Can we really separate our personal life from our personal brand? When every person is a channel and broadcasting something to the world is as easy as sending a tweet, everything we say or do is pretty much out in the open. If we say one thing and do another we will sooner or later get called out.

For our personal brand to have substance, it has to be consistent with our personal life. It is dangerous to build a personal brand around a certain image or persona that we’re not willing or able to live up to.

That is why when guys like Eliot Spitzer or Tiger Woods get exposed we feel cheated and let down. It’s as if we had bought an expensive product only to find out that it doesn’t perform as advertised.

It used to be that business was business and what we did in our personal life was personal, but in the age of personal branding and social media business is personal.

When I was in grad school, a friend of mine went to Europe and brought me back a coffee mug displaying a humorous cartoon under the title: “The Perfect European Should Be…”. The cartoon was meant to underscore the difficulty of building a united Europe given the cultural differences of its members, as suggested by the stereotypes assigned to each individual nationality.

One of the challenges of building our personal brand in this increasingly globalized world is how to combat the different stereotypes associated with our national or ethnic origin. As in all re-branding exercises the task is not easy, but here are four approaches that have worked for me:

1. Give people a chance to know you: most people embrace stereotypes because they don’t know better. Once they get to know you, though, they will see that you are just like everybody else: a unique individual with a distinct personality and many different qualities.
2. If the stereotypes assigned to your nationality have negative connotations work hard to combat them: For example, a stereotype frequently associated with individuals of Hispanic origin is that we procrastinate and are always “fashionably late”. That is why I am always on time and finish my projects before the established deadline. I don’t want to be associated with behaviors that don’t respect or value other people’s time.
3. If the stereotypes have positive connotations, embrace them: For example, Hispanics are assumed to be very family-oriented. I completely subscribe to the point of view that family should be priority #1, so in that regard the stereotype helps me get that particular message across.
4. Don’t sweat the small stuff: I don’t remember how many times, when people learn that I live in Miami and speak Spanish, say goodbye to me with a loud and cheery “hasta la vista!” (a term that nobody in Latin America uses any more). In those cases, rather than coming across as a snob and lecturing about the petty idiosyncrasies of the Spanish language, I just smile and wave back.

Do you have any experiences of your own that you would like to share?

Photo Credits: phauly
Tim Ferriss  or Malcolm Gladwell? Four weeks working on your credibility indicators, or 10,000 hours of intense practice? What really makes you an expert? On the subject of expertise I tend to agree more with Malcolm’s definition than with Tim’s. Becoming an expert takes practice and experience.

Here are, in my opinion, the five main characteristics of an expert:

1. Knowledgeable: You can’t be called an expert if you don’t know your subject matter. Being intimately familiar with the technical aspects of your job is absolutely necessary, and it is the first step on the road to expertise.
2. Experienced: Experts need to apply the theory and face many different scenarios. A physician may easily recognize the symptoms of an illness, but the right treatment will depend on each individual patient. You may have read about how to manage people, but until you’re actually in charge of a team and deal with real personalities and real conflicts you can’t really call yourself an expert manager of people.
3. Well Rounded: An expert who only cares about his/her subject matter is not really an expert. For example, a good SEO must also have an understanding of subjects like marketing and PR. If you want to become an expert at something, seek to also learn near-neighbor disciplines.
4. Up-to-Date: Knowledge changes fast. That’s why experts are always thirsty for new information. It’s not uncommon to see top experts attending seminars given by other experts, trying to learn something new. Experts reinvest part of their revenues in education. Experts experiment constantly.
5. Humble: Should you call yourself and expert?  Just as PR is more credible than advertising (because it is what other people are saying about you), it is more effective to let others call you an expert instead of blowing your own horn. Work hard at becoming good at what you do, get good mentors, gather honest testimonials, attract links from quality sites, and land mentions in important media, and you won’t need to hard-sell others on your expert status.

Photo Credits: gingerldk
Job fairs are getting ridiculous these days. It’s not uncommon to see tens of thousands of applicants scramble to take a shot at just a handful of jobs.

In almost every professional meet-up I’ve attended in the past six months the question has inevitably come up: “is it really worth it to go to a job fair?”

The answer, of course, depends of what you expect.

Watching soccer back in South America, I could never understand why whenever a referee called a penalty kick against one of the teams, the players would immediately surround him and argue, sometimes yelling and making threatening gestures with their hands.

If you’ve watched soccer before, you know that a referee never takes back a penalty call. Why, then, do players even bother to argue over it? Simple: they do it to give the referee a guilt trip. They want to condition him into believing that the call was unfair so that his calls become more favorable later in the game.

While this strategy may seem questionable and childish, those players are just trying to shape the future to their advantage by influencing the decision maker. They understand that the current situation will most likely not change, but they want to ensure a better outcome in the future.

Going to a job fair expecting to get a job can be as frustrating as expecting a referee to take back a penalty call. Instead, go to the job fair to meet recruiters and peers, promote your personal brand, and expand your contact base to increase your chances of finding a job in the future.

You don’t go to a job fair to get a job. You go there to network.

Photo Credits: rachaelhubbard

With the collapse of our financial institutions and the wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies sweeping the nation, it’s no surprise that employers are turning to the credit report as a tool to measure an applicant’s character.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows employers to have access to your credit information. While they still need your written permission to run your credit report, not granting it may give them the impression that you have something to hide.

My friend Hajj Flemings is one of the few personal branding experts who regularly talks about the importance of a good credit history for personal branding (he calls the credit report a “character report”), going as far as dedicating one chapter of his book The Brand YU Life to the subject of financial integrity.

The point is this: just as once-powerful brands like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch are now worthless due to financial mismanagement, our personal brand can be negatively affected by poor personal finance habits. Fortunately, there are a few things that we can all do to improve our financial position in any economic environment:

• Go to annualcreditreport.com and request a copy of your credit report from each of the three major consumer reporting companies (you are entitled to a free copy every year). If you see errors, dispute them in writing . The reporting companies are required to investigate and correct any mistake within 30 days.
• Live within your means. If you don’t have the money don’t buy it (except for big ticket items like a car or a house).
• Keep a budget and stick to it. Study your budget and make small cuts every month, starting with the items you don’t need or use.
• Put every bill on automatic payment, to make sure you pay them on time.
• Use credit cards to build credit, not to buy stuff you can’t afford. Pay your balance in full every month.

You can also read this simple personal finance guide I put together a few months ago. It is short and easy to read, and will give you some guidelines on how to set up your financial accounts and develop good money habits:

I also highly recommend Ramit Sethi’s blog, and his new book I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Don’t get turned off by the tongue-in-cheek title: Ramit is one of the most knowledgeable and entertaining personal finance experts (until I discovered his blog, I didn’t know that reading about personal finance could be fun).

I’ve been relatively quiet on the blog posting front for a few days now, so I want to share with you this Powerpoint presentation that I put together for a series of talks I plan to give in Miami in the next few weeks.

While presentations are meant to be delivered, and the slides by themselves don’t tell the whole story, I wanted to show it to you regardless, since I believe that in this case the main ideas will come through clearly enough.

The main audience is made of job hunters who are not really familiar with the web and social networks, and the objective of the presentation is to give them enough information and motivation in one hour so that they start experimenting with web tools for networking and personal branding.

Let me know what you think.

I was recently interviewed by Chris Lunt, founder of Nombray, and the interview is now up on his blog. We talk about blogging, social media and building your brand. Nombray is an interesting new service that allows you to register your domain name and set up a simple website consolidating all your social media profiles, which you can access through tabs at the top of the page. It is a simple, yet effective way to start building your web identity if you still don’t have a personal website or blog.