I’ll tell you, from my perspective, facebook is amazing as a way to keep consistent communication going with all of my networks. Of course, I’m one of those people who is willing to tie together their business contacts with their personal contacts — not everyone wants to be that way.

But if you are not willing to share your facebook account with your business contacts, then they won’t be participating in your brand as much as you might like.

What do you think about facebook? Does it stand up to the heat of networking? Hit us up in the comments below.

In a recent event that I did, the $1 weekend, I found that I built such a strong brand for the event that I couldn’t tell people about it anymore. They all already knew everything about it because they had been following me on social media websites! How cool is that?

All I did to make this happen was consistently update my status on social media websites with relevent information for the people on these sites.

So what defines relevant?  

There is a fantastic video I watched a while back which I’m going to share with you called The Relevant Truth.

This video discusses finding that piece of your business that will really resonate with your clients.

Here is the link.

Now if you haven’t already, go register for facebook.com, Twitter.com, and linkedin.com.

Getting registered on these social media websites is the first step. Next you will want to flesh out your profile in as much detail as they will allow you to do. Take a day and really work hard on this, you won’t regret it.

After that, go register with ping.fm  and tie that site together with all your social media profiles.

Then you’ll have the ULTIMATE brand management machine!

Go get started, and then let us know how this works for you .

I know… not what you were expecting me to say based on the topic at hand, eh? ~_^.

Well, think about it. The real key to becoming a specialist means that you need to tell people no.

If you tell people you can do everything then you’ll never specialize. So based on my own personal experience, the best way to become a specalist (which I have been starting to do) is to tell people that you can’t help them when they have jobs which are outside of the range of your specialities.  

What has been your experience on this topic? Have you been trying to become a specialist in any particular field? Have you found what I said above to be true, or have you had another experience?

The funny thing about it is that it seems easy at first. You see a need. So you start to offer a product to fill that need, but then you slowly begin to realize that you are having more difficulty selling on the whole.  

This has been my experience at least. I have found that I just need to slim down, sometimes, and stick to what I’m good at. What has been your experience in this area?

Things like, keeping someone’s computer in their shop for 8 months!! Or taking someone’s hard drive (with all of their family photos) and then disapearing off of the planet. How crazy is that? But I end up taking some of the blame because these companies are giving my industry a bad name.

So I am forced to really push through some resistence when it comes to selling my own services to my target audience (who has lost faith in my industry.)  

I have been going through the book Tribes by Seth Godin recently, and he has a pretty interesting method for dealing with resistence in a market. That is quite simply summed up as “change”. When you present yourself as opposed to the status quo, you tend to shield yourself somewhat from what people think of your industry.

What do you think? Are you in an industry that has made a bad name for itself and you find that you are battling against that all the time?

If you are, what are some things that you have done to overcome that? Hit us up in the comments below .

“Keeping your success in focus”
-Coach Kolansky

The community question for today is: “How do you manage your brand when you are already known in a market?”

This has actually been something which I have been working very hard on. I made the personal mistake of becoming part of too many things and so I confused my audience as to what I actually do. Big mistake. So now I am faced with the monsterous effort of trying to revamp the public’s expectations of who I am. I am just now starting to see things turn around as I slowly put out consistent messages as to what I can do for people. My brand is starting to get a shape again! .

Brand management is a slow and tedious process which requires quite a bit of dedication.

What are your thoughts on how someone who has already made a name for themselves (good or bad) can work to change or manage their brand?

God Bless,
-Coach Kolansky