Influential Marketing Blog

How To Manage 1.4 Million People - 5 Questions with YUM! Brands CEO David Novak

No one writes a business book about leadership to help hungry children. Leadership, we usually read, is about having a grand vision. It is about the touchdown pass. No one wants to hear about the months you spent in the summer working out in the weight room. In our quarterly culture, fast results are the only thing that matters, and we expect our CEOs to be larger than life. So when David Novak, the CEO of YUM! Brands -- which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and employs over 1.4 million people worldwide -- first wrote a leadership book, I expected it to be about having a big vision.

Instead, Novak's newly released book Taking People With You is a surprisingly practical step by step guide on how to be a daily leader instead of an annual visionary. This week I had the chance to speak with him about the book and about why he felt it was so important to share his message with the world. His surprising answer for the first motivation to write his book is that all the proceeds from the book go to the United Nations World Food Programme (a CSR partner of YUM! Brands), so it may hopefully help feed some children. His second reason was because he felt it was time to share lessons from a management training program and philosophy he had already been using for 15 years to train over 4000 restaurant managers with huge success within YUM! Brands.

Here were five questions I asked him and his responses:

Q: How important is social media and digital tools to the way that you communicate and take people with you?

A: Even if you are in a huge company, you have to do everything you can to make the company smaller. I do a blog on my travels in the first person. Tell people what I see in each of our markets. I personalize it. I think relationships and having people feel like you are engaged and care is absolutely critical. If you are an "ivory tower leader" and never get out of your office, then you aren't going to get work environment and culture you need.

Q: In the quick service restaurant industry, there is high turnover. How important is what you do to helping address that issue?

A: Great people leave for two reasons. Money is not one of the reasons. The first real reason why people leave is because they don't get along with their boss. Second reason is where people don't feel appreciated. It may be more true in the services business, but it is true in any business.

Q: How important is likeability to leadership and taking people with you?

A: It is hard to like somebody who doesn't like you. You have to be a person that people want to be around. I don't think people follow people they don't like. They don't buy brands they don't like. But doesn't mean you need to run a popularity contest. Your aim should be to get a point where people want to be around you.

Q: What is the biggest mistake that you see other leaders and CEOs of organizations making?

A: Leaders don't tend to be self aware. They don't know how what people really think of them. Leaders are often in a cocoon, seeing themselves in a way which may not be true.  Also, a lot of times leaders will assume that people will just do their job. People want to be part of something bigger. Just because someone works for you, doesn't mean they will just do what you want them to do. That's niave. The real trick to getting results is involvement.  You need to get your people involved.

Q: One day when you one day retire or leave YUM!, how will you want people to remember you?

A: I would like them to remember me as a leader who believes in them and cared enough to pass on the learnings that I was privileged enough to gain. That I was genuinely a leader.

Disclaimer: Ogilvy, my employer, does some marketing and communications work for YUM! Brands. This interview was not solicited or granted as part of our work for them or compensated in any way. Novak's publisher (Portfolio Penguin) came to me directly to review the book, and I accepted.

Facebook Bankruptcy: How (And Why) To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Facebook Page

FINAL UPDATE: This process did not go as expected for me and there are several downsides to converting your profile to a page.  Read my update at the end of this post for why you may NOT want to do this before you make a decision - it includes some things I wish I knew before starting this process.

For more than a year now, I have had a problem with Facebook. When I first joined the social network several years ago, I intended to be completely open.  I accepted every friend request and posted whatever I wanted. Over time, as my friend circle on Facebook started to grow, I found that I was less personally connected to the people who I was "friends" with on Facebook. Now, several years later, my Facebook page is a mashup of people who I am connected with for different reasons. As of today, I have 2434 friends on my personal profile and hundreds of friend invites which are sitting in my queue unapproved because I don't really know what to do with them. Sound familiar?

This is a problem that I know many others have, and one that Burger King brilliantly brought to life back in 2009 with their "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign which infamously called upon Facebook users to defriend people in exchange for a free whopper and had more than 234,000 people choose to defriend 10 people each. As the reasoning went, anyone you would trade in for a whopper couldn't have been that good of a friend, right?  In case you were wondering, I didn't dump anyone for a free burger.  Still, my problem of losing the separation between personal and business contacts on Facebook continued. This weekend I am finally going to fix that problem by declaring "Facebook bankruptcy."

