You can be Bill Simmons

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Morgan

If you’re reading this and are not an American male you can be forgiven for asking “Who is Bill Simmons?” If you are an American male and are asking the same question, please take a minute to reconfirm qualifiers one and two.

For those of you who don’t know, Bill Simmons works for ESPN and writes the popular Page 2 Sports Guy column and is host of the B.S. Report podcast. He’s also the author of two books “Now I Can Die in Peace” chronicling the 2004 Red Sox run to the World Series title, and “The Book of Basketball” just released.

Born and raised on the east coast, Bill Simmons broke on to the scene with his popular sports blog The Boston Sports Guy where he riffed on the Boston sports scene, writing from the perspective of a passionate fan rather than an insider sports reporter. His passion, humor and intertwining of pop culture references with sports analysis through humorous analogies made him a must-read for red-blooded New England males. Finally, someone had captured the authentic voice of the sports enthusiast.

He now has a tremendous following. His podcast is reportedly downloaded 2 million times a month on ESPN.com, he has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter, and his latest book debuted at number 5 on the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller list.

His success is fascinating and, I believe, instructive.

If you’re looking to create your personal brand online, or build a reputation for your brand online, and feel like you’re facing an uphill battle, the Bill Simmons story should give you a valuable blueprint for achieving the success you’re after online.

Here are some things worth taking from Bill Simmons when it comes to your social media strategy.

There is no such thing as a crowded niche. You may look at your niche as an opportunity for building your personal brand and say “there are already so many people doing this” that it isn’t worth doing. Simmons proves you wrong. You’d be hard pressed to find another topic more thoroughly covered than the Boston sports scene. With the Boston Globe, Herald, NESN (a New England sports network), and other outlets clamoring over the latest news, it would be easy to look at Boston sports and say “there isn’t any room here for me.” Bill Simmons didn’t look at it that way – he saw an opportunity in a crowded space, because his take was different from everyone else. Writing as a fan separated him from the rest.Need another example? Gary Vaynerchuk, the poster child of social media, broke into the well covered wine reviewing niche, by switching from written, stuffy reviews to irreverent video blogs that spoke to the masses. Bottom line? No niche is too crowded for a refreshing and unique take on things.

Authenticity rules. Simmons isn’t afraid to call out a player, coach or team for terrible play. He expresses his passions and doesn’t mince words. He’s not hateful, and he couches his criticisms in his sarcastic humor; but make no mistake, he calls them like he sees them. This is different than sports reporters who coddle athletes in order to get the access and quotes they need to get their stories for the paper. As an outsider, Simmons had no connections to preserve. He could call them like he saw them. Stay true to your beliefs and you’ll resonate with people who share them.

Make the experience enjoyable and familiar. Perhaps Simmons’ biggest success is his ability to write and connect with readers and podcast listeners as if he were your friend. In fact, my brother and I were commenting that it’s hard to believe Simmons is so popular, because he has the ability to make you feel like you’re just one of the guys talking with him about sports. Sure there are 2 million other people that feel the same way as you; but that’s the magic of his style.

How can you make your readers and listeners feel like they’re on the inside? How can you make them feel like you’re sharing with them the way that you’d share and talk with your closest friends? That feeling is invaluable and draws people in and makes them care about you. When people care they help spread the word and build your momentum, without you having to ask or promote your agenda.

When Simmons compares the New York Knicks to Survivor or the Real World/Road Rules Challenge he makes analogies that are easy to understand and that are enjoyable. They’re also damn funny. What can you do to tie your experience and stories back to familiar parts of people’s lives?

Create with a sense of humor. Some people are funnier than others. But even if you’re not a comedic genius you can still create content and tell stories with a bent towards humor. As I’ve been told in my Toastmasters classes, humor always wins. And it’s true. What funny stories can you weave into your content to make it enjoyable to read? Can you get a laugh or a chuckle or a smirk out of your readers? Give it a shot and see what happens.

Bill Simmons taught me a lot about what it means to build your personal brand. He taught me that there is no such thing as a niche that is too crowded. He taught me that a different perspective, a sense of humor and the ability to tell a good story among friends go a long way to connecting with people in a world where we feel more marketed to each day. Authenticity, connections and humor. Not a bad recipe if you ask me. Give it a shot, and see if you can find your unique voice that connects with the people you want to reach.

What do you think? Who are you learning from online?

Update: The New York Times wrote a piece about Bill Simmons on Sunday about how he’s changed the definition of a sports journalist. Great read.

