1. Email signature

Check out LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) or Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). Both of these online networking sites offer professional signature templates that can be customized to include your tagline, your website and your blog address. If you do not have your own website, I strongly suggest that you do not use Yahoo!, Hotmail or AOL as your email address. Infinitely more professional are Comcast, Verizon or one of the many other communications service providers.

2. Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)

There is no longer any excuse for not having a Facebook (www.facebook.com) page. It requires little technical know-how and the initial set-up is easy. Be sure to include as much texture in this as you can. Flag the blogs you read and the organizations you belong to. Use your BRAND NARRATIVE for your bio here and, if you have a tagline for your business, include that, too. If you have a logo, upload that and fly it proudly!

3. eNewsletter

Your eNewsletter is intrinsically tied to the brand you have just developed. Make sure that the title reflects this—that the title has something to do with the services you offer. For example, mine is called “The Brand Dame,” which reinforces the kind of consulting I do. My tagline is “branding from the inside out” and this appears right underneath the title, further strengthening the connection between my eNewsletter, my website and my services. Make sure that your eNewsletter includes an “about Me/About Us” section or button. This is where your BRAND NARRATIVE goes.

Most eNewsletters put the service descriptions at the bottom. As an example, see how eNewsletter guru Michael Katz (www.bluepenguindevelopment.com) describes his value at the bottom of his eNewsletter:

Blue Penguin Development helps professional service firms get clients,
by showing them how to communicate effectively with the people they already know.

My good friend and marketing communications genius Dianna Huff (www.dhcommunications.com) does it this way:

Take a look at my B2B marketing communications copywriting and SEO services to see how you can put my award-winning expertise to work for you.

4. Blog

This is where your list of keywords and central messages comes in very handy. Because it is only by being consistent in what you say to your prospects and your target audiences that you will be successful. The same holds true for your eNewsletter— it’s the old television adage – say it, say and say it again! You also want to have an “About Me/About Us” visible on your blog. And, it must be the same BRAND NARRATIVE that appears on all of your materials.

5. Website

Leaving the best for near last, this is where all of your BRAND ELEMENTS get to strut their stuff.

Your BRAND NARRATIVE becomes the text for WHO WE ARE.

Your WHAT WE DO becomes the text for OUR SERVICES.

Your KEY WORDS and KEY MESSAGES become sprinkled liberally and consistently throughout all the rest of your web COPY.

6. Telephone/ cell phone greeting

Your recorded voice mail message is every bit as important a branding opportunity as your website, your blog and your eNewsletter. Don’t overlook it! Use it to reiterate your key phrase or tagline!

So, the answer to the question “how do I use my new brand portfolio system?” is put it everywhere that anyone will see, read, hear or come in contact with you and your business!

Technorati Tags: dianna huff, michael katz, personal branding

Joe Biden is not eighty-seven. He has no excuse for introducing his wife (repeatedly, I might add, as if we didn’t get it the first six times) this way:

“My wife, Jill, who you’ll meet soon, who’s drop-dead gorgeous. My wife, Jill, she also has a doctorate degree, which is a problem.”

Shame on you, Senator Biden. I know you’re a nice guy and I’m really glad that we’ll be seeing a lot more of you between now and November, and hopefully for eight more years after that. I also get that you love your wife. So why put her down? Why remind us that “you got the girl,” the model/poster girl, who, oh yeah and by the way, just happens to have a doctorate? How do you hope to win over the 18 million Hillary supporters with this age-old notion that it’s not enough to be smart, that real women must be “drop dead gorgeous” too?

Sure, it helps. We’ve all read the surveys that say that men prefer blonds, long hair and high heels. But isn’t this election supposed to be about change? Before I get to your foreign policy, your stand on the environment or how you and Barack will fix the economy or get us the hell out of Iraq, I need you to drop the old boy attitude, the patronizing, offensive references to how your wife looks.

Technorati Tags: jill biden, joe biden, michelle obama

My gripe is about password-protection. If it doesn’t involve my money, my so-called intellectual capital, or my livelihood, what’s the point? Could someone please tell me?  Back when I could use the same username and password for almost everything, this was not a problem. But ever since my PayPal account got hacked into and cleaned me out earlier this summer, I have changed everything to a hieroglyphic combination of numbers, letters, small, large and everything in between. No two are alike.