"Facebook Bankruptcy" is the extreme act of either closing an account altogether or migrating it to a different type of account in an effort to reduce or better organize your friends. 

5 Good Reasons To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Page

This weekend, I will convert my personal profile into a Facebook Page, something that I read about doing some time ago in a Mashable post.  For me, I think this is going to be useful 5 reasons:

1. Leverage your best URL: I can start to use www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava as my official Facebook page URL instead of my personal profile URL, which is what it is now. This is a BIG motivator for me to make this change because I really want to be able to use a better and more logical URL at events (my current Facebook Author Page URL is www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor). 
2. More effectively segment people by relationships: It will be easier to separate my work colleagues and acquaintances from my closer friends and family who I know in person (and have generally met!)
3. Handle pending friend requests: It will give me a solution for how to handle all the backlog of pending friend requests that I have. I am going to approve everyone over the weekend and then convert the page. 
4. Allow relationships to scale: I will no longer be limited by the 5000 friend maximum that a personal profile has, which means my page will be able to scale over time. 
5. Enable better privacy control + Share better content: One reason I don't share too much about my family and kids is because I don't have a more personal way to do it. After this, I can share more personal thoughts and images with my smaller circle of friends - something that I have wanted to be able to do for a long time.

What Are The Risks?

There are a few big risks that I have been considering related to this, as well as how I might be able to handle them:

1. Multiple Facebook Pages: Given that I already have an Author page for myself, converting my personal profile will give me two pages for myself. This is not a problem that I have found a great solution for yet (so please let me know if you have one!).  There is a page on Facebook about how to merge two pages, but otherwise I may try to contact Facebook directly to find a way to do this and combine the fans.
2. Losing past content and conversations: The help page for migrating a page clearly says that all your profile photos will remain, but the other content such as wall posts and messages will be lost - so you need to download them before converting. For some people this may be a big problem, but I never tended to use Facebook messages a lot, and my wall posts are about moments in time so while I would love to have access to them, I am ok with losing them because the benefits of migrating my profile to a page are higher. 
3. Annoying friends by trying to turn them into "fans": This is probably my biggest concern, because of the inherent rudeness of turning someone who wants to be your "friend" into what is essentially a "fan" even though Facebook doesn't use that term anymore. Part of my method for dealing with it is to write this post and publicize WHY I am doing this so people who already follow me understand my reasons. The other better reason is because I think that the content I am able to share with people will improve because I can share what they ACTUALLY care about. Having a Facebook Page helps me to separate my more marketing related thoughts and ideas which MOST of my friends who are not in marketing don't really care about.

So, taking those pieces together - I have decided it's time to finally do it. In case you happen to be following me on any of these places, thanks and I hope you continue to stay there. If this change makes you angry or somehow otherwise unhappy, I'm truly sorry. And for those who just want to see how the experience goes, here are a few links to my existing Facebook pages:

http://www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava (Currently my personal profile)

http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor (Currently my Facebook Author Page)

NOTE: I will likely come back to this post after several weeks and share an update on how the experience went - in case anyone is considering doing the same thing in the future. 

Update: Why NOT To Update Your Personal Profile Into A Facebook Page

Let's just say I wish I had done a bit more research on this process before taking the plunge to migrate my profile.  After having a few issues, I read these two posts which I highly recommend you follow the links to read right now:

• http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/facebook-profile-migration-warning/
• http://www.zeldman.com/2011/03/05/migrating-from-a-conventional-facebook-account-to-a-public-figure-fan-page-%E2%80%93-a-report-from-the-trenches/

For my own experience, there were a few things that I wish I had considered before which might have impacted my decision to migrate my page.

