Knowing how to market oneself is a great differentiator. It can mean orders of magnitude of differences in influence, revenue. It makes the difference between the competent-knowledgeable, and the successful achievers.
What prevents us from developing this important skill?
as we saw in the previous blog post, developing a personal unique brand is against Industrial Age mindset and is rejected by our social environment;
marketing oneself is scary, because it means standing up and getting rejected more often than accepted;
successful marketing involves developing an emotional connection with prospective buyers, and this is not something we have been educated to develop and enhance
Still, self-marketing it is a key skill that differentiates successful achievers in any field.
How can we develop this skill? Beyond developing one’s brand, expose yourself! Find your unique selling proposition, stand up and start marketing it. Persist, get feedback, and you’ll get there.
The Fourth Revolution is here. Today anybody living anywhere can develop a personal brand that will be visible over the entire Internet.
Personal brand marketing
This requires a good definition of one’s personal purpose and a persistent and consistent communication over many media.
But it is necessary.
And actually, it is key for the successful K.E.E.N. to develop such personal brand.
The Industrial Age mindset is completely opposed to such idea: people were put in categories, by profession and diploma. They were considered interchangeable in the workplace. And any individual deviating from such classification was considered suspiciously, and he or she did not fit anymore in these categories.
Today, more and more, exceptions to the Industrial Age categories are the rule. Although failing bureaucratic organizations will continue to resist the idea for a while, the future is that each individual will have a specific profile and a specific brand.
And that’s needed because having a strong personal brand increases one’s value by being unique: possibly the unique response or profile to solve a particular issue.
So, when do you start developing your personal brand on the Internet and in the world? It will take time. Start today.
I summarize the post and add some content from Amazon.com here:
A new ebook by and for Japanese earthquake survivors.
I’m not sure if you’ve come across Quakebook: it’s a collection of short stories by people who were in the earthquake in Japan on March 11.
quakebook
In just over a week, a group of unpaid professional and citizen journalists who met on Twitter created a book to raise money for Japanese Red Cross earthquake and tsunami relief efforts.
In addition to essays, artwork and photographs submitted by people around the world, including people who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake contains a piece by Yoko Ono, and work created specifically for the book by authors William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein.“The primary goal,” says the book’s editor, a British resident of Japan, “is to record the moment, and in doing so raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society to help the thousands of homeless, hungry and cold survivors of the earthquake and tsunami. The biggest frustration for many of us was being unable to help these victims. I don’t have any medical skills, and I’m not a helicopter pilot, but I can edit. A few tweets pulled together nearly everything – all the participants, all the expertise – and in just over a week we had created a book including stories from an 80-year-old grandfather in Sendai, a couple in Canada waiting to hear if their relatives were okay, and a Japanese family who left their home, telling their young son they might never be able to return.”
They can also follow @quakebook on Twitter, re-tweet the #quakebook hashtag, like the Quakebook page on Facebook http://on.fb.me/htJxCw, or simply express their support at the Quakebook site http://bit.ly/qukbook
WOW! The power of the Fourth Revolution in action where people need most of it! In one month a book is out and people are connected like never before!
Today as yesterday, making sense of available data to create information and knowledge is as important as before.
The difference is that the available data is way larger and much more accessible to anybody. Statistical analysis tools on Internet-based communication are available for free, like Google Analytics. And a lot of people try to use then to increase their own or their marketing impact.
And there come questions like ‘what’s the best time for me to tweet’? It’s possible to run that analysis, as this blog post by Chris Penn, “when is the best time to tweet”, shows. Now what is the meaning of this analysis? Is it statistically significant? Do we effectively control all the other parameters that influence the result? What are the assumptions – here, the assumption is clearly that people are supposed to live in real time, you want to tweet at a moment they are connected. Is that real? For myself I look at tweeter once a day for all the day’s tweets…
As a conclusion. Running statistical analysis on heaps of data, in the Fourth Revolution, is easier than ever. It makes all the more dangerous the conclusions we get. The good old principles of statistical control and design of experiments are still valid. And more needed than ever. That should be part of the basic literacy in the Collaborative Age.
Did you hear about 3-D printing? Today there are printing machines that are able to print in three dimensions, complex shapes.
3D printing in action
They use much less material than conventional manufacturing (which starts from a large chunk of material and removes most of it through machining).
They build objects layers after layers, using perfectly controlled materials.
An article by The Economist on 3D printing highlights the current development status and the potentialities of the technology. By the way, the glove above was 3D printed.
So, let’s now cross the potentialities of 3D printing of objects with POD (print-on-demand). When will be the day where you find a nice new object in a magazine, will download the file and get it printed at the next door 3D printing shop?
No more worries of having to search store after store for that unique object of your dreams. Design it and print it!
Well that might come a few years later than for books POD, but that’ll come. And then manufacturing, in the Industrial Age meaning of mass production, will shrink significantly. Because we want to have unique objects, 3D objects POD will be the response. Only those basic components which benefit greatly from the savings of mass production will remained produced that way.
