Since Tom Peters first coined the expression Personal Branding in 1997 in a Fast Company article, there has been more and more hype around the concept and new terms such as career branding, employee branding personal mission statement, have seen the light of day. Mostly the discussion and application of Personal Branding is focused on how to obtain a new job or how to build a career for one-self. For that reason, when corporate and personal brands are discussed together the focus is mainly on topics such as Managing the conflict between a personal brand and a corporate brand.

In this article we will discuss the other side of the story, how working with personal branding can enhance the corporate brand. Let us look at a few different situations where the personal brand is supporting the corporate brand:

THE EXECUTIVE TEAM

Personal branding is all about having a clear identity for your own brand as well as being able to communicate in a manner that the recipient will accept and relate to your brand identity. If you are a member of the executive team, then being clear about your values and passions and how to communicate to different target audiences, will help you build a more loyal team that has a clear image of how you are.

This way of working with the personal brand will not only strengthen the corporate brand to the employees, but also to other stakeholders of the company.

THE SALES MEETING

The sales representatives are one of the most active communication channels for the company, and are very sensitive of how the brand is perceived. The same is true with the executives, the personal brand of the person is extremely important. Does the sales person believe in the same values as the company and the products? In what ways do they differ and how can we work with them in a conscious way. Imagine a sales representative for a company working with eco-transportation, showing up to a meeting with a sports car or SUV. Imagine a sales representative for a consultancy firm saying that she doesn’t believe in the methods the company uses.

The personal brand, the image that the person communicates should be aligned with the corporate identity.

RECRUITING

Showing the personal brands, the values, beliefs and the passions of current employees is a great way of attracting new employees with the right mindsets. This could be done by storytelling on the website, in folders or sending the right persons that are aware of their personal brand to student fairs. Make sure that the personal brands that you put out there are aligned with the positions you are recruiting for, and keep in mind that different profiles can be positive to the creative environment and the development of the company.

This way of working with the personal brand is also very useful when attending trade fairs or different networking events.

SOCIAL MEDIA

With the development of social media, the consumer is demanding more personal service and that the companies are getting more personal. Working with the personal brands alongside company values will not only strengthen the relationship with customers on a more personal level, but will also create a consciousness about status updates and messages that seem harmless but can be hurtful to the brand. If you repeatedly see that your friend at the big lawyer firm posts “Off to another boring meeting” every now and then, your idea of the company will change over time into thinking that the company is boring, even if it is not even mentioned in the post. If that person instead would post “Off to another meeting about patent infringement”, then your idea of the company would probably change towards that they have a lot of experience of patent infringements.

These are just a few examples of how the personal brand can add value to corporate brands if used in a conscious and correct manner. If you have any other situations or thoughts, please add them to the comments for further discussion.

This post was originally posted in the Superbrands blog.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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“Short and clear pitch – interesting and clear brand”

The statement above is the core message of this post. Maybe it is all you need, or maybe you want to read the whole post. The choice you made depends on your interest for the subject, your relation to the author (that’s me) and your curiosity of what the rest of the article is about.

News articles are written in pretty much the same way for two reasons

1. to keep the interest of the reader
2. to make it easy for the editor to remove the less essential stuff

Even commercial messages have started to see the advantage of this, just look at this site for the car brand Mini. The key here is to match the message to the audience and the time frame at disposal, which is often controlled by the recipient of the message. So what can you do to make your pitch work in several situations.

Purpose

Always start with the purpose. Why am I doing this. What are the desired results and outcomes? For what context is this useful?

Multipicth

First, make very clear what you want to communicate and what you want the other person to remember after your pitch. Then define situations for when a

• 60 second pitch would be suitable (introduction of a presentation, when someone ask you to explain what you do, etc.)
• 30 seconds (formal networking with timeframes for each participant, etc.)
• 15 seconds (phone call introduction, networking introduction, etc.)
• 5 seconds (tagline, end of presentations, cliff hanger, business cards, etc.)

It is hard in the beginning to see what is the purpose and possible situations for each pitch, but bear with me, the ends justifies the effort.

Be personal and professional

The pitch is about you, do not hide behind a formal title that can mean very different things to different people. Imagine what you think of when you hear “sales executive”, I am sure that most people do not have the same idea of the title as the bearer. So your pitch should describe you, but also contain a professional message (if this is the purpose of the pitch).

