Although securing and promoting your company’s brand is an important step when starting a business, and although protecting that brand can be an ongoing concern, the question of what it means to associate a person with a company brand is a lot more complicated – a fact made obvious in light of Tiger Wood’s sex scandals. The companies that featured Woods in their advertising had sought to latch onto Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand – an image crafted to suggest his tenacity, reliability, skill, and success.

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The gulf we now see between Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand – “the perfect role model” – and Tiger Woods as a flawed human being points to some of the potential dangers in associating your company’s brand with a person. Of course, few startups are in the position to build a brand based on a celebrity’s image or reputation. Instead, if there is a person associated with the startup’s brand, it is likely someone from within the company.

Tiger Woods serves as a cautionary tale, obviously for the businesses who endorsed him but also for individuals who seek to promote themselves as a brand. Despite concerns about people as brands (branding is, after all, what we do to cattle), the power of brands continues to be a way to quickly identify a product or service or idea with your business.

For many entrepreneurs, developing a brand isn’t merely a matter of creating a company brand, but of also crafting a personal brand. The idea of a personal brand is hardly new, often traced back to a 1997 article by Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You”: “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

It may be that some of the fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal has made the idea of personal branding seem trickier – people are people, after all, not objects and not cattle. As Doc Searls has argued in two recent blog posts, brands are “boring” at best and “bull” at worst.

Technological innovation has made personal branding easier, in some regards. Registering a domain name under your own name has become an incredibly straightforward and inexpensive process. Having a domain name is a simple step in helping make sure that content you produce is readily associated with your name. And services like Google Alerts can be useful to monitor the Internet for mention of your name. The rise of social media has made creating an online presence quite simple, but signing up for social media networks or having a LinkedIn profile for example, is not necessarily sufficient or suitable for crafting your personal brand. As the information available online about all of us increases, it is likely that our ability to create and maintain personal branding will become more difficult.

Undoubtedly, building trust is fundamental to business success. Maintaining reputation is crucial, whether or not you want your name to be synonymous with a product, a service or a company.

What are your thoughts on personal branding? Has it become impossible? Or has it become ubiquitous?

Discuss

Google’s decision to redirect Chinese searchers to Google.com.hk is having some serious repercussions.  On Monday, Chinese Internet company Tom Online distanced itself from Google.  China Unicom followed suit on Wednesday.  And now, Motorola has also turned its back on the search giant.

Mark Lee and Hugo Miller reported late yesterday, "Motorola Inc., the handset maker that’s rebuilding its mobile-phone business around Google Inc.’s Android software, has dropped the U.S. Internet company’s search engine from one of its Android phones in China."

It looks like Baidu and Bing will be used as replacements, and in certain regards, that isn’t too shocking.  Deals between Motorola, Baidu, and Bing were announced months ago, and the two search engines represent the market leader and an obvious American alternative, respectively.

Still, as Lee and Miller pointed out, Google and Android are supposed to be central to Motorola’s strategy; the company’s in fact claimed that it will release 20-30 Android phones this year.  So Motorola must either have little confidence in Google’s ability to impress Chinese users, or it faced quite a lot of pressure to part ways with the American search giant.

Both of these possibilities imply that the fallout might continue.  Google fans, hold tight.

Google’s decision to redirect Chinese searchers to Google.com.hk is having some serious repercussions.  On Monday, Chinese Internet company Tom Online distanced itself from Google.  China Unicom followed suit on Wednesday.  And now, Motorola has also turned its back on the search giant.

Mark Lee and Hugo Miller reported late yesterday, "Motorola Inc., the handset maker that’s rebuilding its mobile-phone business around Google Inc.’s Android software, has dropped the U.S. Internet company’s search engine from one of its Android phones in China."

It looks like Baidu and Bing will be used as replacements, and in certain regards, that isn’t too shocking.  Deals between Motorola, Baidu, and Bing were announced months ago, and the two search engines represent the market leader and an obvious American alternative, respectively.

