egotistical than to be open online. In fact, the place where most people start when using social media tools is on the more egotistical side, just talking about themselves. It is not a sign of raging arrogance, but of initial naivety. When you are not used to "engaging" online, it is easier to just talk about yourself. Eventually, the good personal brands get past this and become something more robust.
2. High profile tension between personal brands and companies will continue. There have already been several stories of individuals who built a personal brand and had difficulty remaining in their corporate positions and this will continue. To attribute this only to a phenomena that happens for personal branding, however, would be a mistake. There are situations every day where people outgrow roles at companies and move on, for many reasons. Growing a personal brand will continue to be one of these reasons, but should not be singled out.
3. Personal branding matters because PEOPLE matter. I have been vocal for several years now about the premise that people make decisions to buy from a company or talk about it based on the personal relationship they have with individuals who work there as much as the association they have with the product. If you have ever recommended a product that you didn't buy to someone who needed it, you know this well. Companies with personality succeed because they create a deep emotional connection with customers, and personality comes from individuals. If the faceless company is dying, as I believe it is in every industry, then more and more companies will need to hire people with strong personal brands and this tension between the individual and the company will be even more present in business.

The solution, in my opinion, is not to single out and vilify the people who are visibly working to balance personal brands with their employers', but instead to treat them as examples of a future in the business world that is rapidly approaching for us all.

*Disclaimer - Ford is a client of Ogilvy (my employer) and Scott is a personal friend of mine. This post was in no way solicited by either and represents only my honest opinion about personal branding.

5 Marketing Lessons From Fast Company's Influencer Project

Who is the most influential person online? That is the tantalizing question behind the Influencer Project, a brilliantly conceived marketing campaign from Fast Company magazine dedicated to getting people to engage with the idea of online influence and pass along their participation to their entire social networks. The Influencer Project is a simple site that gets you to register with a few details, include your photo and then spits out a custom URL for you to use in all your influential efforts online. The more people you get to click on your URL, the more influence scores you can generate for yourself. (Note - the link above is to my personal URL)

The payoff, as with many of these types of campaigns, is personal reputation and bragging rights - but for the growing ranks of people for whom social media offers an additional limb upon which to balance their virtual identities this reputation is more important than money. It could be considered a simple journalistic effort to do this, but if you look at how the project has been executed, it offered a great case study on how to use the power of the Internet to engage people and build an audience online.

1. Have a strategic message behind your campaign. The idea of seeking the most influential person online could have been done by any publication, but the fact that Fast Company has chosen to do it sends a strong message about how they want to be perceived: as the magazine that people who are highly influential online read. There are plenty of choices to fit this category, but Fast Company has long been one of my favourite printed publications that I actually subscribe to in print format and read every copy of cover to cover because of their dedication to merging the worlds of online and offline together to paint a picture of the future of business. It is why I have written for them before and why I often recommend the magazine to colleagues.
2. Make it easy to spread the word. Core to this idea is the fact that every participant gets a shortened URL to use for their own bio. This URL is what anyone can use to pass along the promotion to their social network and is also the primary way that the site can measure your influence. You can also integrate your Twitter and Facebook profiles, but unlike other promotions that can turn into popularity contests through the number of friends and followers you have - the Influencer Project is focused on actual action. The more clicks you generate, the higher your influence score.
3. Support your promotion with your core business. In the case of Fast Company, their business is producing editorial content. Instead of just sticking a banner on their site and sending out some emails to their subscribers, they are also integrating the Influencer Project into their editorial by releasing a series of interviews with influential people online. The first was with Gary Vaynerchuck and presumably the others they do will help add more context to the idea of influence online and take advantage of Fast Company's editorial voice as a way to bring more people into the Influencer Project.
4. Have multiple payoffs to attract more participants. The ultimate payoff, as I noted above, is the ego stroke that having your photo appear larger will give and that will likely drive many people to participate. Fast Company will also publish a large photo in their magazine with a spread of all the participants as well - which adds a dimension to the reason for participating and likely will attract people for whom the online credit may not be enough.
5. Integrate long term brand assets with a short term campaign. One mistake many marketers make is to drive a lot of attention and engagement around a short term effort without generating any longer term value for their brand. Fast Company has the Influencer Project, which will have a definitive start and finish, but they also integrate it with their branded Facebook and Twitter pages, which are longer term assets for the brand. By doing so, they can use the spike in activity around the Influence Project as a way to build greater long term value for their brand and a bigger base of engaged people that they will be able to promote content and activities to in the future.

