¿Alguna vez has sentido que con todos las nuevas medias sociales que estamos perdiendo el interés clave?
¿Donde se ha ido el aspecto del social, y a donde va?
Hace poco tiempo estaba hablando por teléfono y un cliente potencial me habia dicho que mis tácticas  y estrategias de medias sociales son muy “libro de texto”. Por un lado lo comprendo, pero por el otro, simplemente funciona.
El habilidad de mantenerse e intractuar en las redes sociales es lo que crea relaciones furetes. Si sean personas que conozco directamente o no, hay una fuerza que supera cualquier otro método de gestionar las redes.
No soy el único que piensa asi. Hace unos dias Mitch Joel (@mitchjoel) escribió una pieza titulada, Personal Branding R.I.P., y tendré que estar de acuerdo con sus puntos de vista. Pero, la falta de personalidad e interactuación no solo tiene que ver con el Branding Personal, pero muchas presencias en Twitter y Facebook extendiendo a todos los aspectos de las medias sociales.
Estamos perdiendo la interactuacíon social, lo cual empezó y sigue fortaleziendo el proposido de medias sociales. Este significado social que tenemos es la única cosa que nos deja atraer, como negocios e individuos, a hacer auto-marketing y construir relaciones duraderas que en fin son provechos. Estando en una red social y simplemente poinendo enlaces o publicidades no es la manera de gestionar. Por ejemplo: el @dellOutlet. La gente entiende que este por la mayoria es un servicio automático. Pero si estas haciendo un perfil para estar ahi para la gente y establecer conneciones, teniendo un servicio automatica simplemente no ayuda.
Construye estas conversaciones y conviertelos en algo aprovechoso.

Relaciones, son la clave para comprender ventas, marketing, y en su totalidad la parte Social y Personal en Medias Sociales y Branding Personal.
Desacuerdo? De acuerdo? Deja un comentario!

Imagen por Sjany

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My friend asked me once a while back, how did I manage my SEO strategy in order to rank high, and basically dominate the first page of Google results for “Greg de Lima”?

Quite simply, it all boils down to patience.

I have never really managed my self in a way of SEO to intentionally try to become the lead results of my own search results. When I began my blog in Early 2008, I couldn’t have told you what Search Engine Optimization was. But now, with a little bit of understanding and a couple of WordPress plugins achieving and maintaining the results is just a matter or patience.

Here are my tips:

• Keep consistent – The name you use in one place should be the name you use everywhere else. I branded myself since the beginning as Greg de Lima (@gregdelima, Facebook.com/gregdelima, gregdelima.posterous.com, gregdelima.tumblr.com etc.) If you change it, make sure you change them all, unless you want a different association with each.
• Post Often – If you are not keeping updated or posting something at least once every two weeks (I have found) can lead to lower results, or less accurate results. Keeping fresh news coming from your consistent names gives search engines something to keep posted.
• All-in-One SEO Pack – Get it. Use it, considering you’re running on WordPress. Download here.
• Link Out/Link In – If you mention external sources, link to it. Whether these posts are within your own blog, someone else’s, a news article, etc. Hit up a small link, and make sure the link title reflects what it is. Ex; Greg de Lima on Twitter (@gregdelima) the html should look something like this:<a title=”Twitter – Greg de Lima” href=”http//twitter.com/gregdelima>@gregdelima</a>
• Be Patient – Rome wasn’t built in a day.

From a students point of view, especially for young entrepreneurs, this will definitely help with new and upcoming personal brands. Getting yourself known and building up your network never hurt anyone!

Downside – don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see. You get one bad rep on your name, and it will definitely hurt your reputation.

Disagree? Extra tips? Leave a comment!

Related posts:

1. Meeting the People That Help You Get There
2. We’re Losing the Social
3. Where Are You Going?

This post isn’t about me, it’s about my friend Emily. One of the most fabulous people that I know is going on a Mission trip starting in September of this year. As the former Director of a mission summer camp, her leadership is some of the strongest and most effective I have ever seen. She is a strong person with a great heart to do many things for many people.

