Month: August 2015

The Triad of Personal Branding

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There are many different techniques that can contribute to a personal branding campaign, but I’m only going to touch on the triad that works well for a professional practitioner, such as a consultant. The primary considerations are recognition, authority and reputation, with all three being heavily interlaced.

Recognition

There’s a slew of different channels that can be used for recognition. The main idea is to get your name out there (obviously, in a positive light), in front of the right people. Social media is certainly one area that can be put to good use, but it shouldn’t be the primary, and it definitely shouldn’t be used solely as a channel for self-promotion.

Social media is better used for… are you ready for this… being social. In other words, interact, build relationships, network. It’s a great place to show your areas of interest, but you’ll find that promoting relevant content from others will generally yield better results than promoting your own.

Some great channels for getting in front of the right people are groups that are focused in your specific topical area. LinkedIn and Facebook have the ability to launch or join topical groups or communities, and for many, they’re an excellent place to establish your credibility.
Quora is

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Dealing with Problem Clients

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We’ve all had “problem clients”… the guy that thinks scope creep is natural and acceptable, the gal that approves everything at every step of the project, until it’s time to pay the final invoice, then suddenly discovers that the color that she specified and approved just “isn’t right”. Sometimes they just lie to us… they profess complete innocence regarding the 20,000 garbage links that magically appeared or they didn’t mention, because they “didn’t think it was important” that they had three previous manual actions against their site.

Once in a while, we may even find ourselves dealing with a client that tries to bully us, demanding far more than what the scope of our service includes. They threaten and cajole, then apologize and promise it’ll never happen again… and promptly repeat the behavior.

When we encounter this sort of client, our blood pressure rises, our motivation falters and we sometimes find ourselves daydreaming about firing them. This isn’t what we signed on for – we shouldn’t have to put up with this – there are plenty of other clients to be had… we tell ourselves all sorts of things to vent our anger or frustration. And sometimes, we vent to the client.

That’s not always a bad thing. Some things need to be said. But how we say them can make a world of difference in how effective it is.

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