Rohit's Custom URL for the Influencer Project: http://fcinf.com/v/a7en

Update 07/07/10 - For more context on this campaign and how it attempts to track influence, check out Amber Naslund's great post countering Fast Company on how they are confusing ego with influence. She has a great point about how this is an overly simplistic and ego driven way to track whether people have influence online. Though I agree it is an incomplete metric in terms of influence, I still think there are many marketing lessons you could take from this effort as I talked about in my post - but I found her alternate take on the campaign made me think more deeply about it and I highly recommend you read her post and decide how you land on this campaign for yourself.

SXSW And The Power Of Nametags

I remember a cold morning in January, piling onto the Metro and heading with hundreds of thousands of other excited and frozen people to stand outside and watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. As you would expect, emerging in DC there were tons of vendors selling every kind of souvenir imaginable. Bobble head dolls, tshirts, mugs, and American flags spread as far as you could see - on the rare occasion that you could see, between the wall to wall people all seeking their spot. This was the largest mass event I had ever been to.

Walking off the Metro, though, the first thing someone gave me was a nametag. Actually, it was more than a nametag. It was an invitation not to be faceless at a faceless gathering. It was a challenge to be approachable to a stranger. I wore it most of the day. Before that day, I had heard about a guy who wore a nametag every day, 24-7. Around the same time of the inauguration, I got an email from someone named Scott Ginsberg who had read my book and thought we had similar philosophies.

As it turns out, Scott is the Nametag Guy - and has spoken all over the world about approachability, written a bunch of highly entertaining and useful books and also writes a great marketing blog. So, how does all this relate to SXSW? Scott and I started talking about this huge annual music, film and interactive festival that happens in Austin every March. They were accepting submissions for proposed panels and the deadline was closing soon.

So Scott and I started talking about approachability and authenticity and how it has become a huge buzzword for companies (and people). Both of us felt like there was more to it than that. Authenticity, in short, is overrated. So we decided to put together a proposal for a session like neither one of us has done before, all about what authenticity really means, and what you have to do to get past the buzzword facade.

Our session, "Authenticity Is Overrated" is now live as part of the Panel Picker - an online tool that SXSW uses to help determine which sessions to include in the program for 2010. Check out the description here, and if you feel it's worthy, please vote for it before September 4th!

6 Lessons From the Best Marketing Campaign Ever

Last month an unlikely underdog stunned the marketing world at the International Cannes Advertising Festival. At the show, a single marketing campaign took home a Grand Prix award in three categories simultaneously--direct, cyber and PR-- something that had never happened before in the 50+ year history of the show. Contrary to what you might expect, the unanimous winner of this unprecedented victory was not a Fortune50 brand with an advertising budget of millions, but a small Tourism board promoting a little known island off the Great Barrier Reef.

The winning campaign was called the "Best Job in the World" and was essentially a big online job search conducted through social media for a new "caretaker" for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. Done on a comparatively paltry marketing budget of just $1.7 million dollars and reliant on fortuitous PR and word of mouth, the campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.

Just two weeks ago on July 1, the winner of the competition--a 34-year-old British man named Ben Southall started blogging and touring around Queensland, finally bringing the competition to a close. For the next six months, he will be touring around Queensland, sharing his adventures through a video blog, writing, Twitter account and Flickr photos-- generating even more interest in Hamilton Island and all of Queensland in the process. The tangible results for the island are rolling in as well: Amway Australia chose it as the site of their upcoming annual conference, and domestic Aussie airline Virgin Blue just started flying a direct flight between Sydney and Hamilton Island, due to the rise in demand from travelers wanting to get to the island.

I realize that tourism and the travel industry may seem far removed from your business. Unfortunately, we don't all have the natural beauty of Hamilton Island to fall back on when starting our marketing campaigns. Still, a big part of the reason for the amazing success of this campaign was not what they were marketing, but how they used social media to do it. In that, there are some lessons anyone trying to promote a product or service could use:

1. Make it believable. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can't provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can't. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people's definition of a dream job might be.
2. It's not about how much you spend. One of the major benefits of smart public relations and social media is that it scales in a way that advertising typically doesn't. In other words, you don't have to pay more to get more. The real trick is to have something worthwhile to say that people can't help talking about. You need a good story.
3. Focus on content, not traffic. The typical marketing campaign focuses on traffic to some kind of site. For Tourism Queensland, the biggest payoff of this campaign was having over 34,000 videos on YouTube from people around the world talking about how much they love Queensland. Aggregate the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term and you'll start to understand the true impact of their campaign.
4. Create an inherent reason for people to share. Another element of this campaign that worked extremely well was the fact that there was voting enabled on the videos. What this meant was that after someone submitted their video, they had an incentive to share it with everyone in their social network online to try and get more votes.
5. Don't underestimate the power of content creators Most recent statistics point to some number between 1% and 10% of the user base of any social network are the active content creators. Though these percentages may seem small, the potential impact of some of these individuals are vast online. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next marketing campaign.
6. Give your promotion a shelf life. The best thing about this campaign may just be the content yet to come. Ben, the winner, just started blogging and sharing videos and photos, but the content is already engaging, high quality and inspires you to dream of making it to Queensland yourself. Over the next six months, his itinerary will take him across the state of Queensland and unlock many other unique opportunities. Best of all, this content will live on far beyond the time span of the campaign.