Still, as Lee and Miller pointed out, Google and Android are supposed to be central to Motorola’s strategy; the company’s in fact claimed that it will release 20-30 Android phones this year.  So Motorola must either have little confidence in Google’s ability to impress Chinese users, or it faced quite a lot of pressure to part ways with the American search giant.

Both of these possibilities imply that the fallout might continue.  Google fans, hold tight.

Every day, my inbox is filled with emails promoting yet another new marketing strategy or promising results that will cure all of my marketing ills. Most of the strategies are flash-in-the-pan — here today and gone tomorrow because the next new strategy has been discovered. A few newer strategies have proven to have staying power over time, like social networking, which took a long time to grow on me. I’ve learned the hard way not to be an early adopter of new marketing strategies — I tend to sit back and watch the fallout to see if something is worth my time and energy.

As I reflect back on my early years in business, I often felt like a dog chasing my tail. I used to run and run quickly in one direction chasing one marketing idea, and then reverse course, chasing my tail in another direction when hearing about the next “greatest thing.” What resulted from my helter-skelter marketing? Not much. I was going in too many directions at once and trying to keep too many balls in the air to create a truly successful marketing plan that really helped promote my business.

Here’s the marketing secret I wished I’d learned early on: Adopt the marketing strategy that best fits with your gifts, talents, and interests, or in other words: Do what you’re good at. Yep, it’s that simple. I knew that this was good advice for pursuing a career or starting a business, but I never realized how well it applied to marketing my company.

Roughly 4 years into my business it suddenly dawned on me that I had always been a good writer. Supervisors, teachers, friends, and colleagues had often complimented me on my writing, but I dismissed the praise because I found writing to be a taxing chore that gave me a massive headache. It wasn’t until I learned how to write for myself in my own voice, rather than structuring my writing to meet the criteria of others, that I truly began to enjoy putting pen to paper (or, words on a screen, if you will).

This love for writing made me a natural for my now-favorite marketing strategy, article marketing. Why do I love it? Because it’s easy for me — sometimes scarily easy. However, I discovered that having a skill for a strategy isn’t enough to be successful. Even at this point my marketing continued to be hit-or-miss. There was still something missing from the mix.

After hearing a great talk by a coaching colleague about how he structured his time, I finally realized what was the key compoent missing from my marketing strategy — and the missing component was the same for the bulk of the other entrepreneurs sitting in the room with me. The #1 marketing mistake made by the majority of online business owners is: Lack of consistency. Once you determine where your talent lies and how you can integrate that into a workable marketing plan, then you need to commit to implementing that plan consistently over time.

Could it possibly be that simple? In a nutshell, yes. I committed to publishing my ezine every Thursday morning. I committed to writing one new article each week for the ezine. I committed to syndicating one new article each week through my article submission service. I committed to repurposing my ezine content to my blog. I committed to making 1-2 new posts on my blog each week. This is only the tip of the iceburg describing what I do for marketing, but consistency was the catalyst that propelled me to a successful online marketing strategy that I’ve been implementing now for 5 years.

My results? I no longer chase after clients — they find me online. 100% of my business comes from my web site, internet marketing, or word-of-mouth referrals — I do no in-person networking at all any longer. My web site screens out those clients who aren’t a good fit and invites those who are. I enjoy running a thriving business from my home office with only a 5-second commute. I create a work schedule that works best for me and my husband, which gives me the flexibility to leave my office early if I want and catch a matinee with him without having to submit a vacation request form to my supervisor. I am happy and healthy and no longer have recurring bouts of colitis and depression from working in a miserable situation. I make more money now than I ever made by working for someone else.

Take inventory of your skills and abilities, and see how you can easily integrate those into a marketing strategy that will be easy for you to implement. Once you decide on your strategy, commit to implementing it consistently over time, and enjoy your results!

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Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

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Internet Marketing: The #1 Marketing Mistake Made By 75% of Online Business Owners