Rock the Vote: My New Site has Been Nominated for the CSS Design Awards

I am out-of-this-world excited to announce http://www.ShawnGraham.me (my new digital home) has been nominated for the CSS Design Awards—a contest recognizing the world’s greatest websites and an inspirational showcase celebrating emerging talent.

Check out my new site and, if you like what you see, show some love by casting your vote. Just click on the thumbnail of ShawnGraham.me to cast your official nod.

And if you would, please ask friends, family, your friends’ families and your family’s friends to vote as well. Winning this award would mean the world to Moly and I—over the past few months we put our heart and soul into bringing the site to life.

I hope you enjoy my new virtual digs as much as we enjoyed creating them.

I have a brand spanking new website.

For the past few months, I’ve been conspiring with a rock star designer on a complete overhaul of my virtual digs to coincide with the launch of my freelance career consulting and marketing communications business.

For the past few months, I’ve poured my heart and soul into every word of every page. And today I’m excited to announce that my new site is officially live and in living color.

So welcome! Please let me show you around…

I wanted my bio to be a little unique — I wanted to share my story: from the apple farm on which I grew up that was purchased by my grandparents in the early 1900s, to my first entrepreneurial venture at age 10 to today. Oh, and there are even a few pictures to look at.

Since consulting is at the heart of my business, I wanted to provide a menu of services for each of my focus areas brought to you in four snazzy buckets: career, higher education, entrepreneurs, and medium to large businesses. Along those same lines, I also thought it was important explain how I work with each client starting with our first conversation.

Next, you’ll find speaking which includes a real, live glamour shot from a recent presentation to a group of eager and highly-talented MBA students at Duquesne University. There you’ll also find an overview of presentation topics, a list of the organizations at which I’ve presented, and some good old-fashioned testimonials.

My blog includes a fresh new design, tighter categories, links to sites I like, and of course no blog would be complete without Twitter and RSS feeds. I also came up with a fancy new name—Creative Combustion.

The press page includes my media mentions in a few well-known publications and is meant to establish instant credibility as well as thoroughly impress my mom (pronounced “mum”).

Finally, I’ve added a fancy new contact form to make it easier for us to connect. So what are you waiting for? Drop me a line to let me know what you think of my new digs or so we can start to explore how we might be able to work together.

Courting Your Career on Viralogy

Recently, I had a chance to chat with Jun Loayza of Viralogy fame about the parallels between dating and the job search and all things career adjacent.

Check it out.

Me 2.0-the personal branding playbook

Whether you’re looking for your next job, positioning yourself for a promotion, or hoping to start your own business, your ultimate success will begin or end with personal branding.

Targeted at college students and young professionals, Dan Schawbel’s new book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, provides a comprehensive crash course on personal branding that includes easy to understand tips and strategies, expert quotes, and even a personal branding toolkit.

Defining and managing your brand doesn’t just happen, it takes a combination of proper planning and execution. And today you’ll get a chance to hear from an expert on the subject—someone Fast Company calls “a personal branding force of nature.”

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. In addition to managing the Personal Branding Blog, Dan works as a Social Media Specialist at EMC Corporation where he has spearheaded the company’s Twitter, Facebook, social media press release/newsroom, social bookmarking and blogging strategy in the past year. All that, and he’s only about three year’s out of undergrad.

Me: What would you say to any college students out there who might want to dismiss personal branding as something only marketing majors should care about?

Dan: Everyone should be a marketing major at heart because we all have to market ourselves in a daily basis. We are always being judged based off of first impressions and we always have to sell our ideas to management, our teachers, friends and family. We need to lead with influence, so that people support us as we navigate through our careers. It will be very hard to get an internship or job, without the right marketing mindset these days. For instance, I think everyone should have their own business card and website.

Me: With undergrads being one of the primary audiences for your book, how early do you think they should start thinking about their brand?

Dan: If I was a freshman right now who understood personal branding, I wouldn’t have to even apply for jobs when I graduated. Personal branding is the best career protection you can have because you’ll have a strong network, a strong sense of being and a strong determination to succeed. The sooner the better in my opinion.