NOTE: This entry is republished from my guest blog post on FastCompany.com today.

The Personality Project: Women of Personality

There are generally three kinds of ideas. The most popular two are the ones that you act on right away and those that you never do anything about. Those are the majority. Most of us love the third kind. Those are the ideas that are too big or complex or important to do quickly, but that you simply cannot let die because of how you feel about them. Today I finally launched that kind of idea. Since Personality Not Included came out about a year ago - I have been getting emails from people sharing their experience with the book and how they felt about it's main premise that businesses (like people) need to have a strong and authentic personality.

Soon after the book launched, I noticed that many of these emails were coming from women working in professional roles and those that had started their own businesses. These female entrepreneurs were responding to the message of personality in a way that I didn't expect. So since that moment I started thinking about bringing those voices together. Of course, part of the reason would be to promote my book ... but like most authors the important thing for me was for my idea to find a home and actually help people change their careers or make their business more successful.

So today, you can download a free ebook called "The Personality Project: Women of Personality." It is an extension of a site that I launched some time ago with a similar mission - to get visionary people in many industries to talk about why personality matters. This ebook features 20 business women that I respect and admire who each agreed to share their story as part of the ebook. These include founders and CEOs, best selling authors, popular bloggers and online personalities and even the first woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic Ocean (and she's now making her way across the Pacific).

See the ebook embedded below and click on it to download a free PDF copy:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books marketing blogs

Once you get a chance to read it, please visit each of the contributors sites and blogs, buy their books and support their efforts. The best thing you can do is to validate their ideas and use their examples to improve your own business and your career. And then let them know they made a difference.

PS - If you mention this ebook on your blog or twitter or facebook or anywhere else online, use the tag #wop (on Twitter) or "WOP" (anywhere else) as this is the one that all the contributors will be watching and responding to.

Interview: Personal Branding For The Millennial Generation

If there is one thing you can learn from Dan Schawbel, it's how to choose a niche and own it. He's a 20-something social media consultant for EMC as his day job, but over the past several years he has focused his blog and extracurricular work on becoming a personal branding expert for the millennial generation. In that time, he's launched a magazine, written a blog and even created his own awards for personal branding, which was when I first connected with him.

His first book, titled Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success came out this week where he shares his lessons for creating a strong personal brand and the impact it can have on your career. In this interview he shares some insights from the book and offers an inside look at his path to where he is today.  It's a story worth paying attention to.

1. Why is a personal brand so important to someone just starting out in their career?

A personal brand is inescapable and inevitable, whether you're a high school student, CEO or consultant.  We've already been branded by many people without even realizing it.  The three reasons why every has a brand are that we are constantly being judged based on first impressions, we have to sell ourselves in order to accomplish anything and because we can adopt the same branding strategies that companies or products use.

When you're just starting out in your career, you have the opportunity to define your brand before others do it for you.  In Me 2.0, the first step in the personal branding process is called "discover your brand."  Without investing time in figuring out who you are, what you're capable of, what you're passionate about and establishing goals, you're truly lost.  The sooner you can get a grip on what your brand is, and how you want to position yourself in the marketplace, the more time you'll have to prepare for the real world if you're a college student and the less time you'll waste jumping from one career path to the next aimlessly.

2. Do you always need to know what you want to do in life in order to have a strong personal brand?

Rohit, understanding your brand is mandatory for your business success and overall happiness.  Being able to align your passion with expertise in a specific area is the key to living a great life.  Passion is the fuel that will push you through adversity and expertise allows you to fulfill customer needs (clients, teachers, etc).  The value you provide is a reflect of your brand and the reputation you build up by providing that value over the course of time, is what will allow you to become more successful.  Without cementing your brand in the first place, you'll waste your time on social networks, a blog, on a resume, etc.  Everyone needs to be able to write their own personal brand statement, which consists of "what you do" and "who you serve," and it better be a niche if you want to stand out among everyone else.

