A personal brand has many elements and reputation is key to a strong personal brand. I like this anonymous quote regarding reputation: “A person’s reputation is a mixture of what his friends, enemies, and relatives say behind his back.” You can add employees, ex-employees, co-workers and classmates. Thanks to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ZoomInfo and whatever else you use to network, there’s a mother lode of information about you to remind your friends and enemies what you were like way back when…  LinkedIn became a new and a far more effective way to check references or to get information about prospective candidates from former colleagues and bosses than the obligatory list of candidate-supplied references of yesterday.

The most critical driver of a personal brand is communication: how well an executive can put into words his or her experience, achievements and personal strengths.  Presentation skills matter, but content matters even more.  And yet, few executives invest the time to develop a personal portfolio that can make the difference between getting a dream job or accepting second best.

“You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop,” wrote Tom Peters in his ground-breaking article on personal brand, published in Fast Company almost two years ago.  Mr. Peters is right when he says that your brand is your responsibility, not your company’s corporate communications. What counts is your communication on every social networking site and everything you do above and beyond your everyday job – from training your daughter’s soccer team to helping at a food bank.

©2012 AlfadogPR Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Jon Stewart’s rant about CNBC last night must have been his funniest show ever.  But when the laughter died, it left me with an uneasy feeling about the future of the financial network.

In less than ten minutes, Mr. Stewart took CNBC apart and also confirmed our worst fears – there is something not right with some mainstream media.  They’ve changed their focus from information to infotainment and are now becoming micro-infotainment as each “talent” (they’re not journalists in the traditional sense) becomes his or her own commentator/stand-up comic.  Or, as one of my print journalist friends calls them, bingo caller.

The micro-infotainment may be taking the whole concept of personal brand to an extreme, but that’s exactly what is expected of TV talent these days.  Perhaps the micro-infotainment is a symptom of our consumerism.  Viewers want their news packaged in small, cute pieces, funny or outrageous, and, above all, colorful.  Media are desperate to retain audiences and are therefore only too happy to keep the customer satisfied.  Unfortunately, the product isn’t ultimately satisfying, so that programs that deliver it may become irrelevant. Or, as happened to CNNfn less than five years ago, gone entirely.

This presents an interesting dilemma for media relations: where are the stakeholders we’re trying to reach?  How do we reach them? Which media are still relevant and credible?  I know that trying to book your CEO on the Jon Stewart show may sound like a lunatic proposition, unless he/she wrote an amazing book and can tell a joke without looking like a funeral director doing pole dance.

Social media consultants like to think that blogging and twittering is the answer.  But only a miniscule number of bloggers reach large audiences and, if you know of a CEO’s blog that is read by the same size audience as the Economist, please let me know.  We need extended media relations, capable of maximizing every media channel. (And please, don’t call it Media Relations 2.0, or some other dumb number.)  We need to make well-performing senior executives relevant again and that may take more creativity and brains than a year ago.

In the meantime, let’s hope that CNBC can get its act together and make itself relevant again.  We need a decent business program, because The Daily Show cannot replace it. 

©2012 AlfadogPR Inc.. All Rights Reserved.