GenXmanager: Leadership for the Generation X Manager

You can Twitter and Facebook all you want and establish an incredible online brand for yourself. However, if you fail to deliver value, your brand is worthless. This may seem pretty self-explanatory but don’t get so caught up in the promotion part of personal branding that you forget to deliver value. This is true for entrepreneurs, cube warriors, managers, and executives.

While you are establishing your brand using social media and other tools, make sure you are also doing the following to deliver value.

Do what you say you’re going to do.

If you tell someone you’re going to do something, do it. Don’t be full of promises and never deliver.

Over deliver.

I wrote an entire article on this called ‘How to be valuable at work‘. Read that article and do more than what is expected.

Serve others.

The irony of personal branding is that it’s not about you at all. You really don’t matter much. It’s your customers and everyone else that matters. Serve your boss, clients, and employees and watch your brand take-off.

Be an expert.

Whether you are a zoo keeper, a computer programmer, a stay-at-home mom, or a store owner, be an expert in your field. Learn everything you can about your area. Stay current on the latest trends. Experiment and try new approaches. Be someone people turn to for information.

Focus on quality.

Be certain that whatever you do you do it correctly and with the utmost quality. Don’t be known for delivering junk.

Work with integrity.

 Be ethical, honest, trustworthy and moral in all that you do.

Here are 101 business buzzwords I’ve collected over the years. Share yours in the comments section.

1. best practices
2. touch base
3. value-added
4. win/win
5. up-sell
6. bandwidth
7. offline
8. no-brainer
9. quick hit
10. point person
11. paradigm shift
12. tee-up
13. budget cuts
14. up the flagpole
15. slam dunk
16. frontline workers
17. next step
18. COB
19. outside the box
20. leverage
21. social media
22. going forward
23. above my pay grade
24. dovetail
25. pick your brains
26. circle the wagons
27. mission-critical
28. strategery
29. heads up
30. right-size
31. drill down
32. dashboard
33. low-hanging fruit
34. actionable
35. lessons learned
36. customer-driven
37. bottom line
38. synergize
39. co-opetition
40. team player
41. mission statement
42. empower
43. ramp-up
44. 24/7/365
45. The ball’s in your court
46. par for the course
47. blip on the radar
48. due diligence
49. real-time
50. leadership
51. push the envelop
52. big picture
53. upside
54. detail oriented
55. sweat equity
56. game plan
57. Googled
58. repurpose
59. drop the ball
60. throw the baby out with the bathwater
61. reinvent the wheel
62. deliverables
63. elevator speech
64. pushback
65. diversity
66. back-end
67. sustainability
68. bleeding edge
69. ROI
70. seemless 
71. Twitter
72. competency
73. granularity
74. solution driven
75. throw it against the wall and see what sticks
76. 110%
77. change agent
78. 80-20
79. manage expectation
80. It’s not rocket science
81. hit the ground running
82. globalization
83. networked
84. it is what it is
85. urgent
86. proactive
87. multi-tasking
88. step up to the plate
89. boots on the ground
90. showstopper
91. social network
92. transparency
93. bootstrap
94. don’t upsset the apple cart
95. blog
96. crtical path
97. personal branding
98. hunker down
99. work-life balance
100. streamline
101. corporate agility

I was randomly messing around on YouTube last night after conducting a webinar and noticed a news item that read “1080p Launches”. That’s right, YouTube is going from 720p to full 1080p HD starting “next week” (December 20th I assume). I applauded YouTube’s move to widescreen, HQ, and eventually 720p HD. YouTube raises the bar and I again, applaud their efforts.

I urge you to take a look at the Toy Story 3 trailer and go full screen. It is amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f-MYl-HzNw

Though I welcome the move to 1080p HD, I hope that their servers can handle the load. I have a fairly fast home connection and a peppy laptop but I find playing HD videos on YouTube is an exercise in patience. The HD videos load slowly, buffer, and skip.

I’ll admit that there were no issues watching the Toy Story 3 trailer in full 1080p HD. So I hope that is a good omen of what to expect from YouTube.

My definition of a personal brand is very simple. Your personal brand tells the world about you. Your brand tells the world what you stand for, what your values are, what your expertise is, and ultimately why the world should even care.

A personal brand combines elements of marketing, career planning, and personal development.

The Marketing Angle

What is a brand? According to Kotler and Keller a brand is “a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.” The key word here is ‘differentiate’.

The Career Planning Angle

Career planning “is a lifelong process, which includes choosing an occupation, getting a job, growing in our job, possibly changing careers, and eventually retiring” (from About.com). I think career planning is much more. Career planning involves matching your strengths and passions to what you will do for a living throughout your life. The key words are ‘strengths’ and ‘passions’.

The Personal Development Angle

Personal development encompasses many disciplines but here I’m relating it to personal values and understanding your purpose in life. Your values drive your behaviors. Your values define who you are and what you stand for. Your purpose in life is your overarching reason for living on this earth. The key words are values and purpose.

So, your personal brand comes down to differentiation, strengths, passions, values, and purpose. Branding yourself is the package you present to the world and methods you use to communicate that package. There is much more to say on this topic, of course, but this is a very simple definition (my definition) of a personal brand.

Tweeting great content is essential to gain followers on Twitter and engaging your audience. The question is, how do you find great content to tweet? Look no further. Here are a few ways to find great content.

1. Business Exchange by Business Week

Though not a robust social media platform, I’ve found wonderful, tweetable, content on Business Exchange. The home page presents you with a cadre of topic areas including the Banking Industry, Business Innovations, Social Media Marketing, and even MBA Admissions. Click on a topic and there is a list of articles submitted by Business Exchange users. I’ve found the content quite good.

2. Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Reddit

I use Digg more than any of these other social bookmark sharing sites because the content is well organized. I’m interested in tweeting content about business, the economy, social media, and innovation. Digg let’s me go right to those categories and browse what’s available. StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and others are okay at listing what’s trending and hot at the moment but I find their categories unorganized.

3. Subscribe to great RSS feeds

Subscribe to your favorite blogs and news sites via RSS. You can download an RSS news reader or simply use Google’s newsreader. You’re newsreader will give you the latest content from every feed you subscribe to. If you see something interesting, tweet it out!

4. Google News

Google news serves up-to-the-minute content from major media outlets. I like the way the content is organized and enjoy the newsworthiness of all the articles.

5. Facebook and LinkedIn

You can’t rely on Facebook or LinkedIn for consistent Twitter content but I’ve had friends post articles on their wall that I’ve tweeted on multiple occasions. So, pay attention to what your friends and contacts are posting. You might find a great nugget of wisdom to share on Twitter.

6. YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo

Most of the folks I follow on Twitter don’t tweet video content. I’m not sure why. I love video and enjoy watching great quality, relevant video to my area of interest or job responsibilities. You can subscribe to users on YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo who produce video you like. If they publish a great video, tweet it. You can also search these sites for video content.

7. Newsletters in your email

Pay attention to those newsletters you get in your email. Most companies, educational institutions, research foundations, and bloggers produce weekly, monthly or quarterly newsletters. Subscribe to them and read them! Oftentimes the content in these newsletters is not found easily on their respective websites or blogs. So, if you see something interesting in the newsletter, click the link to read more and then tweet that article.

 There are many more ways to find tweetworthy articles but these are some of the ones I use. Share yours in the comments below.