The 25 best blogs nov: Building

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Friday, February 24, 2017

Book Review: Known, The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age

All of the personal branding gurus out there are leaving out an important piece of the puzzle.

Yes, you should try to discover your life’s passion. But what’s next?

According to Mark W. Schaefer, consultant, speaker, and author of Known, the missing piece is applying your passion in service of a long-term goal.

For example, talking about my obsession with cupcakes is not going to help my personal brand unless I’m opening a bakery.

Mark is a masterful teacher, and he uses extensive interviews with successful people to give the reader actionable advice. He pulls back the curtain on regular people who found the right niche, built an engaged audience, and then patiently activated that audience to achieve a goal.

He’s the right person to talk about this subject, since he left the corporate world and started over as a consultant, using blogging as his calling card to become known in a new professional niche. His blog, grow, is now one of the top marketing blogs in the world.

My favorite thing about this book is that it’s written in Mark’s inimitable voice, as if you’re old friends. It’s not a stuffy, by-the-numbers business book.

Each person interviewed brings a new insight to the story, whether it’s the “grandpa who shoots things on YouTube,” or the blogging pediatrician. You’ll just have to read the book to meet these interesting characters.

There is also a separate workbook that takes the lessons from the book and provides a step-by-step walkthrough of the process to become “known.” Each question or prompt will provoke deeper thought and encourage you to put some meat on the bones of your professional plan.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who is struggling to be heard and recognized above the din. You’ll find inspiration and solid ideas in one entertaining package.

Disclosure: I consider Mark a friend, but he did not request this review or send me a free book (what’s up with that?). I forked out my own hard-earned dollars to purchase it, and these are my unvarnished opinions.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

The post Book Review: Known, The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age appeared first on Successful Blog.

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Successful Blog

Book Review: Known, The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age

Thursday, January 19, 2017

My Stake in the Ground: What I’m Building This Year

Local business It’s been just over a year since my last company failed/got acquired, and I’m excited to announce the project I’m going to be working on for the foreseeable future!

I’ve long been frustrated by the state of marketing information for small businesses. It’s what led me to start my last company, and, today, a bit more than year after that company failed, I still get the strongest sense that that’s where I want to be as a founder and CEO. What’s out there now stinks!

Small Business Owners’ Issues with Marketing

In talking to small business owners, two big issues regarding marketing come up consistently:

1) “I have no time to do any of this.” What I see here that has huge potential: A system that makes intelligent recommendations for you and then offers you the choice to do that or hire it out to a trusted provider for a fee. We can also show you how much time each item is going to take to do.

2) “I don’t know what will give me the highest ROI.” What we can do here: Use intelligent recommendations to give you the highest-leverage items to do first. For instance, if you don’t have a website with a title optimized for your SEO keywords, we’d highlight that first, as opposed to–say–adding ALT tags to your images, which is going to be a lower-value item.

I still don’t know why this doesn’t exist. It’s where we were headed previously with Whoosh Traffic as we pivoted into MarketVibe.

My best guess on why it isn’t out there today is that small businesses are notoriously hard to gather as customers, and they don’t like to pay a lot of money for marketing. Still, HubSpot seems to be doing well (they currently claim 15,000+ paying customers on their homepage), and email marketing companies like MailChimp and Aweber are also thriving.

Going Back to Where My Heart Is

When we went for this out of Techstars a year and a half ago, I got dissuaded from the small business market and I lost my focus. That was my failing–as CEO, I should have stuck to my guns and said, “Look, this is our market!” I’ve always felt most passionate about serving that market. It’s hard when you are told by investors and mentors over and over that it’s difficult to build for that market. I think they’re right–it is hard–but I should have done it anyway, because it’s where my heart is.

The other big mistake I made was focusing on the software first. This time, I’m going to build it totally differently. I’m going to build it as education first, and then gradually work my way into the software/intelligent recommendations side.

Who I’m Looking For as Beta Testers

I’m looking for Real Business Owners (small businesses with a physical presence–this could be anyone from people who have a retail store, like John, to people who are personal trainers, coaches, or massage therapists), and build a course that shows them how to market their products or services effectively.

I’ll walk through what John and I have done to grow his business from a “pocket change” business generating less than $ 2,000/month to a powerhouse that is on track to generate over a quarter of a million dollars in revenue this year. By the way, we’ve done that in 6 months and we’ve spent less than $ 2,000 on marketing. And we have an ugly-ass website. It is possible!