1. Facebook URLs don't transfer - One of the main reasons I wanted to change my profile to my page was so that I could use the URL I had registered as my public facing URL. When you convert your page, you lose the URL - a strange policy since anyone who has a profile and wants to migrate to page would probably want to keep any URL they have.
2. The "Facebook Suicide Moment" is painful - When you first migrate your account and it shows up, your profile is gone right away, but your new page has 0 likes. The immediate result is that you think you just killed yourself on Facebook and lost all your friends. Eventually after a couple of hours your friends come back as likes, but it's a traumatic experience - be warned!
3. Profiles can't be added to pages - Once you convert your account, if you then want to create a separate personal profile (as I did) then you will need to create a SEPARATE account in order to do that.  I wanted to keep all my accounts under one umbrella, and though I could create a new profile and then make that an admin on all my pages to control it centrally, it is still a unwanted extra step.
4. Friends can't be easily re-added to a profile - Perhaps the toughest thing about this migration, as Christina Warren shared in her post linked above is that you can't add all the friends that you want to because Facebook thinks that you are spamming people even though you actually know them.

So I am going to try and find a Facebook connection who can help me migrate my page back into my profile (I already submitted an online request).  After that, I will likely take the manual step of trying to reduce my friends on my personal profile to only family, friends and those whom I have met in person.  Wish me luck.

Final Update: How My Experience Ended Up (11/11/11)

After trying unsuccessfully to get my page converted back, I have moved ahead with my original plan.  So now the fans on my official Page have doubled and that is now going to be my page moving forward.  I created a separate personal profile and now have made that mostly private and am only accepting friend invitations there from family and people that I know in real life or have an actual personal connection to (rather than just a shared interest in marketing, for example).  Here are a few things I've finally learned about this process, as well as a few ongoing sources of frustration:

1. Page name is lost - I have officially lost my original URL that I had associated with my personal profile when that profile was converted to a page.  I am working through a Facebook connection to get it back, but in case you are very attached to the URL you currently have for your personal page, you may want to reconsider converting that profile into a page because you will lose that URL.
2. Friend network is tough to rebuild - You can add your friends based on Facebook's suggestion tool to your new personal profile, but after adding a few - you will continually be blocked because Facebook assumes that you are spamming.  The end result is that you may have to wait months to add people who you legitimately know because you can't send them invites and they don't realize that you are no longer friends and have converted them into "likers" of your page instead.  There seems to be no way around this. 
3. The "Admin" Hack - One workaround that you will figure out quickly is due to the fact that your profile that you now converted into a page will only let you log into the page and not add your personal profile to the same account.  That means you will now have two accounts, but the hack to get around this is to add your new account and profile as an adminstrator of any pages that you manage.  Then you can manage all your pages from your new personal account directly.

Ultimately, the entire experience of doing this was useful to get all my fans onto a single page, but has exposed some serious usability problems with Facebook when it comes to doing a more complex task like this.  That coupled with the near impossiblity of using Facebook to accomplish a simple task (such as letting any of your friends or family who live in NY know that you will be there next weekend) makes Facebook a major pain to use as a primary social network.  It is not surprising several people I respect like Chris Brogan are actively moving away from Facebook to Google+. One bottom line result of this entire experience is that I will likely start to do the same myself. 

How "Case Study Blindness" Can Kill Innovation

Last month while working on a strategy for a large client, we had a brilliant idea. This was not the kind of idea that agencies come up with all the time while sitting in a room by themselves drawing pictures on a whiteboard. No, this was the kind of game changing idea that could solve a client challenge and completely engage their audience in a way that no one in their industry had before. Our day to day main client loved it, and the budget was no problem, but before sharing it with the CMO they had a simple but toxic request that I had heard dozens of times before. "We need a similar case study to prove why this will work," they asked. And of course, the idea was so new that there was no comparable case study to be found. And as quickly as it came, the idea died before we could even present it to the CMO who probably would have loved it. Sadly, this is not an uncommon situation. Every day in business, great ideas are killed because of a simple lack of skill and education on how to properly use a case study.

In the business world today, there are few sources of information as revered as the case study. Harvard, like many other business schools, write their own and to be positively featured in one of them is considered to be a badge of honor. MBA candidates learn from case studies, and business professionals in every industry are forced to write and share them with one another in an attempt to transfer earned knowlege from person to person or from division to division within large organizations. The intention is noble: to learn from other's successes and failures as you build your own business or marketing program or operations.

Yet for all of our fascination and idolation of case studies, there is disturbingly little education in the business world about how to properly read and use them. As a result, usually intelligent people voluntarily put on blinders when trying to learn and apply lessons from case studies that they ordinarily would not. This "case study blindness" refers to the situation where businesspeople desperately seek a case study to use internally as permission for starting a new initiative, and are unable to build consensus or support to innovate without it.

