Hasta La Ideas

I’ve written a short article about office organizing that appears on page 25 of the August 2009 issue of Personal Branding Magazine. (You can check out a free sample of the magazine online.) Since we talk about office organizing quite a bit on Unclutterer, I thought it might be fun to instead let the magazine’s editor, Dan Schawbel, talk to us about a topic he knows in great detail and one that we rarely discuss on the site — personal branding.

In addition to being the editor of the magazine, Dan is also the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand To Achieve Career Success. If after reading the following interview you want to learn more about personal branding, I recommend checking out Dan’s book, his site, his magazine, and his column in Business Week.

What is your method for helping people to identify their personal brand to stand out in the crowd?

There are four steps in the personal branding process I’ve developed: discover, create, communicate and maintain. You can’t create a brand unless you know what you want to be known for or labeled as. This isn’t a job title we’re talking about here. It’s all about positioning yourself in a crowded market by developing a personal brand statement, which contains your expertise and your target audience. For example: Top doctor for young adults in San Diego. As long as this statement is backed up, then you can stand out, demand a premium salary and become more respected and well known. Right now you’re asking “what if I’m not an expert” and the answer is simple, become the expert. I started off as a “personal branding spokesman.” Once you become proven, you can transition, but you have to start somewhere.

Brand discovery can be challenging, so you may want to survey the people who know you best. Ask them to describe you and give you feedback on what they think you enjoy. Ask yourself “what makes me stay up at night”? Write down your strength and what projects and/or college classes you enjoyed. Once you discover your brand, it will change the way you see yourself, give you confidence and ultimately make you successful, as long as you put the effort in.

What are the key elements of personal branding every worker should be scheduling time for in their day?

Each day, there are a lot of tasks you can do, depending on how much time you have allocated to building your brand. If you haven’t discovered your brand in the first place, then you should invest time in figuring out what you’re passionate about, what you’re expertise is (or what you want it to be) and what your support system looks like. You need all three to succeed and I call this the “triangle of success.” It’s not about finding a job anymore. Instead, you want to position yourself for the career you desire. You should do your homework to see what’s out there and make a list of your strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities you have and the threats (or factors that may impede on your success).

Another thing you should do is to follow conversations online, using google.com/alerts, search.twitter.com, backtype.com, and others. Set alerts and/or search for your full name, topics in your field and competitors. This will keep you up-to-date with the latest happenings in YOUR world, as well as keep you relevant and knowledgeable.

I also recommend that you publish one blog post per day. The post should relate to the career you want to create and be unique. It’s hard to stand out in the blogosphere now with over 200 million blogs, so you have to be creative to stand out.

It’s so tempting to waste time on social media sites instead of using them efficiently for work and personal branding. Any tips on how to use these services in a productive way?

You have to first recognize your current situation, both financially and responsibility wise. If you have three six year old children, two pet dogs, and a full-time job, then you might not be able to invest twenty hours per week using social media sites to build your personal brand. Second, you’ll want to concentrate on only a small amount of social media sites, or your brand will be spread too thin and you won’t be able to manage it. I recommend that you join Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (the big 3), while discovering and joining social networks in your industry. For instance, if you’re a real estate agent, join activerain.com or if you’re an entrepreneur, you may want to join partnerup.com.

It’s quite easy to waste time on social media sites because they are fun and there are a lot of features and people to connect with, along with unlimited opportunities. The smart thing to do is to allocate a certain amount of hours per week to each social media site that you can benefit from and keep to that schedule.

How do you keep networking contacts organized? Do you have any services or advice to recommend to others for keeping all the information gathered at networking events stored in an organized and meaningful manner?

I use a simple Excel spreadsheet to log all of my contacts and worksheets within that spreadsheet to separate different types of contacts. For example, one worksheet is called “media contacts,” where I list the names of all the journalists I’ve corresponded and another one is “personal contacts,” where I list the names of friends and family. LinkedIn.com is another great tool to organize your contacts and export the list, which you can print out as well. JibberJobber.com, a company owned by my friend Jason Alba, is a highly regarded networking database tool, which allows you to track jobs you apply for, in addition to personal and professional relationships. I wouldn’t consider myself the most organized person at all. I use most of my energy executing ideas and index my contacts later. For instance, I’ll use Gmail and create a category and put in contacts who have emailed me to be stored there, until I have time to log them.