Me: What’s one tip you can share on how to effectively use ebranding to further your career?

Dan: Claim your domain name (yourfullname.com), yesterday!

Me: How important is it to have a personal marketing plan?

Dan: It’s very important because a good personal marketing plan will align with your development plan and give you a good sense of what you can pull off, for what price and when you should execute. It’s also good to know what tools out there are available to you and which ones make sense for your brand. A personal branding plan, just like a business would have a marketing plan, is essential to help get your name out there over and over again, which is essentially what branding is all about.

Me: I know I sometimes struggle with trying to balance managing my in-person networks while also maintaining virtual networks through sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What advice do you have on how readers can decide which social networking sites to join and which ones to avoid?

Dan: You need to choose the ones with the largest volume (Facebook has 200 million users), the most credibility (LinkedIn has Bill Gates) and the ones that are most relevant to you and your industry. Avoid ones that don’t fit any of these.

Me: It’s one thing to develop your brand, but another to maintain it. Will you talk a little bit about reputation management?

Dan: Once your name is all over the internet (or at least you hope it is), you’ll want to keep a pulse on what people are saying about your personal brand. Reputation management is important because if people are negatively portraying your brand, you’ll want to intercept that before it spreads virally throughout the internet.

Me: If you could pick one personal brand not your own, who would you choose and why?

Dan: Right now, Shaquille O’Neal has impressed me a lot with his personal brand. Aside from him being famous for being a top NBA basketball player, his use of Twitter has really helped people keep in touch with him. Some Twitter users have even met him in person after a tweet. He’s able to remain transparent and authentic, without having a PR person take control.

Me: What inspired you to write this book and what do you want people to get out of it?

Dan: A lot of my friends were having trouble getting jobs and they were begging for a resource. Also, I feel like I was born to do what I’m currently doing because I was always interested in self-marketing back in college and I have a deep interest in social media and how people can use these tools to connect in meaningful ways and form a “fan base” of some sort. I think it’s all extremely powerful and the end result is that you can monetize your passion and enjoy life.

Social Media Overload: Don’t Twitter Yourself Out

This is a post I wrote for Brazen Careerist…

Is it just me, or does work really seem to get in the way of blogging, managing your Facebook page, adding new LinkedIn contacts, sharing snippets on Twitter and, if you’re really bored and looking for a little nostalgia, logging in to MySpace?

Like me, most of the people I “follow” on social networking sites have full-time jobs. Yet somehow they are still able to find time to manage their own micro multimedia conglomerates aggregating and sharing information on cool new websites and resources that most of us haven’t even heard of.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m either suffering from Twitter envy or everyone else is suffering from Twitter addiction…not only are they posting five, six or more updates an hour, they almost always refer to value added, meaningful stuff. Meanwhile, I’m tweeting about being stuck in traffic or about how much I like pickles–two things that aren’t that exciting and don’t add a lot of value unless you’re a lobbyist for light rail systems or the pickle marketing association. Yet, if I go a day without adding something profound to Twitter, I feel like I’ve dropped the ball—even though I only have a modest number of “followers.”

To keep up with the “in crowd,” I try to find five or ten minutes during the day to uncover something profound to share with the masses while realizing that every time I update my status on Facebook, there’s a good chance I’m alerting clients, coworkers and even my boss that I’m surfing the web.

Managing my modest “online presence” is an important part of my personal and professional brand, but it’s not like I can use searching for articles to share with folks on Twitter as an excuse with my boss if I miss on key deliverables or don’t complete an important project on time. In fact, during my provisional review last week, all we talked about was my on-the-job performance—not my blog, the number of LinkedIn contacts I have in my network, how many followers I have on Twitter, or even my Facebook status.

Which brings me to the questions I’ve been kicking around…

• Should you tell your boss you’re spending time at work on social networking sites when it’s not work related?
• How much time is too much time on any of these sites when you’re at work?
• As a manager, what do you do if members of your team are letting Twitter and Facebook get in the way work?