It is not that I don't believe in the value of real life examples, or feel they have something important to teach. In every talk I have ever given at hundreds of conferences around the world, I always use real examples and share lessons from them. There is no better way to learn than looking at real experiences. The problem comes in treating a case study as a roadmap - which will only work if you are starting at the same place, with the same product, and the same end goal, at the same time with the same audience. Want to guess how often this is the case? Never.

Instead, what if we used case studies and real life examples as they are best intended ... to spark a new idea. They would no longer be used for justification of good ideas, but as inspiration for for new untried ideas that might work and what we could accomplish with them. Getting over our self inflicted case study blindness may be one of the most important things that any business can do to help create a more innovative business culture.

What David Ogilvy Can Teach You About Good Manners

There are some things in business that no one really teaches you. It is the "instinctive" part of being a professional, and it mostly refers to little things. A powerful reminder of how important those little things are comes from the founder of the brand I work for, David Ogilvy, who said:

"I always use my clients' products. This is not toadyism but elementary good manners."

We all have a filter when it comes to biased reviews or people who we feel are simply being paid to flack for some product. The point most of us forget is that knowledge and proximity can easily translate into affinity. In other words, we often buy the brands we work with - not because we have to, but because we want to.

Of course, there are always examples like the loyal Coke drinker who is required to drink Pepsi because of where he works ... but for every example of forced allegiance, there are dozens of others where the affinity is real and authentic. It should not be a foreign concept that people believe the best product on the market is the one they work for and the one that they know the most about.

The flip side of this is that negativity comes from personal experience as well. For example there are several brands that I had such a sour experience with while pitching for their business that I will never be a customer of their products or services. The point of all this is simple: your employees and the organizations your brand works with are potential advocates, or potential detractors.

So the next time you consider bringing on a new vendor or hiring a new employee - remember that how you treat them makes a difference.  The little things (like good manners) still matter ... as they always have.

The 12 Types Of "Social Media Experts" - Which One Are You?

There is a fundamental problem among social media experts today. Some people have argued that the problem lies with people who are rushing to call themselves an expert without having the necessary experience. Others create some sort of artificial metric to try and put some parameters around who should be allowed to call themselves an expert and who should not. The easier way out (which I myself have taken on occasion) is to excuse yourself from the entire debate by saying that no one is REALLY an expert and we are all just people who use these tools and try our best. Since coming back from SXSW, I have been thinking about this and realized that none of these methods really works because they all assume that a "social media expert" is a single type of person.

To be sure, there are some people working in social media who really shouldn't be - but I don't believe this number is as high as others would say. Instead, I think that many people who could be great at certain roles are simply trying to fill the wrong role. So, to help, I thought I would share what I think the 9 types of social media experts really are. And in true social media fashion, since 9 is such an uneven number ... let me know what you think the 10th would be. I will add the best suggestion for a 10th to this list. Thanks to all the great suggestions, I have added 3 more types of Social Media Experts to this post and updated the title to share 12 instead of 9 types. Thanks for all the great comments!