So what’s the point, she tells me that she needs quite a bit of money to complete this mission trip, it’s year-long. From what she tells me, about $12,000. I ask you kindly to help her and the hundreds of people she will be helping by donating any amount you can.

You can learn about Emily at her Mission Year Blog and click Donate Now, this will contribute directly to her fund. You can also donate through the main website here, with the Support ID # 10-0009.

Follow Mission Year on Twitter, or Facebook.

Thank You.

Update: Here is a link directly to Emily’s donation page, if reading this was enough for you.

Related posts:

1. Do it for Everyone Else
2. Push Your Passion

Have you ever felt like with all this new media and social networking, that we are losing the key interest?
Where has the social aspect gone, and where is it going?
Not too long ago, I was on the phone with a potential client when I was referred to as being very “text-book” with my social media and branding strategies. Now, on one hand I can definitely understand this, but on the other hand, quite simply, it’s because it works.

The rigidity of being able to stick around and actually interact on many social networks is what builds the strong relationships that I have within my social networks. Whether or not they are people that I know directly, or people I have never met, there is a strength that trumps over many other methods.

I am not the only person who believes this. A few days ago Mitch Joel(@mitchjoel) wrote a piece titled, Personal Branding R.I.P. and I must agree with him whole heartedly. But this lack of personality and interaction not only has to do with Personal Branding, but many presences on Twitter and Facebook and extending to the social aspect of social media.

We are losing this social interaction that started and continues to strengthen the purpose of social media. This social meaning that we have is the one thing that allows us as businesses and individuals to market ourselves and build the long-lasting relationships that eventually prove fruitful. Being on a social network and merely pushing out links or press-releases is not the way to go. Sure, you might see click-through rates go up, maybe even some turn around. Take the @DellOutlet for example; people understand that this is a mostly automated service. However, if you’re setting up a service to cater to people and build your network with the end of having attendees or worth-while connections, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Build these conversations and make them into something that you will always benefit from. Relationships are the key to understanding sales, marketing, and overall the Social and Personal in Social Media and Personal Branding.

Disagree? Agree? Let me know!

Image by Sjany

Related posts:

1. Burning Bridges – Relationship Series pt. 4
2. Social Networks – What Are They Good For?
3. Where Are You Going?

How many times have you seriously done something that you enjoy? Something that you want to do and give back to someone else? Are these your passions?
Even as a student the level of involvement of my friends to their studies and what they want to do is sometimes  slim to none. With the new business world spinning at a rate that we keep pushing and keep advancing, the only way to keep it going is by doing what we love!

I can agree it sounds cheezy, you may be stuck in a job that you think you enjoy, but at the end of the day you couldn’t give a rat’s-ass about it.

I couldn’t tell you the many times my Grandfather and my parents just put everything aside and said, “Here, this is what we are going to do, and you’re going to help!” I was never 100% committed to what they wanted me to do; I stuck with it though. I learned what to do and how to act. But when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of your prime business or website, whatever, you have to care, and you have to love what you’re doing to make it worth while.

That’s not to say that you will not be successful, but simply a way to enjoy what you do, and be able to take yourself and your venture to the next level because you care, want, and need to see something come of what you do.

The way of Social Media has entirely changed the way we put our passions into our projects. You don’t have to agree with me, and quite honestly I don’t expect you to. I just personally despise seeing so many twitterers depending on ReTweets, @ Replies, and how many followers they have. And all that in the end does have significance, but what’s the most important part of this new marketing wave?

The Passion.

Give it all you’ve got. Make it significant, for yourself, others and they will come.

What are your passions? How can this be changed?

Image by (nutmeg)

Related posts:

1. Culture Not Clique – Relationship Series pt. 1
2. Do it for Everyone Else
3. The New Age of Business

I decided to finally compile my top 10 posts since I started taking track with Google Analytics, I also took into account comments! Please feel free to let me know what you think!