Building a Personal Brand with Social Media Presentation

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Morgan

Here’s a copy of the slides of the keynote that I gave at the California Phi Beta Lambda Future Business Leaders of America conference this weekend at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. I was honored to get a chance to talk with such a smart, inspired group of future leaders of the next generation.

The goal was to give them an overview of what a personal brand was, what it can do, and a framework for creating their own. The slides don’t have many words on them, so I’ll be back to explore more of the presentation once I get some sleep (lots of travel lately).

How to build a personal brand using social media

View more presentations from Morgan Brown.

4C’s of Personal Branding

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Morgan

I’m still working on my keynote on Building a Personal Brand for November 7th. I think I’ve come up with a framework for the talk that I’m happy with, now I just need to round it out and execute on the actual presentation. One of the things I came up with in my brainstorming for the talk was what I’m calling the “Foundation of the Personal Brand” which is based on the 4c’s (not dissimilar to the diamond industry.)

I’d like to share those 4c’s with you here and see if you agree with them as the cornerstones to building a successful personal brand.

The 4c’s to a successful personal brand

Character - Character and integrity are at the base of everything. Plenty has been written about authenticity, transparency and ethics when it comes to creating asuccessful brand on the Web. I believe it speaks for itself and goes without saying that to win in the long run you have to be true to yourself and true to others. You also have to have the mindset of helping others with what you’re doing. If you’re not out to help others you’ll be talking to yourself. Without character, without integrity and the desire to help others you’ll never be successful in the long term – with a personal brand or any other effort.

Commitment – Building a personal brand using social media tools is not a sprint. Using social media to create a personal brand is the longest path to overnight success there is. Building a personal brand is a marathon. It requires a persistent consistency. Without that commitment to success you’ll stop before you even get started. You won’t make the connections and you won’t create the body of work to demonstrate your expertise. Without a true commitment to it you’ve lost before you’ve begun.

Create – Goes hand-in-hand with commitment. The most well-recognized and successful social media luminaries create tons of valuable content. You have to give to get. Pay in with amazing content, insight and opinion and you will be rewarded. Spend all your time on Facebook and Twitter and you won’t create the foundation of thinking that will give you the respect that you’ll need to propel yourself forward in your career/life. Sure, you can build a viral following on Twitter by being witty; but that’s like catching lightning in a bottle. Lay a solid foundation of your expertise by creating valuable content.

Connect – None of this is worth very much without connections to other people. If you’re not building relationships with people in your industry you’re not going to find the success and recognition that you need to cement your personal brand. While some of this is self-promotional, it is primarily being earnest in trying to connect with people in your industry that you can help and learn from. This is where getting offline is critical. Sure, meeting people on Twitter or in the comments of your blog is a great way to break the ice; but the relationships really get built at conferences, mixers, meetups, tweetups and other real world gatherings. You need to find the ones you need to be at and get to them one way or another. If there aren’t any in your area, start them. There is no way to succeed without connecting.

So what do you think? What are your building blocks for a successful personal brand? Brad had a great comment in my last post about being yourself which is dead on. What am I missing? Do you like these or not? How would you change/add/subtract to/from them?

Photo credit

Building a Personal Brand – You Tell Me What’s Important

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Morgan

I'm not this guy, so help!

I was recently invited to keynote the California Future Business Leaders of America- Phi Beta Lambda Leadership conference in Berkeley, CA in early November. The topic of my talk is building a personal brand using online tools. With the focus being on how recent college graduates can better differentiate themselves from their peers and get a leg up in this super-difficult job market.

I’m really excited to speak on the subject because it is something that is very near and dear to my heart. If you haven’t known me for very long the 30-second version of the story goes like this: I started a blog about mortgages and finance, it got me a lot of visibility in my market niche, I won some awards, I got a new job based on a connection I made through the blog and Twitter, and along the way my blog made a bunch of money and then I sold it. There’s more there; but that’s the overall gist of the story.

I want to tell that story to these graduates and show them how they can leverage the same opportunities to create that kind of experience for themselves. If I can do it then anyone can. I know everyone says that; but in this case it’s true. I got to the blogging game late, I had little experience in my field, and it still turned out to be a homerun. I want to share my experience and try to identify what worked and what didn’t work along the way so that these grads can apply that to their situation and begin building their personal brand.

So now I need your help.

I know my story. But it is just one. I don’t know everything there is to know about building a personal brand online. I’m no Dan Schawbel or Gary Vaynerchuk. So if you don’t mind please take a moment to leave a comment about what’s important to you when building a personal brand. What would you tell these students if you had the chance?