I recently fell in love with a site called visualthesaurus.com. It’s a nifty site for anyone who loves words and who writes for a living or for pleasure. I paid the $2.95 a month to join, but can I remember my log-in credentials? No–and was it easy to retrieve them? Of course not. Does this leave a bad taste in my mouth about an otherwise delightful and useful site? You bet!

What does this have to do with brands? Everything. Think Mac. Think ease-of-use. The more complicated we make using our products or services the more barriers we throw-up for our customers. Instead of becoming to go-to site or the go-to firm or the go-to expert, folks begin to turn to us as a last resort because it is too hard, too time consuming or just plain too confusing.

Simplify, simplify. Let this  be your brand mantra for the day.

Technorati Tags: brand, Mac, passwords, visualthesaurus.com

He sent me a note back after receiving my enewsletter, a perfect opportunity I would think, to update me on his latest projects, tell me what successes he’s had for other clients, etc. You get the picture. In other words, a perfect opportunity to sell me. Alas, but it was not to be.

Just a quick note of “hello”. Hope all is well with you. As you work with your clients budgets for next year, please keep me in mind if you ever need assistance in securing high-impact XXXXXXXXX.

This little note makes a lot of awfully big assumptions.

1. That I remember what he does.

2. That I know how I can use him.

3. That I know exactly what value he will add to my business.

4. That I will take it on faith that he has a recent history of securing high-level XXXX’s. Why not tell me what they are? Go ahead, impress me.

This little note could have been a slam dunk. Great timing–I am lining-up my partners/vendors for fall projects. But why oh why didn’t he sell me? Huge opportunity missed.

You have to use every chance that comes your way to give your clients and prospects new information about yourself and your business. Even a simple one-liner. Give me something to remember  you by– your skill, your expertise, your value to my work. A little “how are you” is just plain annoying from someone I am not in frequent contact with. Give me something I can really use.

As someone once said to me, hard beats soft every time.

Technorati Tags: sales, selling

Queen of B2B Marketing Dianna Huff has come out with a gem of an e-book, 5 B2B MarComm Strategies to Increase Sales Now. She’s very clever, this Dianna, and she tells it to you straight — no lingo, no buzz wording, no smoke screens. This is a playbook for those of us who need a simple guide to the swirl of options at our disposal, if only we knew how to use them. She breaks it down, clears away the fog and gives you everything you need to know.

As she says, her e-book won’t make tell you which channel to use, but it will make crystal clear what your strategy should be. And they are:

1. Understand your target market

2. Determine your campaign objectives before you start writing

3. Integrate online and offline tactics

4. Build your Website around what Buyers and Prospects want

5. Focus on your Customer, not on your company

Nothing new here, you say? Ah, but I beg to differ. Download it and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: dianna huff, marcomm

When I Googled myself this morning I found lots of interesting tidbits. First, as expected, there at the top of the list is my skyepr website, followed by the Brand Dame Blog, and my LinkedIn profile. But wait–what’s this? Something called my Pipl Profile — never heard of that before. I click on it et voila! All the words I use to describe my personal brand collected into a handy snapshot of Brand Lyn! How clever! How thoughtful of Pipl’s deep search robots to scour the web on my behalf ….

But wait, what’s this? Lyn Chamberlin-Scientology Service Completions ? WHAAAAAT? I hesitate to give you the link, dear reader, to yet another snake-in-the-mailbox Scientology scam to get those of us appalled to see our names connected in any public profile to this organization click and read the propaganda that’s there. There is no way to get rid of this, and since Google listings appear in order of their rankings (the most-read appears first, etc.), I have to assume that people are as surprised as I am to find this link holding the # 4 spot in my little Google precis.

Once I get past this blight on my otherwise, ah-hem, impressive Google reputation, I skip happily along through articles I’ve written, talks I’ve given, even a book that was written about the tragic/comic saga of the Monitor Channel.

Several clients have asked me lately if there is a way to get rid of something on Google that you wish wasn’t there. The answer is there is no quick fix; no instant delete. The only solution is to take your online reputation very seriously. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

You must feed the beast–using every means possible –yes, Twitter, flickr, LinkedIn, ning, and all the other entrance ramps to the Internet expressway. Keep shoveling coal into the content furnace and watch as that zinger someone took at you online in 2001 begins to fall below the Google radar.