1 BlaireAshley Jewelry for a Cause

2 Where are you going?

3 Burning Bridges – Relationship Series pt. 4

4 Musibility’s Doing it Right

5 Seven Pounds and Relationships

6 Fail – Do it sometime

7 Culture not Clique

8 Do it for everyone else

9 Simplicity Sells

10 Community Marketing – Relationship Series pt. 3

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What do you expect from social networks? Are you as an employee or service provider giving what is expected of you?

Many times we go about our lives with expectations of certain products, places, services, just about anything we come across when we go or do anything. Take for example, a new hotel you’re trying out for business travel. You’re an avid Hilton fan, but this time you branch out into a more independently owned hotel. You expect entirely that you will have the phenomenal accessories that are offered 100% of the time at previous hotels. You expect that the customer service will be exceptional and they will cater to your needs in a timely matter with the utmost courtesy and efficiency. Later on in your stay you realize, the internet is flaky; a poor connection with a very slow transfer speed. The lighting in the room is too dull for you to get any work done because they used 60W bulbs in stead of 80W or 100W.  Surely these are things anyone can complain about, but the simple fact that your expectations were higher allows you to build a higher level of confidence with your hotel.

Does this mean that we should lower our expectations every time we try something out of the routine?

No.

Does this mean the products, services, etc. that we use should increase to our expectations?

Not 100% No.

The key, is adaptation. The understanding to be able to adapt our choices and our expectations to what we know and understand. Much more importantly we need to change our own personal references and relate the unknown opportunities to the future rather than experiences in the past. Granted we cannot predict the future, but we damn well are able to make a good judgment of our choices to benefit us.

In this ever-changing social media world, we should be able to understand the we need to build our expectations based on the future possibilities, and the past results of the known and unknown. It’s a different way of thinking, but in the end, the result is a more positive attitude and a better understanding of our expectations vs. what the business expects of us as consumers.

What do you think of expectations? Are you building them appropriately?

Image by atelier/Ed Brodzinsky

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There is a gift that many people have and in some, it may have “skipped a generation”.

That is the gift of Tinkering.

I can say clearly that I am no engineer, nor do I plan to be, or have thought of being one. But ever since my childhood I have grown up with Erector sets, Legos, Knex, and many toys that unfortunately I have yet to see much of recently.

Do you have a tinkering knack? A will to just sit around and create things?

Not much has changed in the all around world of tinkering. Kids like to build tree-houses, bridges, swing sets, and tons of other toys that simply bring joy to them. But beyond the sheer joy that can be found from nailing a nail or hanging things from your ceiling, tinkering as a child has become less and less of a common act. To be quite honest it kills me.

Where has parenting gone? Parents sitting around saying, “no don’t go anywhere with that drill you’re gonna hurt yourself.” Stop it. Let your child go around with a hammer, nails, and saw. Let them try to build the tree house of their dreams, or that tire-swing that you were “too busy to build”, or hired someone to build for them.

Children have an insatiable curiosity for the way things work, and they should be allowed encouraged and pushed to create things. Not only physically but mentally. Give them a piece of paper and a marker; where will their ideas take them? This natural born knack for being able to look into things and find the way they work, or to build for their boredom.

To hell with video games, even if it is an educational game, it’s still another screen for a child to become addicted to. Even in schools we are seeing a much larger focus on the non-creative arts, and much less on the music, mechanics, visual arts every piece of creative education is being stripped little by little leaving the system down to the core education. We need to start focusing equally on the creative edge of education!

As adults we have this same knack for creativity, even here in the age of technology. With new programs, websites, devices that are satisfying our needs of education. Programmers giving us new and ever-changing applications for a better and more productive life.

Creativity is being demolished little by little. When will we be able to embrace our tinkering knack? Are we giving the ability to tinker to our children on a daily basis?

Image by horriblejerk

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With your brand that is; your personal brand. What are you doing with it? Do you have your objectives set up?
Since the first times I have been following a lot on personal branding and self-marketing, it’s rather interesting to see how little has changed and how much is repeated. Often times I will stumble in and read something I see that is new but in reality I am reading the same tips and suggestions over and over with different wording. To be quite honest it gets kind of frustrating.

