Blog

As more and more people are coming to Delightful for insight and help with how to build a personal branding strategy and tell their professional stories, we decided to embark on a series of blog posts that gives readers a sense of what they need to think about when putting together a strategy to help build their personal brands and make them more Discoverable, Sharable and Memorable.

This post has been revised and updated based on the feedback we have had from our book on Amazon that has been getting rave reviews:

Introduction to Personal Branding: Ten Steps Towards a New Professional You

We’ve renamed the series: How to Build a Personal Branding Strategy.

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With the Introduction to Personal Branding Kindle eBook out for just over a year racking up five-star reviews on Amazon, we decided (inspired by our friend Karl Sakas’ pocket guide for agency leaders) to work with the fine people at CreateSpace and publish a paperback version of the book.

We’re very lucky to have our friend Jason Miller, who heads up Global Content Marketing for LinkedIn, write a few kind words about the book.

This is what he said:

“In today’s incredibly competitive landscape you need to stand out; you need to differentiate yourself from the masses, and personal branding is the answer. But what exactly is a personal brand and where does one even begin to proactively manage how the world sees them?

Enter the modern playbook for taking control of your personal brand, based on real world experience, not some philosophical approach. I wish that I had Mel Carson’s guide when I had to re-invent myself several years ago as it would have saved me from a tremendous amount of trial and error.”

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Given all the great feedback we’ve had about our personal branding workshops and training over the past year, we’ve decided to up the ante and do as many as we can in our hometown of Seattle during 2020.

The next Seattle Personal Branding Workshop we’ll be giving is at WeWork Seattle.

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When I started my career at Microsoft over a decade ago, my colleague at the time, Carolyn Miller, suggested I read a book about blogging called “Naked Conversations” by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

I can safely say that book changed my life.

My initial role at Microsoft was as a Pan-European Search Specialist helping to launch Microsoft adCenter (now Bing Ads) but after a while, I was tapped up for a community role to help advertisers “help themselves” by creating and disseminating useful content on blogs and forums.

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Beginning in January Team Delightful will be plus one.

Ashley Seffernick will be joining us with a focus on growing and expanding our Personal Branding services.

With her 11+ years at Microsoft in Learning and Development and Sales Readiness, Ashley brings a wealth of experience and insight when it comes to helping people grow personally and professionally.

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The next video in our Delightful Conversations series sees me catch up with Scott Monty shortly after his keynote speech at Pubcon last month.

Scott is now CEO and Co-Managing Partner of Brain+Trust Partners and made his name in digital as Global Head of Social Media at The Ford Motor Company.

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Earlier this month I had the immense pleasure of not just introducing Scott Stratten on stage at Pubcon in front of 2000 people, but also interviewing him afterward for one of our Delightful Conversations.

Scott is President of UnMarketing, bestselling author of four books and all-round hilarious and good guy who certainly knows how to be authentic with his personal brand and marketing.

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Next week I’ll be joining an illustrious panel to discuss the US election and I have been asked to talk specifically about how digital and social media is affecting the potential outcome.

I wrote about it a bit more in this article: BABC Pre-Election Breakfast Discussion in Seattle on my personal blog but thought our Delightful followers would like to know in case you’re in Seattle next week!

Register here: Pre-Election Breakfast BABC

Hope to see you there!

Mel

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We recently stumbled upon the eBook, Thoughts on Crafting a Brand Identity by Brandwatch and it inspired us to discuss the question, “Does your business have the “why” element in your brand and what is it?”

Every company out there has a product or a service they offer, some companies have an idea of what differentiates them, but few companies truly know why they do what they do!

Simon Sinek, a best-selling author, famously known for his Ted Talk: Start With Why, explores the idea of how companies that focus on their core belief are more successful in their branding and marketing strategies.

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At Delightful, we believe content marketing and influencer marketing can’t live without each other.

Content can be seen as the currency of most influencer marketing activities and, on the other hand, influencers help amplify content and bring brands the credibility to reach and engage with relevant audience.

However, it’s not easy to find the right influencers to help you create killer content and amplify it. Most influencer marketing tools that can help marketers find influencers evaluate how influential they are based on their social media performance, while the influencers content marketers value the most, are those who write and share not just on social media, but also on their blog and 3^rd party publications.

Buzzsumo is the perfect tool to solve this problem for content marketers. By providing powerful content insight, the tool can help marketers find the right influencers to boost their content creation and amplification numbers.

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