Technorati Tags: flickr, google, LinkedIn, pipl, the monitor channel, twitter

And I agree — although it can be hard to follow the advice of Gina Trapani, who Dan interviewed. Check out what she had to say:

Being on top of your game is the best kind of “branding” you can do, because honestly? Most people are not. Most people let email slip through the cracks, or say they’ll get back in a week and don’t, or drop the ball on that task you talked about doing in that meeting two months ago. When you follow up, when you’re responsive, when you’re on time (even early!) delivering on your deadlines–even when you pre-empt being late with a “Hey, I said I’d get this to you today but I turned out to be busier than I expected. How’s Tuesday instead?”–your co-workers and colleagues and clients will be impressed and only want to work with you more. You’ll become known as responsive–and therefore responsible–and dependable and effective and indispensable.

Click on “indispensable” and read Dan’s post called “The Nirvana of Personal Branding,“ in which he talks more about how being perceived as absolutely necessary, essential to any team or project, is one of the hardest personal branding goals to achieve of all.

Technorati Tags: Dan Schwabel, Gina Trapani, personal branding, time management

It’s a whole lot easier to stay in your air-conditioned room with the curtains closed.  Being social takes energy — a lot of energy — and what if, by putting yourself out there, no one talks to you, no one asks you to sit with them, asks you to dance or if you’d like fries with that Coke?

I’ve tried hard to ignore facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I told myself that these were just faddish ways of wasting more time, and the thought of having my face and profile globally available in the great Internet ether made me kind of queasy.

But as time went on, and more and more people that I respect and emulate began to invite me to LinkIn with them or to write on their facebook wall, the more I began to stare out that window and watch the party going on without me.

I am now fully facebooked and LinkedIn. I twitter regularly. Many clients have asked me to write their profiles for their own social networking endeavors. I can’t yet say that there have been any tangible results (read “new business”) to come from this, but I do feel that my Outlook contacts have suddenly come alive, that I have connected my rather random universe, and — as with business cards and websites — ya just gotta have it, gotta put yourself out there.

What good is a personal brand if no one sees it?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, personal brand, social networking, twitter

The truth is, I thought long and hard about who I wanted to be on the screen. My ah-hah moment came when I realized that I could  just be myself. Being myself — no longer trying to hug the corporate line, throwing away the blah-blah-blah of professional service selling lingo that I rip apart for other people. I rewrote everything — this time in my own voice. I encouraged the designer to play with fonts, colors,  and images — we even hired an illustrator to draw me, my lap top and Jack the Dog.

My collateral is now the real deal, at least to the extent that I am the real deal. Take me or leave me, this is who you get when you hire me. I used to think that I wanted any and all clients — now I know I only want the ones who like what they see.

The law of attraction at work.

Technorati Tags: personal branding, professional service sales, professional services

Why, indeed. I’ve always said that there was no magic to getting press coverage. Just old fashioned shoe leather. If you want to pay me the big bucks to do the legwork for you, I won’t argue. And sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll be able to see a story where none existed before. But most of the time, as several people who aren’t flacks for a living have proved, a little diligence and question-asking will get you, well, maybe not into The Wall Street Journal, but close to it.

Trumpets, please. Now you don’t have to lift a finger. Self-described CEO, entrepreneur and adventurer Peter Shankman is doing all the heavy mental lifting for you. HARO is now making the rounds. At least a dozen clients have breathlessly emailed me this week. Have you seen THIS, they ask?

Have you? This is media relations for the great unwashed. Not the wine of the week/ diamonds for a dollar feeds of yesteryear when companies like Bacon’s charged folks like me a gazillion dollars for precious (and useless) queries from marginal “journalists.” Shankman and his HARO (which stands for Help a Reporter Out. Cute, huh?) have trumped them all. You can subscribe free to his daily feeds which contain real reporters looking for real sources on a wide variety of real stories. It is worth reading because he is very funny, seems to travel the US faster than a speeding bullet, and he has gained the respect of journalists and media groupies alike.

Who knows, you might just find your fifteen minutes of media fame.

Technorati Tags: HARO, media relations, shankman