1. The Pretender - This is the person who everyone loves to hate. The newly arrived and minted "expert" who has barely used any tools beyond Facebook and Twitter, has hardly any friends or followers, and bases most of their thinking on what they just read from the dozen or so social media "gurus" who frequently share free advice on their blogs.
2. The Trainer/Teacher - Being a great teacher is a gift, and not many people truly have it. If you are a natural trainer or teacher, you have the ability to make complex ideas that are part of social media easy to understand. After listening to your direction, someone new to using the tools and thinking about social media will feel dramatically more comfortable using the tools and (most importantly) why they should even bother.
3. The Professional Speaker - Popular sentiment is to treat these people as the biggest blowhards in the industry because they get up on stage and get paid to talk about social media. It is the existence of this type of expert, however, that often creates the inspiration and excitement about social media as a whole. Once again, not everyone is necessarily good at taking this role - but listening to a great speaker about social media can create a real impact across the entire industry. Speakers may be the rising tide that can lift everyone else's boats.
4. The Content Curator - I have blogged at length about how I believe content curators will be among one of the most important social media jobs of the future. While some may equate the job to that of a digitally savvy librarian, I see the role of a curator as much more of an editor about a particular topic. The curators are the ones that can help us make sense of the exploding amount of content online. The almighty search algorithm won't be enough.
5. The Event Organizer - In social media, there are lots of great events. From the more official conferences and summits to the less formal meetups and tweetups. If your gift is in creating really engaging moments for people to gather in real life and to facilitate those moments, you might fit this category. The Event Organizer, too, is vital for the social media industry to thrive because they are the ones that drive the real moments where virtual relationships become real.
6. The Community Manager - Having a great community manager may be one of the most difficult roles to fill on a digital team, because the skill set can be quite elusive. A great community manager is dealing with real conversations in real time and reacting to those conversations transparently. If you happen to have these skills and use them well, you could easily grow into the very center of an organization's entire social media efforts (a great place to be).
7. The Content Creator - This is one of the most public types of social media experts because their expertise is on display consistently. Content creators are great at writing thoughts in blog posts, sharing their every thought via Twitter, or creating video. In the right role, content creators can become indispensible assets to a team and generate highly original content to engage an audience.
8. The Marketing Strategist - If I have one intention with this post, it is to point out very distinctly that not every social media expert should automatically be put into this category. If you are a marketing strategist, you know the best way to use social media to achieve a marketing objective such as promoting a product or service. You don't blindly create a "platform" for a client with every social media tool, or consider "start by listening and then engage people in a conversation" actionable strategic advice. Instead, you are able to solve a real business problem with a smart plan for using social media, and entirely capable of admitting which business problems social media may not be the best solution for.
9. The Designer/Builder - In some ways, this is the most important type of social media expert - because these are actually the people who make real solutions. Strategy is great, but at some point you need a real execution plan and these are the experts who can get it done. More importantly, they will also be able to provide advice based on experience for how you may want to implement your plans, and what strategy or tactics you may want to stay away from.
   
10. The Networker/Connector [Added 03/24] - This additional category, suggested by several commenters, is the person who actively uses social media to make connections with people both online and offline. In some cases these individuals may be HR professionals, but in most instances they are simply people who actively believe in being social online and use their connections to introduce people to one another. In the best case they are the ones that enable real connections between people - but in the worst case they can also be shameless self-promoters. (Suggested by Maxiosearch, Ann Marie van den Hurk, APR)
11. The Evangelist [Added 03/24] - Often in the role of speaking for a brand and putting a human face on an organization, the Evangelist is the person who uses social media to promote a belief, product or organization. For this individual, social media is a way to share content and engage in conversations about something they are passionate about. As some readers pointed out, this could also be someone who preaches the use of social media internally within an organization. (Suggested by Phil Simon, Ingrid Hein, Russell Pearson )
    
12. The Entrepreneur [Added 03/24] - One category that several readers alluded to but no one specifically suggested was the category of innovator or entrepreneur. This is the person who sees everything in social media and decides that their expertise is in creating a new tool or platform to share with the world. The creators of popular services like Foursquare or Twitter might fall into this category, as well as anyone who has ever launched a new service or app to solve a particular need or desire. Entrepreneurs are the ones who use their expertise to create something new in social media and drive innovation.
    

You might be tempted to read into this post that there are certain types of experts that are more valid than any others, but except for the first type I strongly believe that each has an important role to play as organizations and businesses of all sizes get smarter about how and when to use social media.  If you work in the industry or interact with those who do - my simple plea is that we all need to get better about understanding which of these roles we are particularly good at and focus on that.  As a whole I can think of nothing better to help legitimize and grow the entire area of social media and the groups who are able to benefit from using it well.

The Women Of Personality eBook: Second Edition Launches

About six months ago, I created an ebook based on a surprising truth that I had uncovered in the year since my book had come out. Over that time, I received emails from many people talking about how they had found Personality Not Included to be useful in solving their own marketing challenges. Within them I noticed a trend ... that the majority seemed to be coming from women. Clearly, I thought, the idea of using personality to stand out in business is an idea that somehow women entrepreneurs not only understand, but were also actively using intuitively.