Are you ready for the revolution of 3-D objects print-on-demand?
Do you know POD (print-on-demand)? Well that’s quite easy: you choose the book you want and a machine produces it for you in a few minutes, cover, binding and all.
print-on-demand machine
That’s not a dream: that’s today. As a self-publisher, Amazon and a number of others propose to put my book on display in their electronic stores. Should anyone buy it, a copy gets printed and sent.
No more stocks of hundreds of books that might not be sold. No more risk to produce stocks of no value. Just-in-time print-on-demand.
What’s visionary though is electronic bookstores just consisting of a print-on-demand (POD) machine. Because people still like to touch books and get a quick glimpse inside. But soon that will take off.
Think of it. Today more than 60% of the price of a book is distribution – manual handling, logistics, taking back unsold books etc. POD just does bypass this problem. It will remove distributors as intermediaries and create value by making more books physically available everywhere that a huge bookstore could ever contain.
POD will replace bulk manufacturing. Because it will also apply to everything else, not just books.
I was travelling lately and I am still amazed at how difficult it can be to get reasonably cheap access to the internet for a traveller.
Well of course there are some free computers to be able to look at some basic websites in most airports and a lot of hotels. I’m speaking about getting internet access for one’s device – computer or other device.
Want to connect your computer in wifi at the airport? You need to pay. Want to connect your computer in the hotel? Again, you are charged a small fortune.
Of course that depends on the country and some countries have understood the benefit of making free connections available – and they are often not the most developed. They are the emerging countries and the small dynamic countries like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Wonder why these countries will develop more value and will overtake the countries that still believe that connectivity should be exclusive and expensive?
Unleash value by enhancing free connectivity everywhere!
A useful statistics in the excellent book by Clay Shirky, “cognitive surplus“.
Cognitive surplus is that cognitive capability that is available during our free time. It has steadily increased during the Industrial Revolution, in particular in the 20th century. But, it has mainly been devoted to broadcasting media, and mainly TV.
American watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year (and, interestingly enough, this is still increasing).
All of Wikipedia, all articles, edits, in all languages represents roughly about 100 million hours of contributions (over 10 years or so).
Hence, Wikipedia, this extraordinary sum of human knowledge, permamently updated (so much that it is a worthwhile source of information) represents less than 0.005% of the available cognitive surplus.
So… can you imagine what will happen when just 1% of the available cognitive surplus will be used for the community?
That’s right, it will be a true Revolution, the Fourth Revolution.
When do you start contributing a small share of your cognitive surplus?
Our current education system was created during the Industrial Age. It was made mandatory in the second half of the 19th century in most developed countries to produce the manpower Industry was requiring.
What skills were taught? Basic literacy and conformance.
Einstein on curiosity and education
No wonder that Einstein reflected “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”.
Curiosity is now what we need. What we need to develop – with some other skills like Presence and Choice. Because we need to educate for creativity.
When will we say “It is a miracle that conformance survived education”?
Sooner than we can expect, because the young generation today thrives by being curious. But that will require great changes in our education system. And then for sure the Collaborative Age will be flourishing!
Note – the image of this blog comes from the “Presentation zen” blog, a blog by Garr Reynold, a presentation specialist living in Japan, with some very interesting insights about what it takes to do great presentations.
It shows the incentive schemes of the Industrial Age corporation only work for mechanical skills. Once the task involves cognitive skill, rewards lead to lower performance!!
What then does motivate the K.E.E.N, the Knowledge Enhancing Exchanging Networker of the Collaborative Age? According to Dan Pink, there are 3 main factors: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Autonomy like self-direction.
Mastery like getting better at something.
Purpose like getting up in the morning.
We are purpose maximizers
According to Dan Pink, we are purpose maximizers, not just profit maximizers.
So, when do you start maximizing your purpose?
I am a Coach and I find through my experiences that one of the most difficult stumbling blocks for personal change is for people to stop doing things.
We are often scared to start new things. What will be the result for us? How are other going to look at us?
But because it adds things to our life, our character, our reputation, because the new can be exciting, with a little or more effort this fear can be overcome, and we effectively start the new activities.
Though, you can’t continue to add up things in your life without removing others… or you’ll have a burn-out problem.
And then comes the even more scary part: removing activities, habits that one has developed over time. We feel comfortable with them. They become part of our identity. It is scary to abandon them for the benefit of some new, uncertain things and activities.
Stop and go sign
It is where most people fail: stopping old things to give room to new things. They don’t fail to start new things, but because they don’t abandon old things, they don’t devote the time and attention to the new things and they falter.
Overcoming the fear of stopping and abandoning things and habits is the hardest. It is where the Coach needs to concentrate.
So, when do you make an habit to abandon every year what makes 5 to 10% of your time and replace it with new, better activities?