What do you believe is the most difficult area of personal branding to keep organized and clutter free?

Aside from building a strong network contact list, it can be hard to manage your online presence as it moves through the web. The reason is because we’re all constantly moving and we’re swimming in an ocean of information everyday, so it’s hard to make your brand consistent. Also, technology has changed rapidly. Just Monday, Facebook bought FriendFeed, Facebook launched it’s own real-time search engine and Google launched a test website for their new search engine. You have to keep up with everything that is going on and if you subscribe to Mashable.com, TechCrunch.com and ReadWriteWeb.com, you’ll have a pulse over the greater tech industry. The web is a cluttered place, so you should find the blogs with the most value and review them everyday. This can obviously be tedious, but you don’t want to be left out, while your competitors are paying attention.

Is there ever a time along a career path to stop maintaining relationships with others in your industry?

If you do that, then you will be in severe shape, especially if you lose your job. I’m a firm believe in the power of networking and the social equity that brings. For instance, when I needed an intern this summer, I tweeted about it and several of my contacts retweeted that internship opening. In turn, I received many resumes and eventually hired three interns. Without the social equity to make that happen, it would have been a gruesome summer. The older you get, the more important it is to have a strong network, especially in your industry. I did a poll on my blog and 60% of people got a job through networking. For executives, that number jumps up to over 75%. Building your network before you need it is required for career success, both online and offline.

An acquaintance of mine recently told me about a problem she is having in her retirement. After decades of working and thinking, “I’ll have time for that when I retire,” she’s now overwhelmed by all the things she promised herself she would do with her free time and resources.

I read about the injustices in the world — now that I have time to read — and I want to help out in all of the causes. I want to give my time, energy, and money to help others. But there are so many causes, so many people in need, and I can’t possibly give to all of them.

Her home is primarily uncluttered, yet her dining room table is piled high with magazine articles, donation solicitations, and printouts from websites detailing organizations, people, and causes in need. Her heart and good intentions are pulled in numerous directions. Most of us face similar situations in our lives — maybe not with looking for ways to help charitable causes but how to spend our personal time.

I gave her the following advice, and I suggest the following for anyone who feels pulled in too many directions.

1. Take the time to reflect on and determine what matters most to you. We’ve written about this process before, and I believe it is the most important step to determining how best to spend your time.
2. Choose ONE opportunity that aptly reflects what matters most to you to account for 80 percent of your available resources. Out of all of the possibilities that stand in front of you, pick the one thing that you feel comfortable making a true commitment to.
3. Budget the remaining 20 percent of your resources (time, money, whatever it is that you wish to commit) for all other projects that are in line with what matters most to you. For example, if you have $1,000 to donate to charity every year, $800 will go to the ONE organization and $200 might be distributed in $20 gifts to 10 other charities.
4. Stick to this arrangement for at least six months. Give yourself a decent chunk of time to commit to the new system. After six months you will be able to re-evaluate and decide how to proceed into the future.

In this list, I give the example of budgeting money, but you can budget your time just as easily. Commit to volunteering eight hours a week at the local animal shelter, one hour to your grandchild’s PTA, and one hour to sorting food at the food bank. Or, maybe you have a young family and you’ll commit eight hours a week to coaching your son’s soccer team, one hour to a professional organization, and one hour to a committee for your neighborhood association.

(With my job, I try to budget 80 percent of my time to writing and 20 percent of my time to administration. It doesn’t always happen, but I’ve found that focusing the majority of my work day on the most important aspect of my job makes it more enjoyable and more productive.)

If you look at the situation as “what do I get to do” instead of “what don’t I get to do,” it makes saying no to other opportunities simpler. You stop feeling overwhelmed and your attention is focused on what matters most to you.