Wanting to explore this a bit deeper - I invited 20 visionary women to each contribute a few paragraphs sharing how personality has helped them to achieve their personal success and what advice they might offer to up and coming female entrepreneurs about achieving similar success. That turned into the first edition of The Personality Project: Women of Personality, a free eBook which was released in April of 2009. Today, I'm proud to share the second edition of that ebook, with another 20 contributors bringing the total stories to 40. It's still free and available for download at www.thepersonalityproject.com/wop2.

I am also embedding it below and if you follow the links to see it on Slideshare, you can get a downloadable PDF version:

I'm really proud of this effort and though I realize it is self serving in that it promotes the idea of personality in business that I wrote a book about - but the eBook is free and the ideas and stories in it are still very inspiring. If you enjoyed this ebook, please share the link to either this post or link to download it from the online page. I'll also be compiling a list of links and mentions from the contributors and others below - so if you do happen to write about this or share it, please use the tag "wop2" or "wop" so I can easily find your post and include it here!

Posts About WOP2:

• Lynne d Johnson - "The Personality Project: Women of Personality Second Edition"
• Girls in Tech - "The Personality Project Highlights Our Founder"
• Biz Tips Blog - "Women of Personality ebook (sneak peek!)"
• More coming!

The World Business Forum Highlights The Power Of Passion

Earlier today the World Business Forum, one of the largest business events in the world, kicked off at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It was a fitting venue to host a range of visionary speakers that could rightly be called "rock stars" for their varied achievements in the world of business. I was invited as part of a cast of about 50 business bloggers to cover the live pulse of the event and managed to participate in a blogger meetup the night before the event started, as well as a few hours today.

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to make it to a lot of events and many of them are focused on such niche topics as the future of social media and how Twitter is changing business. I expected, after receiving the invite to WBF, that it would be illuminating in a completely different way about the world that we all work in. My hope was that it would offer a chance to contemplate a future of business in which social media was just one piece of the puzzle and not the whole story. In that respect, the first day of WBF certainly delivered.

The speaker lineup for today included Harvard Management Guru (and bestselling author) Bill George, T. Boone Pickens, Jeffrey Sachs, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts and filmmaker George Lucas. Reading the stream of tweets from the dedicated bloggers at the event (hashtag/keyword #wbf09), it was clear that there were a lot of great soundbites coming out of the event. As I wasn't able to be at the event for the whole day, these tweets were the method by which I could partake in the live pulse of the event and as I read them it struck me at the "bloggers" the event had invited to cover it were largely choosing to do so through the real time 140 character limited tool of Twitter.

As a result of these many tweets, as an outside reader piecing together the story of the event through these short bursts, it occurred to me that for my recap post from Day one, I would focus on what I felt was a trend that had emerged from all of these micro-observations: the importance of passion. Passion isn't necessarily a word that we typically equate with business. Yet listening to the stories of each of the leaders - passion was a common thread in how they approached their careers and achievements. Passion, to a degree, was what made them great at what they did ... and what they looked for in the next generation of people they hired.

Each of the men presenting today (and yes, unfortunately it was all men) - recounted as part of their point of view their own story of how their personal passion has driven them to do more. George Lucas shared his passion for storytelling. Kevin Roberts on his passion for creating something that people can't help but sharing. Even David Rubenstein (by far the most pessimistic in the group with his sobering presentation about the recession economy) preached being passionate about what you do and choosing something you love.

In the surround-sound media environment of today, there is no shortage of places you can go to see an expert's view of business and where it is headed. What I took from the first day of the World Business Forum, however, was just how important passion is as a common thread in the people (and their organizations) who are accomplishing something. The future of business isn't about leveraging Twitter or weathering the storm, or even finding the next great groundbreaking product. The ones who really change our world for the better will be the ones most passionate about doing it.

Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future ?

Every hour thousands of new videos are uploaded online. Blog posts are written and published. Millions of tweets and other short messages are shared. To say there is a flood of content being created online now seems like a serious understatement. Until now, the interesting thing is that there are relatively few technologies or tools that have been adopted in a widespread way to manage this deluge. We pretty much just have algorithmic search, with Google (and other search engines) as the most obvious example. Social bookmarking and social news have been around for some time (ie - sites like Digg or delicious), and new models of aggregation like Alltop are springing up to help us navigate all this content as well.