I’ve done some early thinking on the plane ride from SFO > OC last week and came up with this v1 mindmap.

I see a lot of things that I need to update when I do a new one tonight; but I’d love your thoughts on how I can make this talk really rock.

Image by aaronmentele via Flickr

Why Blogging Still Matters

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Morgan

People love to claim stuff “dead” on the Internet. It seems everyday something is dying or already dead. Frankly, the pace of extinction around these parts is exhausting. And, of course, the rhetoric is usually completely overblown and, well, wrong. So it is with the death of blogging. As Twitter user growth soars (1928% YOY to be precise) and people flock to Facebook in droves, pundits love proclaiming that the statusphere is the new, new blogging. And with equal joy it’s corollary blogging obituary.

I’m here to humbly say that blogging is indeed not dead, and in fact now, unlike any time in the last 4 years, represents the single best opportunity for professionals and organizations to stand out from the competition and river of noise that is the statusphere. In this post I look at why it’s still important to professionals. In a future post we’ll look at why it matters for organizations.

Reasons why blogging is still important to professionals

The case for blogging for professionals has never been stronger. As more people jump on the Twitter bandwagon and engage in the cocktail party that is the statusphere there are fewer hours and fewer people dedicating time to producing longer-form content that demonstrates their expertise and value to prospective customers, potential employers and others in the community. While interacting with people online is critical and an important way of building relationships and your network, the effectiveness of that effort is greatly reduced without some home base that represents who you are, what you stand for and what you know. Having a well-developed blog gives the people you engage with a true sense of who they’re talking with and can be an important relationship builder in its own right.

Demonstrate Expertise

There is still no better way on the Web today to create and curate a body of work that demonstrates your expertise and insight than a blog. While engaging quickly and responding to questions and engaging in conversations online is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise they have a definite shelf life and limited utility shortly after the exchange. Go ahead, try to dig up a Tweet from 5 days ago. You’ll quickly find that your conversations are washed away by the onslaught of new information added to the statusphere. You face a similar problem with discussions on LinkedIn, comments on YouTube, Facebook status updates and Wall posts, forum posts and more. By simply participating in online conversations in these social platforms you’re making your expertise a perishable commodity. If you maintain a blog and curate your thoughts there you maximize the value of your expertise by giving it a longer shelf life and making it infinitely easier to find.

Why throw away your expertise by using a social conversation only strategy when you can easily create a valuable library of insight and expertise with a blog?

Create a Google-able Home Base

For better or worse you are who Google says you are. And while your profiles on the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn may appear higher than your personal blog in a vanity search (where you search your own name in Google) Google can reward you heavily with searches that include your name and important industry and career topics. For example, my previous blog, blownmortgage.com ranked exceptionally high for terms such as subprime mortgage, FHA home loans, loan modification and other key mortgage terms that drove traffic and business to my company. More importantly, because of the body of work I created at the site (if you can’t tell by the name it was a site intent on blowing up the malfeasance in the mortgage industry) people instantly bonded and trusted me. And I showed up all over the place in Google on terms that people were searching while looking for information related to my expertise.

While Twitter and Facebook may come up higher in vanity searches, Google will reward you with rankings in areas of your expertise when you create a body of work on a blog dedicated to the exploration of those subjects. Twitter will never rank for loan modification for me, but my blog (which I recently sold, more below) did. And it created additional (dare I say ‘long tail’) referrals to my home base on the Web resulting in additional business, contacts, and more.

Build an Online Resume

You can either have a resume and say what you know or you can have a blog and show what you know. What do you think is more powerful to a prospective client or employer? Exactly. Particularly in a devestrating job market creating differentiation among your peers is critical to getting out of the deluge of resumes and on to the short list for the interview. And while your blog can’t help you in the interview, it can certainly help you get in front of the decision maker. It can often jump you several steps through the interview process in the first place. Any professional can benefit from a solid body of work that is easily found and referencable on the Web. When employers look for quality individuals a blog can be an invaluable advantage to you. It creates the ideal forum to demonstrate your thinking and analysis of issues critical to your industry. Same thinking applies in demonstrating your expertise and thinking to a potential client.

While you can build a resume online with LinkedIn and other online services it’s impossible to curate a living body of work that speaks to your unique skills and viewpoint like you can with a blog.