This is what I most want to do. This is my stake in the ground. I’m tired of people telling me that I shouldn’t work with small business owners because they are difficult and frugal. Great! I am also difficult and frugal. BlogThis!Share to X Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Building The Bridge: Why Compliance Is Key To Digital Currency’s Success

I occasionally see people in the digital currency industry question the value of compliance. By this I mean working with regulators, law

Continue reading on The Coinbase Blog »

Stories by Brian Armstrong on Medium

Building The Bridge: Why Compliance Is Key To Digital Currency’s Success

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Building A Modern Brand: Strategy, Creativity and Agility

Building brands in the mad men era was a relatively straight forward endeavor…

A brand needed to effectively communicate its value to the consumer, plainly stating its functional benefits and for the more enduring brands—connecting with consumers at the emotional level typically through a story told via television led advertising campaigns. The most iconic of brands over time, mastered the art of really digging into the «soul» of a brand. How it was differentiated from others and how it should be expressed in all parts of the world.

Building brands became something of a religious pursuit, with high priests and gatekeepers of brands in place to ensure that a brand did not become diluted. These guardians of brands created all kinds of doctrine meant to keep a brand’s value proposition pure and true. Brands have always been built and expressed based on how they met consumers needs at the rational and emotional levels. More recently, brand stewards have been grappling with the notion of a brand’s «purpose»—industry shorthand for how a brand’s «values» take into account societal context. Can a brand stand for something bigger than itself? Does it exist for a higher purpose? Is there a cultural tension point that a brand has a right to participate in (or lead) a conversation around?

Data from Edelman’s Brandshare study concluded that today’s consumers look for and evaluate their relationship with a brand beyond traditional rational and emotional benefits into areas that veer into societal. Well over half of 10,000 consumers polled globally indicated that brands having a clear «mission and purpose» influenced how they felt about that brand.

In short, today’s marketers must ask themselves—does our brand stand for something? Does it stand against something else?

It is this tension point that takes us back to the drawing board when it comes to the «soul» of a brand. But we cannot divorce this exercise from how a brand must be brought to life. The re-visiting of a brand’s foundation requires taking another look at how it comes to life an today’s always on, multi channel world. Modern brands must master the relationship between these three key facets for how brands sustain their relationship with consumers after answering what it stands for and against:

Strategy
It’s tempting to think at the program level (campaigns, etc.) that once a foundational brand strategy is set—we can go right to ideas and tactics both big, medium and small. Avoid the temptation. Strategy at the program level should be the nucleus of any program and it should inform and influence all ideas. It should present clearly the balance between meeting business, brand and consumer/customer objectives.

Creativity
Never has creativity been so important. People are rarely motivated by statistics and logic—but rich stories and experiences can lead to desired action. However, telling stories and designing useful, usable and desirable experiences requires out of the box thinking. Stories don’t get shared by people unless they are exceptionally compelling, entertaining or educational. There are thousands of apps to compete with and digital influencers can often times build audiences better than brands can. Creativity is now complicated.

Agility
Probably the newest and most disruptive dynamic out of the three. Most brands grapple with agility because they are still operating in a construct built for the industrial broadcast era of marketing. As I’ve outlined in Responsive Marketing, it’s adding a layer of smaller more nimble initiatives than can help inform and even optimize the bigger more comprehensive programs that are still linear in nature. What both layers have in common is that they must move away from the launch and walk away model and move toward a model that puts various «things» in a live environment and adapts along the way. Google’s Ben Jones recently pointed out the elephant in the room when it comes to agility:

«Advertising has radically shifted to be more agile, useful, and relevant in the always-on age of mobile. Yet the foundation of creative work, the creative brief, remains largely unchanged.»

The creative brief shouldn’t go away, but if you truly buy into the notion of agility then the doctrine of briefs and briefing must become more dynamic than static while preserving the ability to influence big, medium and even small ideas.

It’s been said that the more things change, the more they remain the same. In the context of building and preserving brands—this holds somewhat true. A brand becomes a brand only the the hearts and minds of consumers. And today’s consumers have ever evolving values, demographics and technology/lifestyle habits. We didn’t walk around with super computers in our pockets years ago and millennials are a far cry from baby boomers.

Modern brands will be built and re-built on foundations which reflect these evolutions but they must come to life informed by strategy, inspired by creativity and designed for agility.