The real question is whether solutions like these will be enough. By some estimates in just a few years we will reach a point where all the information on the Internet will double every 72 hours. Double. I'm running out of metaphors to describe the magnitude of this content creation. The predictable result of this is that brands are beginning to focus on content creation when they start to look at social media. What are we going to create, or what are we going to get our customers/patients/fans/audience/victims to create? Is that really the best question we could be asking?

What if you were to ask about the person that makes sense of it all? The one who sifts through all the content and picks out the best and most worthy. This person is missing from most corporate communications teams. It's not a commonly defined role on any ebusiness teams. In fact, there are few jobs like this at all. The closest comparative role may be contained within the rising Library 2.0 movement (one I wrote about some time ago), but this is not frequently linked to business communication or marketing. If this role did exist, what would it be called?

The name I would give it is Content Curator. A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. If you look at how many individuals are currently using their Twitter account to highlight interesting bits of content they locate or how del.icio.us users have tagged and shared content on that site for years, you'll understand that this idea has been steadily growing organically.

In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job:

MANIFESTO/JOB DESCRIPTION: CONTENT CURATOR

In the near future, experts predict that content on the web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. To satisfy the people's hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators. The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers - creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.

After writing this, I can't help but wonder if there might already be people out there with this title. Let's find out: the first person to send me a scan or photo of a business card with this title on it will get a free signed copy of Personality Not Included ... (UPDATE 04/14/11 - This competition is now over!)

Interested in hearing more about content curation?  Click here to learn how to book Rohit to speak at your next event.

Additional Posts About Content Curation:

• The 5 Models Of Content Curation
• Why The Future Of Travel & Destination Marketing Is All About Curation

The Personality Project: Women of Personality

There are generally three kinds of ideas. The most popular two are the ones that you act on right away and those that you never do anything about. Those are the majority. Most of us love the third kind. Those are the ideas that are too big or complex or important to do quickly, but that you simply cannot let die because of how you feel about them. Today I finally launched that kind of idea. Since Personality Not Included came out about a year ago - I have been getting emails from people sharing their experience with the book and how they felt about it's main premise that businesses (like people) need to have a strong and authentic personality.

Soon after the book launched, I noticed that many of these emails were coming from women working in professional roles and those that had started their own businesses. These female entrepreneurs were responding to the message of personality in a way that I didn't expect. So since that moment I started thinking about bringing those voices together. Of course, part of the reason would be to promote my book ... but like most authors the important thing for me was for my idea to find a home and actually help people change their careers or make their business more successful.

So today, you can download a free ebook called "The Personality Project: Women of Personality." It is an extension of a site that I launched some time ago with a similar mission - to get visionary people in many industries to talk about why personality matters. This ebook features 20 business women that I respect and admire who each agreed to share their story as part of the ebook. These include founders and CEOs, best selling authors, popular bloggers and online personalities and even the first woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic Ocean (and she's now making her way across the Pacific).

See the ebook embedded below and click on it to download a free PDF copy:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books marketing blogs

Once you get a chance to read it, please visit each of the contributors sites and blogs, buy their books and support their efforts. The best thing you can do is to validate their ideas and use their examples to improve your own business and your career. And then let them know they made a difference.

PS - If you mention this ebook on your blog or twitter or facebook or anywhere else online, use the tag #wop (on Twitter) or "WOP" (anywhere else) as this is the one that all the contributors will be watching and responding to.

Interview: Personal Branding For The Millennial Generation

If there is one thing you can learn from Dan Schawbel, it's how to choose a niche and own it. He's a 20-something social media consultant for EMC as his day job, but over the past several years he has focused his blog and extracurricular work on becoming a personal branding expert for the millennial generation. In that time, he's launched a magazine, written a blog and even created his own awards for personal branding, which was when I first connected with him.

His first book, titled Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success came out this week where he shares his lessons for creating a strong personal brand and the impact it can have on your career. In this interview he shares some insights from the book and offers an inside look at his path to where he is today.  It's a story worth paying attention to.

1. Why is a personal brand so important to someone just starting out in their career?

A personal brand is inescapable and inevitable, whether you're a high school student, CEO or consultant.  We've already been branded by many people without even realizing it.  The three reasons why every has a brand are that we are constantly being judged based on first impressions, we have to sell ourselves in order to accomplish anything and because we can adopt the same branding strategies that companies or products use.