No-one is interested in what you do

Maybe this is  an over-statement, but the reality is not far from this. The reason why you are interested to others is that you are or can do something for them. It could be just listening or being there when needed, but when we talk pitches always think of how the recipient will receive the message. What´s in it for him/her? How can you help them achieve their goals? This is extremely important in all brand building as the brand is defined by how others perceive you.

The cliff-hanger

Try to define once again the very core, preferably in two statements. This serves two reasons; to be something that you can add to the end of a discussion for the other person to remember you by; and for your self to remember what the core of you and your offering really is.

Here is my pitch when working with personal branding:

Better self-awareness, clearer brand

Feel free to add your cliff hanger in the comments.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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Det väcks många tankar när ordet “affärsidé” kommer på tal; Vad ska man skriva? Hur lång ska den vara? Vilka ska jag skriva den för? Räcker det om jag har min affärsidé i huvudet?

Ola Rynge med tillsammans med Thomas Byström från Propulsion fick förmånen att hålla ett föredrag om just detta spännande ämne i torsdags i förra veckan på Lindholmen Science Park. Allt var välorganiserat från ALMI Mentor Eget Företag som var arrangör för eftermiddagen. Publiken bestod av adapter i form av små- och nyföretagare samt deras mentorer inom programmet.

Presentationen kan du se här
Det viktigaste i arbetet med en affärsidé är att den ska vara kort och kommunicerbar för alla dina kunder, anställda och leverantörer. Som hjälpmedel ska du kunna helst svara på följande fyra frågor i din skrivna affärsidé:

VAD är det som jag och mitt företag är unika på?

HUR ska vi kunna underlätta och hjälpa våra kunder?

VEM är mina kunder?

VARFÖR är mitt företag bäst på det som vi gör?

Varför den ska vara nedskriven är för att alla ska kunna ta del av den och för att du måste vara mer konkret med vad du och ditt företag faktiskt erbjuder för produkter och vad som gör er unika.

Vi som var på plats fick även lyssna på ett föredrag av Camilla Rahm och Bengt Peterson från KPMG.

De pratade om de olika företagsformerna som finns, enskild firma/bolag, handelsbolag, systerbolagsformen kommanditbolag och aktiebolag. Vi fick lära oss att fr.o.m. 1 april i år startades flera aktiebolag med den nya kapitalinsatsen som är på 50 000 kr istället för som det var tidigare på 100 000 Sek. Det är viktigt att välja rätt bolagsform och att man noga tänker igenom vilka för- och nackdelar de olika formerna har.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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You have probably already read a few posts on how to monitor your brand, you might even have set up a Google Alerts as explained in this post by my fellow writer at brand-yourself.com, Meg Guiseppi. In her post Meg explains very well what you should monitor (I would also like to add former employers, colleagues and clients to the list) and she has a good list of what to do with it.

What I have noticed, along with quite a few other bloggers, is that Google Alerts misses a lot of local results. Also, it returns quite a few older results that are irrelevant due to being outdated. In a time when we get flooded with information, this can be really annoying. Another drawback with Google Alerts is that you have to add keywords one by one which makes it hard to manage when you add a lot of keywords.

There are a few options out there that I think do a better job, such as SocialMention for social media, Google Blogsearch for blogs etc. where you can set up RSS-feeds and monitor your search results. This is better than Google Alerts in the sense that it gives better results, but it is even harder to manage multiple search words when doing it in different channels.

For this reason we have developed Rynge Media Monitor (currently in beta). I would like to invite the readers of this blog to try it out. Just sign up for a beta account and within a few days you will be given access to the system. It is easy to manage; you can set up a feed for each interest area (eg. My brands or My former employers) and in each feed you can enter the keywords you´d like to monitor. The result will be presented in a feed that you can add to your favorites RSS-reader. However, I recommend using Google Reader since it is set up for easy sharing of interesting results.

Please let me know your experiences with monitoring your brands and other key words and also how we can improve the Rynge Media Monitor to be even more useful to the users. Thanks!

This post was originally posted at http://blog.brand-yourself.com.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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En affärsidé är uppbyggd på tre grundpleare: kundnytta, marknad och affärsmodell. Här ger vi några tips som ett stöd då formulerar och arbetar med din affärsidé.

1. Kundnytta
Visa tydligt på vad det är med din idé som skapar ett mervärde för de som ska köpa från dig. Vilka egenskaper är det som gör att man väljer din produkt eller tjänst framför någon annan.

2. Marknad
En framgångsrik affärsidé visar på vilka målgrupper den är avsedd för. En målgrupp kan definieras på många sätt, ex baserat på geografi, ålder, kön, vanor, familjesituation etc.