3. How do you effectively balance your work in building your own brand with your day job at EMC?

EMC has supported me from day one actually.  They've give me some additional flexibility to speak to organizations, colleges and to appear in the media on various occassions.  I'm in a very interesting situation because I was recruited by EMC, after being a product markter for a little over a year, for a brand new position that I got to co-create with the PR organization, called "social media specialist."  I've become the go-to-person for social media at EMC, so I get to work on some amazing projects, such as blogs, social media press releases and our various social accounts.  There is a mutual agreement and kinship between EMC and I, where EMC's brand helps build my credibility and in return, I help advance the brand with new social technologies.

I don't believe in work/life balance at all.  I think our professional and personal lives are converging as such a fast pace, that it's gauranteed that there will be no separation in the future.  I was telling a bunch of college seniors today at Boston University that when they enter the workforce, their co-workers and management will be friending them on Facebook.  Everyone just has to be wiser on how they support and project a positive personal brand.  Being associated with other brands means you have to think twice before you update Twitter or your Facebook status.

I put in over 100 hours of work a week.  I would say at least 50 hrs for EMC and at least 50 hrs for my other projects, such as my blog, magazine, and book.

4. Before getting the book deal, you launched your own blog and magazine. What did you learn from those experiences that helped you when it came to writing a book?

Rohit, this is a great question.  The second I launched my Personal Branding Blog back in March of 2007, was when I started marketing Me 2.0, without even knowing I was goin to write it.  The blog has build a solid reputation over time, being the #1 job blog by Careerbuilder last year and an AdAge top blog, like you have. Both the blog and magazine are assets that have thousands of subscribers each.  When the book came out, I notified subscribers of both, in addition to the rest of my marketing plan, that the book was available.  The blog and the magazine qualified the buyers of the book because they were interested in personal branding.  Each asset that I own helps promote another asset that I own.  It's one big happy family!

5. What is the biggest lesson college students usually take away from your presentations?

The main theme of my presentation and Me 2.0 is "command your career."  It's the idea that college students need to take ownership of their career and stop relying on everyone else to drive it.  Instead of being in the passenger seat, it's time to take the wheel and press on the gas.  At the end of the day, career success or failure lies in their hands.  They shouldn't be what their parents or teachers want them to be.  Brand YOU is independent.  "Command your career" was my books original title because it was the feeling I had after I was recruited based on my passion.  Instead of being asked to do things, people were coming to me for expertise in social media.

6. Now that you have a book out and are doing all this speaking, what's next for you?

I need to unwind a little because I'm very stretched right now and it's probably not healthy.  I have to take a hard look at everything I'm doing and focus on the areas that will help me the most.  I'm also thinking of writing another book for a different age group on the topic of personal branding.  I'll continue speaking to gain more experience and I'll continue to think of new theories and applications, while keeping up-to-date with technology.  I have a plan, sure, but things are so unpredictable that it's hard to be specific.  My end goal with the book (and in life) is to get every college onboard to have a personal branding course.

Why You Need To Hire Employees With Strong Personal Brands

Did you ever realize that actors in films are essentially short term employees? The model for big Hollywood films is that actors lend their personal brands to a film as much as their acting ability, and in return the studios leverage those personal brands to get people interested in seeing a film. It is a traditional model, but it works and has for many years. Now think about your business and how you hire new employees or foster superstar employees today. Are you still only focusing on the skills and accomplishments of potential employees? More importantly, how are you treating your current employees who are actively building their personal brands through factors like having a personal blog, being part of online communities and generally having a strong identity online?

The problem with many organizations is that they don't value personal brand builders enough. Often in the corporate world, as an employee raises their personal brand they are more likely to be treated with skepticism. Called self-promoters (or worse), these growing superstars are often alienated and driven out of organizations by managers or colleagues that feel threatened by them. Of course, some personal brand builders actually are rabid self-promoters to the detriment of the places they work. But the majority are genuinely strong performers who have the ability to use their personal social capital to be even better at their job if you can find a way to embrace them. 

In Hollywood films, the production companies realize that what they are buying (in part) are the personal profiles of the actors in the film. They NEED their "employees" to have a strong personal brands. Sometimes it backfires with high profile meltdowns or personal issues on set. But most of the time it works and everyone makes money. Your business is no different. In the future, the brands that succeed will be the ones who employ the people who have the most social capital. Your next hire should be someone who not only has the right skills, but also a rapidly growing personal brand. The success your business can have in the social media era may depend on it.

UPDATE: Check out this great follow up post from Torley - "How to tell if your personality superstar is a narcissistic egomaniac."

UPDATE: Another good follow up generating lots of discussion from Geoff Livingston on the dangers of focusing too much on personal branding versus substance - "I don't care about your personal brand."