When you're just starting out in your career, you have the opportunity to define your brand before others do it for you.  In Me 2.0, the first step in the personal branding process is called "discover your brand."  Without investing time in figuring out who you are, what you're capable of, what you're passionate about and establishing goals, you're truly lost.  The sooner you can get a grip on what your brand is, and how you want to position yourself in the marketplace, the more time you'll have to prepare for the real world if you're a college student and the less time you'll waste jumping from one career path to the next aimlessly.

2. Do you always need to know what you want to do in life in order to have a strong personal brand?

Rohit, understanding your brand is mandatory for your business success and overall happiness.  Being able to align your passion with expertise in a specific area is the key to living a great life.  Passion is the fuel that will push you through adversity and expertise allows you to fulfill customer needs (clients, teachers, etc).  The value you provide is a reflect of your brand and the reputation you build up by providing that value over the course of time, is what will allow you to become more successful.  Without cementing your brand in the first place, you'll waste your time on social networks, a blog, on a resume, etc.  Everyone needs to be able to write their own personal brand statement, which consists of "what you do" and "who you serve," and it better be a niche if you want to stand out among everyone else.

3. How do you effectively balance your work in building your own brand with your day job at EMC?

EMC has supported me from day one actually.  They've give me some additional flexibility to speak to organizations, colleges and to appear in the media on various occassions.  I'm in a very interesting situation because I was recruited by EMC, after being a product markter for a little over a year, for a brand new position that I got to co-create with the PR organization, called "social media specialist."  I've become the go-to-person for social media at EMC, so I get to work on some amazing projects, such as blogs, social media press releases and our various social accounts.  There is a mutual agreement and kinship between EMC and I, where EMC's brand helps build my credibility and in return, I help advance the brand with new social technologies.

I don't believe in work/life balance at all.  I think our professional and personal lives are converging as such a fast pace, that it's gauranteed that there will be no separation in the future.  I was telling a bunch of college seniors today at Boston University that when they enter the workforce, their co-workers and management will be friending them on Facebook.  Everyone just has to be wiser on how they support and project a positive personal brand.  Being associated with other brands means you have to think twice before you update Twitter or your Facebook status.

I put in over 100 hours of work a week.  I would say at least 50 hrs for EMC and at least 50 hrs for my other projects, such as my blog, magazine, and book.

4. Before getting the book deal, you launched your own blog and magazine. What did you learn from those experiences that helped you when it came to writing a book?

Rohit, this is a great question.  The second I launched my Personal Branding Blog back in March of 2007, was when I started marketing Me 2.0, without even knowing I was goin to write it.  The blog has build a solid reputation over time, being the #1 job blog by Careerbuilder last year and an AdAge top blog, like you have. Both the blog and magazine are assets that have thousands of subscribers each.  When the book came out, I notified subscribers of both, in addition to the rest of my marketing plan, that the book was available.  The blog and the magazine qualified the buyers of the book because they were interested in personal branding.  Each asset that I own helps promote another asset that I own.  It's one big happy family!

5. What is the biggest lesson college students usually take away from your presentations?

The main theme of my presentation and Me 2.0 is "command your career."  It's the idea that college students need to take ownership of their career and stop relying on everyone else to drive it.  Instead of being in the passenger seat, it's time to take the wheel and press on the gas.  At the end of the day, career success or failure lies in their hands.  They shouldn't be what their parents or teachers want them to be.  Brand YOU is independent.  "Command your career" was my books original title because it was the feeling I had after I was recruited based on my passion.  Instead of being asked to do things, people were coming to me for expertise in social media.

6. Now that you have a book out and are doing all this speaking, what's next for you?

I need to unwind a little because I'm very stretched right now and it's probably not healthy.  I have to take a hard look at everything I'm doing and focus on the areas that will help me the most.  I'm also thinking of writing another book for a different age group on the topic of personal branding.  I'll continue speaking to gain more experience and I'll continue to think of new theories and applications, while keeping up-to-date with technology.  I have a plan, sure, but things are so unpredictable that it's hard to be specific.  My end goal with the book (and in life) is to get every college onboard to have a personal branding course.