Tuesday, October 23, 2007

The Beginning of the Personal Brand

Well over the past few months I have been doing a lot of research on social network marketing and I am finding that things are changing quite fast. For example, a couple articles this week showed that traditional media buys are on the decline while web marketing and personal brand marketing are on the increase. Personal brand marketing is using the Internet to promote your products and build your brand. An example is the " Just Start a Business" campaign promoted by http://www.meetups.com/ which promotes getting a group together to just start talking about starting a business. The sponsor, Quicken Get Started, small business accounting software promotes the events, helps to offset the cost of the Meetups site and offers a free starter accounting software to those attending the event. In the past these dollars would have gone into mainstream media advertising.

Another examples is last year, Johnson & Johnson decided to boycott the so-called upfronts, an annual event when advertisers get together with television executives to negotiate for commercial time. In August, General Motors said that 2008 would be the last year for its longtime sponsorship of the Olympics. In May, A. G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble, told financial analysts that the company would spend less on traditional media and more on its Web site, in-store advertising and promotional events.

Another example is to take Nike's marketing pitch. Today,many Nike ads are shown only on the Internet. Wayne Rooney, the British soccer player, is currently featured in a series of online videos for Nike. In 2005, Nike placed a 2-minute, 46-second clip of the Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho online, instead of on TV. The video has had more than 17 million views on YouTube and became so well known that some television networks like Sky Sports and the BBC showed it in their news coverage — free. I would like to thank Louise Story for her October 14, 2007 story, The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life. in which she give the details above and a whole lot more interesting reasons why Internet and personal brand marketing will become even bigger in the years to come. I hope to cover this topic more fully in my next up coming blogs. In the meantime think about how you are building your own personal brand. I will give you some tips in the days and weeks to come.

Kensel Tracy is the Marketing Coach and is Senior Partner with the Corporate Coachworkz Inc. located in Chelsea, Quebec, Canada. He is currently writing a new book called: Building Your Personal Brand, Finding Your Way in the Real World. see his website as http://www.corporatecoachworkz.com/ or at kenselt@sympatico.ca

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