Everyday Influence

My Personal Branding Interview with Dan Schawbel

I had the great pleasure to be interviewed this week by Dan Schawbel. 

Dan is a leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He is the author of the bestselling career book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 2009).  The interview was for his blog which is syndicated by Reuters, Forbes, Hoovers, Fox Business and The Chicago Sun-Times, among others. 

Dan has interviewed over 160 success individuals such as Marcus Buckingham, Tony Hsieh, John C. Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Phil Town, Don Tapscott, Marshall Goldsmith, David Allen, Larry Winget, John Kotter, Robert B. Cialdini, Keith Ferrazzi, Carmine Gallo, Matt Mullenweg, Steven Baker, David Meerman Scott, Mark Sanborn, Tucker Max, and many others.  To be among this impressive group of renowned industry experts interviewed by Dan is a great honor!

Through the interview we discussed the following topics:

• The best way to build ones personal brand with social media
• The most important aspect of my personal brand
• How social media has impacted the landscape of business and marketing communications - with the emergence of business-to-person (B2P) marketing
• The pitfalls and best practices in managing the demanding set of ‘crowed rules’ inherent in social media and the Web 2.0 environment.

The full interview can be found on Dan’s Blog.  I want to thank Dan for the great exchange, and opportunity to be profiled!

Factors of Influence

Duncan Brown at Influencer 50 posted a blog today where he discusses the effectiveness of sponsored conversations (paid media) as a credible form of influence.

In a comment, I offered that at SAP we have found that there are generally three factors that combine to have a very powerful form of influence on most any decision. The three factors are: Awarness, Reputation and Experience. I detail this more in a blog post from last year.

Paid media (through advertising or sponsored conversations) and unpaid media (through traditional media and blogger relations) are great for generating broad awareness for companies and important industry issues.  However, awareness alone (regardless of the channel) will not entirely influence or motivate one to take action (e.g. purchase or engage).

This is where experience comes in. We have found that ‘experience’ is perhaps the single most important and credible factor that influences any individual or community to take action.  This this is very hard to ‘buy.’

Experience (good or bad) is authentic and extremely credible. This is were Duncan makes an excellent point that companies should focus on generating advocacy by creating remarkable products and services.

The more that companies can generate advocacy/endorsement based on the positive ‘experience’ of their products and/or services through their key stakeholder groups (e.g. customers, partners, employees, etc.) the better situated they are to establish a movement that will increase competitive advantage and/or other desirable results.