"Favourite Tweets on Personal Branding Using Social Media, and How it Has Made Millions"

Personal Branding has become much easier to enable with the rise of Social Media, such as Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You can get your name out there, generate attention, become acknowledged as a “thought leader” and get noticed. All it takes is some time, and the use of some Internet tools that can assist, leverage and build a presence on the web in a very short timeframe. Here are some of my favourite resources that I have tweeted over the last few weeks that are from some of the very best. The great thing about this is that these branding strategies can also be applied to your Company or NGO.

“Building Your Online Brand With Social Media Tools”

Chris Brogan in this resource covers how Social Media tools have an enormous power to put you in contact with thousands of people. 

Attention on its own is useless, what are you going to do with that attention?

If you want to build your online brand you have to know how all your activities work together. You need a consistency and congruency. Each part of the social media puzzle builds into a picture people have of you, how they imagine you to be relates to how you really are to the degree you get this stuff right.

If you are approaching social media in a haphazard way, do not be surprised if things do not work out exactly as you hoped or imagined they would.

 “25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity”

Sean P Aune covers in this post that there is nothing more important online than your identity, and nothing more annoying than when someone finds a way to steal it. This list comprises 25+ tools to manage your reputation, officially sign documents, aggregate your social network IDs and more. And yes, there’s some irony that there are so many sites to manage your identity: hopefully all these will adopt a set of standards to make life easier for us all.

“Personal Branding 101 – How to Discover and Create Your Brand”

Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog and in this article discusses how in the past few years personal branding has been discussed exhaustively throughout the Net. The difference between today and over ten years ago when it was first mentioned by Tom Peters, is the rise of social technologies that have made branding not only more personal, but within reach.

From the corporate brand (BMW), to the product brand (BMW M3 Coupe) and down to the personal brand (car salesman), branding is a critical component to a customer’s purchasing decision. These days, customer complaints and opinions are online and viewable through a simple search, on either Google or through social networks. There is no hiding anymore and transparency and authenticity are the only means to survive and thrive in this new digital kingdom.

Many people think that personal branding is just for celebrities such as Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, yet each and every one of us is a brand. Personal branding, by definition, is the process by which we market ourselves to others. As a brand, we can leverage the same strategies that make these celebrities or corporate brands appeal to others. We can build brand equity just like them.

We can also have just as much presence as most startups and mid-size companies and products. Social media tools have leveled the playing ground and have enabled us to reach incredible heights, at the cost of our time. Here he covers the personal branding process, so you can start to think about what face you want to show to the world and how you want to position yourself for success!

“Video “How to Grow Your Social Media Stature”

Wondering how to grow your popularity in the social media world? Then watch this video…Its an interview by Michael Stelzner of  Jason Falls (SocialMediaExplorer.com) and he talks about how he grew in popularity using good old fashioned networking.

In this video, Jason talks about:

• How he strategically grew in popularity on the social media frontier
• Social media tips for PR professionals
• Measuring return on investments with social media

 “How a Leading Marketer Used Video to Gain Fame” and make Millions”  

You may have seen him chatting with Ellen DeGeneres on her daytime talk show, or exchanging late-night wisecracks with Conan O’Brien.  Maybe you caught one of his high-energy keynote presentations at a corporate conference.  Gary Vaynerchuk seems to be everywhere these days, and when it comes to using video to market your brand, he’s the guru to listen to.

To boost his family’s $4 million New Jersey wine business into a $50 million national powerhouse, Gary employed social media tools to promote Wine Library TV (http://www.winelibrarytv.com/), a video blog about wine that has exceeded 80,000 devoted daily viewers—the loyal throng he calls “Vayniacs.”

 “How did I end up on those TV shows?,” he muses.  “In the past, you had to be discovered—someone had to decide that you’re a talent and they need you.  But nowadays, with online video, we are the content and we can go directly to our customers by using things like YouTube, Viddler and YouStream to build our brand equity.  People who have businesses need to realize that they have this opportunity.”

The results of his efforts have been astounding.  Gary has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter (see http://Twitter.com/GaryVee) and recently landed a million-dollar book deal .