3. Affärsmodell
En affärsidé måste vara lönsam på sikt och din affärsmodell visar på hur ska du tjäna pengar på idén och hur når du ut till dina kunder.

4. Differentiering
För att vara attraktiv på marknaden behöver du vara unik på något sätt. Det kan vara att du har en ny produkt eller tjänst, en ny förpackning, en annorlunda affärsmodell för branschen eller att du spelar på andra känslor. Ta dig tid och formulera din USP (Unique Selling Prosition).

5. Timing
Fundera på om tiden har kommit för din idé. Om du har en ny produkt/tjänst eller ny affärsmodell, se till så att marknaden är redo för idén och att systemen som idén är beroende av är tillgängliga.

6. Lättförståelig
Oavsett om det är du själv, din revisor eller en kund som läser affärsidén ska det vara en aha-upplevlese – ”Jag förstår precis varför den här affärsidén är så bra”. Skriv enkelt, vara tydlig och krångla inte till saker.

7. Förändring
Även om en affärsidé är långsiktig så förändras vår omvärld hela tiden. Var därför flexibel och se över din affärsidé regelbundet för att se så att den fortsätter vara konkurrenskraftig och stöda din verksamhet.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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If you are a Gmail user, follow Ola Range’s official Google Buzz profile at: http://www.google.com/profiles/ola.rynge

This is how Google explains Google Buzz:

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail.” For more information about features and how it work, visit this post from Mashable.

One could argue that we do not need another social network, but I think there are some factors that make Buzz interesting:

• Gmail user base of 170 million accounts makes it one of the largest social networks in an instant. The question is how many of the users will use the social service.
• Easy integration of other services makes it easy to connect and share tweets, flickr photos etc. in Buzz when published in other networks.
• One stop. You check your mail and social network in one place, and connect easily with new contacts as you start e-mail conversations with them.
• Mobile and location based updates with other Google services (see movie below)

To be really interesting, I think it will need more features and maybe the most interesting feature is that it is supposed to be an open system. “Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API.” (Official Google Blog).

I will use it, maybe not as much as Facebook and Twitter, but my major concern is how to use it in a business context and would love feedback from you on how you think one can use it.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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Rynge Media Monitor looks into social and traditional media on the Internet, based on specific key words and phrases defined by the user. Let’s say that I as an user adds “The Rynge Group” and “Ola Rynge” as specific key phrases. Then the Rynge Media Monitor looks into different sources for new content generated during the last two days, and then it keeps looking for new content until I remove the key phrases.

The results are then presented as an RSS feed, which is a standardize format for presenting frequently updated works. These feeds can be read through the most common e-mail programs (eg. Outlook, Thunderbird) or other specific RSS readers. We recommend the use of Google Reader which is free, but requires the user to sign up for a Google account. The advantage of Google Reader is that it is has a lot of functionality to share, delegate, sort and act upon the news results.

What can and should you do with the incoming articles/posts?

When looking at one of the results, you are probably asking yourself what to do with it.

Step 1 – is it relevant?

Relevant or irrelevant – is it irrelevant, you might want to refine your search term. If it is relevant information, then you should define in what way it is relevant.

Step 2 – how is it relevant

You should define certain categories that are relevant to you where you can sort incoming articles. The way I have defined my categories are: Possible leads, positive feedback, negative constructive feedback, negative non-constructive feedback, product development, key opinion leader, educative.

Step 3 – act

Depending on which category I act differently:

Possible lead
For possible leads I try to identify who is the persona that I need to get in touch with to see if this can be converted to a sale. If it is a possible lead, but it is another person in my organisation or network that should contact the lead, then  I forward it to their e-mail via the E-mail function at the bottom of each post in Google Reader.  Here I can add a note as well and suggest action points.

Feedback / Product Development
Positive feedback is always encouraging, so I share positive feedback with my organisation, but I also thank the person that published the positive feedback. If appropriate I might even suggest an additional service based on the positive feedback. I am however very careful to not be over selling.

Negative constructive feedback should be answered in a polite and respectful manner, explaining why the negative thing happened,  why the product do not include the specific feature or whatever the negative feedback is aimed at. Maybe an excuse is in place if a customer has been treated bad. Negative constructive feedback is very valuable if responded to in the right manner. The client could turn from being dissatisfied to become a raving fan due to your fast and caring answer. It could also be used for product and service development.