Opening Yourself to Other Opportunities

By having a blog you begin to build a body of work to position you as an expert. While this can lead to direct business gain and advantages in winning business, employment and more; there are other benefits as well. With a Google-friendly home base pushing your name to the top of results in terms critical to your industry you’ll find inquiries from journalists looking for front-line insight into breaking stories. You’ll get random interview and speaking requests. You’ll receive product review requests and feedback on business samples. And you’ll find more people looking to engage and connect with you than ever before. These benefits can often lead to new experiences and opportunities that were never visible to you previously. And while journalists search and monitor Twitter for breaking news you can create more press opportunities by creating a body of work that positions you as a credible source for stories that they may be working on.

My old blog resulted in mentions for me in The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, The Orange County Register, Better Homes and Gardens, The Village Voice, Inman News and many, many more. Those mentions would never have come from my LinkedIn profile, Twitter or Facebook conversations alone. I also received several speaking opportunities and won awards based on my work with my blog. It was the body of work and the easily-found nature of my blog that led to those opportunities.

Crafting Your Personal Brand

Your blog is your home. You get to decorate it and furnish it in any manner you see fit. It’s your personal self-expression online and the single best, most consistent opportunity to build and curate the personal brand that you want to project online. On any number of other social sites you’re dealing with the vagaries of the shifting conversation, newest shiny objects and limitations of the platform. There is rarely the perfect opportunity to express the ideal position for you as it relates to your personal brand. Your blog represents that safe harbor in the malestrom where you can talk about the things that are important to you, you can demonstrate your personal brand, and you can work at, improve and refine your voice and brand online.

While your blog can be your online resume it can also be your online batting cage (or putting green if you don’t like the baseball analogy). It can be a place where you can find your voice and refine it. Where you can test out hypotheses and construct arguments. You can analyze problems that are interesting to you and work through your thinking on issues that are important to you. This is often difficult to do in social conversation platforms. The flow of the conversation rarely affords that type of introspective learning. A blogging platform can open up that opportunity like no other platform.

Making Your Blog Matter to You

In an age of 140 characters blogging is hard. Creating content that people want to read, engage with and share is difficult and the payoff is often not seen immediately. You can spend hours creating content that is barely read when it is initially published. But it’s important to remember that social media is a marathon, not a sprint (and the same goes for blogging) and that the effort is a long term investment in your online personae. It is my firm belief that you cannot extract the maximum value from your social media endeavors without a blog as a home base for your efforts.

So how do you make your blog matter to you? Here is a quick list of things that I did to make my blog matter to me (and what I’m doing with this new blog as we speak.) These are obvious but if you’re struggling with a way to get started try these out.

If you can, register your name as a domain name. It allows you to make your blog the home base for your online activities for the rest of your life. It gives you flexibility in topics and allows your blog to grow with you as your life changes. It also helps with the aforementioned Google love. (To wit, imagine if Scoble’s first blog was Microsoft Insights instead of Scobleizer.)
Blog about something you’re passionate about. Pick a topic you have an opinion about and start with that. And don’t be afraid to have an opinion and express it.
Don’t be afraid to put something out there. Start writing and start publishing. Don’t let perfection or how you think other people might respond deter you from putting content out there.
Get insight and inspiration from other blogs, Twitter and the news. Just like new writers can often get past writers block by taking the opening of an existing story and spinning their own tale, so can you leverage an existing story line and add your own perspective as a way to get started.
Don’t try to write like a journalist or a marketer. You’re not writing the cover story of the New York Times and you’re not writing the corporate brochure. Write from the heart and with passion and don’t worry about the formalities when you first start.
Be a good online citizen. Don’t steal content. Be sure to link and provide attribution to ideas and give credit where credit is due.
Experiment. Try a video blog. Try a long post. Try short posts. Try thought pieces. Try news pieces. Do an email interview. Do a podcast interview. Just do, over and over until you begin to get your blogging legs under you.

Blogging and ‘Winning on the Uphills’

Seth Godin recently wrote about using challenge as a differentiator between you and your competitors. The idea of winning on the uphills is that everyone succeeds and goes fast on the downside of the mountain. In a good economy everyone is profiting. It is in a difficult environment where the good companies and professionals have an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and move forward, ahead of the pack. The same can be said for blogging. While everyone is proclaiming blogging dead and lamenting how “hard” it is compared to Twitter you can win on the uphill and begin to carve out your own little portion of the online conversation. And before you know it you’ll have created an online presence that will serve you professionally and personally for the rest of your life (if you let it) and will help you stand out from the noise of social conversation by creating a clear signal that resonates with readers.

Flickr photo by Mexicanwave.

P Morgan Brown

A work in progress

Tag Archives: personal brand

Building a Personal Brand with Social Media Presentation