When you work to clear the clutter from a space, I recommend that you sort objects into three piles: keep, purge, and other. The keep pile is filled with things you plan to keep, the purge pile is filled with things you wish to get rid of (trash, recycle, donate to charity), and the other pile is for things that require additional action (return to library, take to tailor to be hemmed, take to cobbler to be resoled, etc.). Unfortunately, there is usually a fourth category of items — the tough calls.

I’m of the opinion that it’s okay to keep tough calls, at least in the short term. When it comes time to put things back to their permanent homes (a place for everything, and everything in its place), you’ll know if you have space to store the item. If you don’t have space, get rid of the object. If you have space, put the object in a box and seal up the box with tape. Write the date on the top of the box and what you would do with the item if you got rid of it (sell on Craigslist, give to Aunt Lynda). At some point in the future, six months is usually a good length of time, if you haven’t opened the box just do whatever the directions on the box tell you to do. Except for items you plan to sell, you don’t even need to open up the box and look at the item before getting rid of it.

As far as tough calls are concerned, I’ve found that they reduce in number the more uncluttering you do. The temporary holding box is a reassuring safety net when you’re first getting your footing. I think it’s an excellent way to help others ease into uncluttering, too.

Earlier this year, I had all of my old print photographs professionally scanned (I used scanmyphotos.com and it was around $150 per box of 2,250 pics). Next, I uploaded all of my digital scans to my Flickr pro account and to iPhoto (so far, I have decided not to upgrade to Aperture) on my laptop so that I have the files backed up in multiple locations in addition to having them on DVD. As far as these processes were concerned, the process was easy as pie. (Mmmmmm, pie.)

I am now comfortable with knowing that if my house burns to the ground, decades of photographic memories will not be lost.

However, I am a bit frustrated about the next step in my photo organizing process and I’m looking for some advice. I wish to enter all of the text that I have written on the back of the photographs into the corresponding image’s Notes/Description field. And, I wish to categorize the sets of images into meaningful groups. Doing these two steps, however, seems to be Herculean.

Does anyone out in the Unclutterer readership have a suggestion for how to speed up this process?

• What is the fastest way to enter data from the back of a photograph into a Notes/Description field? Should I enlist the help of a friend? Hire a neighborhood kid to do it? Streamline the process in some way?
• What is the most meaningful way to categorize groups of photographs? Is date order always the best method? What other systems do people use that have proven to be worthwhile?

Let me say, “thank you,” ahead of time, because this has been a bit of a nightmare for me. I look at the box of photographs that have been scanned and feel overwhelmed by the next step in the process.

Last Thursday, Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos made an official apology for the way Amazon deleted unauthorized George Orwell books from people’s Kindles.

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

When I read Bezos’ apology, I was impressed by how direct, sincere, and uncluttered it was. It didn’t contain an excuse. It didn’t shift blame to someone else. And the statement in its final sentence wasn’t an over-promise or an out-of-proportion exaggeration, it simply said that they will try to do better in the future. The apology also came pretty quickly, while consumer feelings were still riled.

Everyone makes mistakes. Apologizing when those mistakes are made isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of personal responsibility. I try to apologize when I mess up or hurt someone’s feelings or forget something important, but I don’t always get the apology right. So, I’m going to take a few lessons from Jeff Bezos and try my best to give uncluttered apologies when they’re necessary:

• Be sincere with your contrition. If you don’t feel sorry and you say that you are, you’re just lying to the person — which is yet another wrong.
• Be prompt. The longer you wait, usually the worse a situation spirals out of control.
• Take responsibility. If you are responsible, say so.
• Leave out the excuses. If the other person wants to know why you chose to do what you did, he or she will ask. An excuse doesn’t belong in your apology.
• Match the apology to the mistake. If you wrecked your friend’s car while you were borrowing it, offer to fix your friend’s car when you apologize (and do it). If you yelled at your child without warrant, apologize and explain what you will do in the future to try to prevent it from happening again.

What do you think about apologies (in general, not necessarily Bezos’) and their ability to be uncluttered? Are they better with or without excuses? What do you think of this example? I’m interested in reading your musings in the comments.