Negative non-constructive feedback is never easy to handle. You can say that you are sorry, but that is pretty much it. Sometimes non-constructive feedback is better left alone.

Key Opinion Leader
I use key phrases to identify who are the key opinion leaders for my industry in different networks. When identified, I follow them, I learn from them and I try to connect with them. When successful, the key opinion leaders likes you and your products and will spread the word about your excellence to their followers (which probably are your potential clients).

Educative
You probably consider yourself and your organization to be experts in what you are doing. To stay up to date with the latest trends, methods and news in your industry, you can use the media monitor as well. Read the interesting news, spread the word internally and externally through your networks. Add some thoughts or comment on the content if possible and you will probably be a key opinion leader yourself in your social network.

How do you work to stay on top of things today? Please share in the comment section below.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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More and more information is being published online, on news sites, social media, blogs and discussion boards. Knowing what is being said or reported about your organization or industry is essential to establish communication with the press, your clients and other stake holders. It is also a great source of information in the decision making process.

We have been developing Rynge Media Monitor to provide a tool that is easy to set up, easy to integrate and use and that provide the essential data for your organization. News websites, social media, forums, blogs and video blogs are monitored on an hourly basis to track the issues important to you.

Do we need another media monitor tool? I think so since the ones out there are overly complex, focusing on fancy graphs, big corporations and lack the focus of business value and usability. The Rynge Media Monitor will be easy to use, we will provide cases for how to best use the tools and want to create a dialog with the users to constantly improving the quality of service and increasing the business value.

During the spring we will launch the service to the public, but if you want access already today, sign up for our private beta.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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This is the second article in a series about Creative Relationship Marketing – Customer focused traditional and social media marketing (the first post can be found here). Since the abbreviation CRM was already taken, I will use CRM² for Creative Relationship Marketing. I think the extra ² is suitable since the Creative Relationship Marketing approach takes CRM to a new level. And since it is on a higher level, you have to make sure that the right resources are in place.

To think marketing and being creative about it is not something that comes naturally to everyone, and even then corporate traditions and culture will make anyone losing their creativity if it is not stimulated. So how can you make sure if you have the right person for the job?

First I usually look for someone within the (marketing) organization that has an interest for new methods of spreading the message and are not afraid of trial-and-error, but at the same time have a keen ear to customer requests and reactions. The person should also have some experience or at least interest in the new social technologies. Even if a lot of the social relations tools available are free or cheap, there is a cost involved since every relationship needs nurturing and care, which consumes time. Time that the person and his manager must be willing to invest to make the effort worthwhile.

So what if there are no one with the right qualities and/or time? Then there are basically two options:

1. Find a new co-worker suitable to the task
Employing someone is always a big step, but the reward of having a dedicated CRM² officer can be immense if it is the right person.

2. Create a long term relation with a consultant
This is a faster and more flexible solution, but normally a more expensive one.

The advantage of a consultant is that he/she (hopefully) is an expert in the field, but the disadvantage is that he/she is not an expert in the industry and your company. In most cases the best solution is a mix of a consultant and a current or new employee, where the consultant is a part of creating strategies, routines and plan. If you have found a great partner to work with, the consultant can inspire and awaken the creativity of the employee(s) and coach them to learn how to think in a creative manner and hence develop new creative ways of marketing the company’s products and services.

So, look at your organization to see if you have the resources available to enter the world of CRM². When you have done that, let’s take a look at setting goals for your new marketing efforts.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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• Seth’s Blog – How to lose an argument online
  November 23, 2009 – Interaction (or argument) within the social sphere is all about creating long lasting relations. Here are some tips on how to avoid destroying the relationship.
• Online Marketing Blog – 3 Steps for Effectively Using Social Media For PR
  November 23, 2009 – Great post about how to work within the social sphere and get good business value out of it.
• TechCrunch – An Ecosystem Is Born: LinkedIn Opens Up API
  November 23, 2009 – This might not sound like big news, but LinkedIn is the largest business focused network out there. I am not saying that this will be the thing that really turns social networks into business opportunities, but I see a lot of interesting apps. Maybe a smart, easy to use CRM syetsm based on Google Wave and LinkedIn with connections to Twitter and Facebook…
• TEDTalks (video) – TEDTalks: Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when
  November 23, 2009 – When will Asia pass the rest of the world economically is the question for this very interesting lecture.
  Even more important, but not covered is what will happen to the environment due to this economical growth.

- Ola Rynge (@rynge)

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