For the sake of clarification here are some of those points. Engage on Twitter, Engage on Facebook, build recognition though a blog, and for those in a more professional setting; enhance the use of your LinkedIn network. Now, that’s all fine and dandy but if you’re not entirely new to this gig, like me, reading the same thing gets tiring and overwhelming.

I love the Student Branding Blog, an offshoot of the Personal Branding Blog. But the thing is, I’m tired of reading tips I’ve been hearing from my parents and college advisors. Every once in a while I will come across something interesting that I have yet to read, but that is a rare occasion. With no disrespect to the author, I would like to look at this post at the Student Branding Blog: Facebook: Personal Branding Friend or Foe?. I just have one comment on this; the whole post is almost one big, “no s*** sherlock”. The points are obvious, points that people already know, but yet students obviously still haven’t caught on to efficiently. I still see my friends’ pictures with beers and bongs thinking, “are you stupid?”, not to mention on a 100% public profile too!

When all is said and done, I implore many of you personal brands, and aides to personal brands to advance your techniques and posts. Don’t repeat the same information for a professional personal brand for a student. It IS different, there are differences that should be addressed, that have not been explored to their full extent.

So I ask you again; where are you taking your personal brand? Are you advancing in the way you want to? Where is your focus?

Image by DigitalParadox

Related posts:

1. How I Made Page 1 of Google
2. Burning Bridges – Relationship Series pt. 4
3. We’re Losing the Social

The buzz about the buzz is buzzing (cheezy I know but I had to). This week I had the luxury of seeing two great releases applied to me. As many of you know those two releases are 1) Facebook’s new layout, and 2) Google’s Buzz.

Facebook

I’m not going to say that I dislike the new layout because the truth is I do like it. The layout is simpler, just as easy to follow, and it doesn’t change things around so much that the users will have some new kind of heart attack causing groups of hundreds of thousands to whine and moan about it.

Pros

• Just as simple, easy to follow, it has good flow.
• Everything you need is within the first left column or on the top bar.
• The search bar becomes more prominent, easier to find, and still just as great to use.
• More focus on the real-time news feed, and the option to control it better

Cons

• It’s a little bit too blue. I don’t know if I’m colorblind or what, but the three icons next to the Facebook icon, are hard as hell for me to see. I will definitely not use them as much.
• Message inbox isn’t as noticeable. I like using the inbox, private messages are helpful. But now accessing the inbox is a little bit tougher by creating a non-top bar icon and moving it to the mix of the left column.
• It’s a hair slower, my connection here in my dorm sometimes isn’t tip-top, so when it slows down and comes to a crawl, it’s noticeable.

I have my opinions, about it but all-in-all it’s a new layout. I don’t think that it will cause too much controversy.

Google Buzz

I’m normally a late adopter finding about things behind the curve and even more so becoming accustomed to using them.  But before I give my opinion, read this, it’s a funny bashing of Google Buzz (no I’m not 100% against it).

The new Buzz feature isn’t new. As Microsoft and Yahoo have recently been doing by belittling the new tool explaining that they have had the feature for over a year now, this is nothing new, but the dominant market of social-medialites has normally been associated with Google. The shear fact that this expectation arrives out of Google immediately offers it up to a larger and more target market. Buzz will just stick more with the people who want it.

Now I don’t like that Buzz provides me a number (like unread emails) from people I don’t follow, such as commenters from people I do follow. It’s annoying and when I read my friend’s posts, I will then look at the comments, I don’t want to see 587 Buzzes when I actually only have 20. It’s annoying, I don’t want that. Oh, and make the settings a little more prominent while it’s still new.

I like on the other hand, that there is not as much of a character limit, like Twitter. This will lead to better search linking especially if it turns into real-time search results. It’s easy to use, just like Twitter and FriendFeed it’s simple to figure out and won’t take long for people to use Buzz almost in a way to connect their other social media sites. Google’s Friend Connect also incorporates well into this!

Overall good things, I like new changes.

What do you make of all the new releases?

Image by ayche_em_ayche

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1. What if MSFT Buys Facebook?
2. Meeting the People That Help You Get There
3. Spanish Too