Fast Company Blog: Competing Priorities? Promoting Yourself and Your Employer via Social Media

You’ve got a little free time at work and you decide to tweet about topics of personal interest. Your witty quips, observations, and links to YouTube videos of your dog barking at the vacuum cleaner are all well and good, but what does your employer get out of it? And, of equal importance, how do you balance time promoting yourself and the company?

To find out, I asked Dan Schawbel, personal branding expert and author of the forthcoming Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future. Dan knows a thing or 10 about managing competing priorities. He was able to parlay his day job into a personal branding empire. He is currently Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, founder of the syndicated Personal Branding Blog, publisher of Personal Branding Magazine, and a columnist with BusinessWeek. Recently, Dan was also named to the prestigious Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list.

You were able to position and promote yourself as a personal branding expert while working as an employee. How were you able to successfully strike a balance between your personal self interests and those of your company?

I started working for EMC Corporation, a top 10 technology company, in 2006. After working there for a year, I began writing about ten blog posts a week on PersonalBrandingBlog.com. Within six months, I had started Personal Branding Magazine, and several other properties out of sheer passion and curiosity. I never mentioned my work, in the personal branding field, to my employer because it was a hobby to me at the time, and I didn’t feel like it conflicted with my full-time job. Once Fast Company wrote about my six month personal branding journey on August 1^st, 2007, my personal and professional lives converged. I was asked to speak at Google, and a Vice President at EMC hired me to be the first social media specialist for the company, a position I held for two years.

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Fast Company Blog Post: Differentiate Your Business – Improve Your “Over the Phone” Customer Experience

Many companies obsess over their customer experience, creating a fancy interactive Web site, finding just the right furniture for their reception area, and investing a ton of time and money implementing a CRM system to track customers’ preferences and shopping patterns. And how many companies spend the same amount of time and effort managing their “over the phone” customer experience?

On a whim, I called Zappos.com. With their cult-like following and a reputation for providing extraordinary customer service, I was curious to see how they approached the “over the phone” experience. In the interest of full disclosure, I have never purchased anything from Zappos.com and, before today had never called their customer service line.

Did Zappos.com go above and beyond, or were they just like everybody else? Read more.

Fast Company Blog Post: New Leaders – Find Your Poker Face or Perish

For most of my adult life, I was incredibly easy to read. I wore my heart, and most of my facial expressions, on my sleeve. On occasion, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Other times, such as in my high school English class where the teacher threw note cards at me after I rolled my eyes, it was. Growing up I was never much of a card player so I didn’t have the chance to really develop and practice my poker face and that has, on more than one occasion, hampered my ability to successfully navigate organizational politics (or high school English classes). In speaking with other extroverts in leadership roles, those who struggle with filtering and/or masking their emotions and reactions often have a difficult time progressing through an organization.

What can you do as a new leader to develop your poker face?

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Fast Company Blog Post: The Problem With Intuition-Based Decision Making

Professors pounded it into my head over and over again–businesses use data to carefully plan and execute their short- and long-

Professors pounded it into my head over and over again–businesses use data to carefully plan and execute their short- and long-term strategies. And that’s what I believed until I started interviewing for jobs. It seemed like every company I spoke with was fixated on growth–not because it made good business sense, but because they were fixated on chasing numbers. Open 500 stores this year, 2,000 next year, and 1,000,000 in year three. Will the local market be able to sustain that growth? Considering that now-bankrupt Circuit City was one of the companies I spoke with, I’m guessing not. Were they carefully looking at feasibility studies, evaluating the size of the markets they were hoping to enter? Or were they too busy opening up across the street from their key competitor in just about every possible city?

With an almost limitless amount of information at our disposal (years of historical data, complex analytical models, competitor benchmarking, etc.), you’d think more decisions would be deeply rooted in data analysis than they would on gut instinct. Yet, that’s often not the case.

Why not?

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Fast Company Blog Post: Building Buzz Around Your (Career) Brand

Marketing is marketing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business trying to attract and retain customers or an eager job seeker trying to capture the attention of potential employers. Your ultimate success or failure will depend on your ability to position yourself (or your product if you’re a business) that addresses a problem people will pay you to solve.

Last week, I had a chance to be a fly on the wall at “Building Buzz Around Your Brand,” an event hosted by Grasshopper.com and MassChallenge at the Microsoft New England Development Center on the campus of MIT. Beyond enjoying the cool digs, attendees also learned marketing tips from folks from Brainshark (an entrepreneurial company with more than 150 employees), Holland-Mark (an advertising agency that boasts an average of approximately 37 minutes per visit to their website), HubSpot (an inbound marketing software provider whose blog gets more than 250,000 hits per day), and Grasshopper.com (a company that provides a mix of products and services to entrepreneurs–oh, and they are also responsible for this really cool video). Each speaker shared his perspective on brand building with the more than 100 people who were in attendance–a diverse audience which included recent MBA graduates seeking employment, entrepreneurs hoping to bootstrap a startup, folks who are gainfully employed in the marketing space.

Which marketing tips can help you build a buzz and stand out from the thousands of other job seekers you’ll likely be competing against ala the Google Job Experiment?

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