Mel Carson Archive

9 Social Media Tools to Help Make Personal Branding Easier For You

We all know that social media plays a huge part in building and boosting your personal brand in the digital world, but do you feel lost sometimes with all the different social media channels and are not sure where to start? There are social media tools that can help!

Here are 9 cost-efficient social media software and platforms that we recommend to help make your personal branding efforts easier.

Sharing Our Delightful Guiding Principles – Values for Life and Work

While we have many combined years of industry experience, Delightful Communications itself is a newer company. Founded in 2012, I started the company to help businesses capitalize on continually emerging trends in marketing and PR like social media, influencer marketing, employee advocacy, content marketing and personal branding.

Delightful Communications Principles
Understanding that while our primary medium of communication may be digital, our focus on business has always made clear that true success depends not just on digital pixels, but also on people.

Why Business Cards Are Not Dead and How to Create Great Ones

Business Cards Are Not Dead

When it comes to business cards, I am reminded of a chapter in my book, Pioneers of Digital, where the fabulous Avinash Kaushik talks about how he tested his famous blog – Occam’s Razor – on his wife and fellow work colleagues to get their feedback before he went public with it.

Well, when I started Delightful Communications, I decided to canvas industry peers about many aspects of my start-up, including marketing. What I found was that many people singled out business cards as a no-no. They’d scoff and say, “I don’t need to carry business cards, they’re out-of-date in this digital age.”

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Infographic: Your Personal Branding Strategy In 10 Steps

We’ve received tons of positive feedback since the launch of our latest eBook: Introduction to Personal Branding: 10 Steps Toward a New Professional You, which is also live now on Audible and iTunes as an audio book!

Personal-Branding-Infographic

We are thrilled that the book has helped our readers to start paying more attention to their personal brand and more importantly, actually making plans and taking action to improve their personal brand and be more discoverable, shareable and memorable:

“This is by far the most-bookmarked book (per page-capita) on my Kindle today. I’ve already set up a site, paid attention to image names, tweaked my LinkedIn profile, and more based on Mel’s tips.” – S. Weise

Meet Kate – Our New Delightful Team Member

I am the newest member of the Delightful Team and, as the Digital Marketing Program Manager, I will be working with clients and online influencers, providing strategic support and content to amplify their personal and professional brands.

Organic — It’s not just for groceries.

I’m a University of Washington alum (Go Dawgs!) from the Master of Science in Information Management program where I focused on user experience and content strategy. Under the mentorship of the talented professors there I found a home with digital content. I was fortunate to capitalize on these skills with a large variety of client work as both a contractor and agency marketer here in Seattle.

Frida Kahlo: An Artist with an Inspirational Personal Brand

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who lived from 1907 to 1954. In her art, we can see her reflection of personal value creating a great personal branding example. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits; she took who she was and created art that is prized for its uniqueness and creativity.

In today’s frenetic, digital world I feel we have much to learn from Kahlo’s legacy which can teach us how to embrace values, passion, mission, vision, and strengths. In Kahlo’s painting and life decisions, you can see how much she believed in her personal values. Even at a time when many of her values were seen as crazy, she was persistent and with her uniqueness created an image of a strong person.

Be Inspired By Your Surroundings

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Kahlo was a person who embraced every part of who she was in a loving way. Her self-portraits portray a strong and determined vision in her eyes. In her early life Frida suffered an accident while she was on a wooden bus. Many in the accident died while Kahlo suffered severe injuries.

4 Marketing Strategies Businesses Can Learn From a House Remodel

We remodeled our house in Seattle a couple of years ago. It was quite a large job which included replacing the roof, furnace, windows, doors, floors, and adding a new kitchen and bathroom. In all we needed 8 specialist contractors to do the work and we needed it done quickly. While early summer is not the best time to request bids as it’s a busy time in the lives of contractors, I was amazed by some of these businesses lack of communication and marketing strategies.

Channeling my frustration into some lessons learned, here are 4 of my takeaways from an experience that EVENTUALLY has helped us renovate a home we love living in.

 

4_Marketing_Strategies_Businesses_Can_Learn_From_a_House_Remodel

Social Media for Personal Branding: Stand Out by Being Social by Design

In the final of 10 installments of our Personal Branding Strategy Series I want to encourage you to use social media for personal branding, to be “social by design”.

I first heard the phrase from Carolyn Everson, my former big boss at Microsoft Advertising and now Head of Global Advertising Solutions at Facebook. Adapted from the industry cry for brands to be “digital by design”, Carolyn’s morphing of the expression is the perfect discipline for the busy professional of today.

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Here are a few ideas of what it means to be “social by design”:

Getting your social infrastructure right

I talk about it in detail in the post on How to Optimize Your Personal Brand Online, but this is about making sure your social profiles  – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. – are set up properly so you’re half way to success. Your profiles need to be discoverable, they need to have the right security settings activated and it needs to be easy for someone to interact with you, understand immediately what you are about, and share whatever you are trying to get out there.

Delightful and Majestic Win Best Use of Technology Content Marketing Award for #MajesticInSpace Campaign

We are beside ourselves with delight to announce that we’ve won our first ever industry award from the Content Marketing Institute for the Best Use of Technology as Part of a Content Marketing Program for the role we played in the creation and execution of the Majestic in Space Campaign.

The prestigious Content Marketing Awards received over 1000 entries and in our final category, we were up against the likes of such mighty brands as Salesforce and FedEx!

Our quest, in partnership with our fine clients at Majestic.com and the crew at Made In Space, to 3D print a data visualization of “The Internet” on the International Space Station had been about 2 years in the making (astronauts move pretty slowly you see!) and so this accolade really is the icing on the space cake of what has been a thrilling year for us.

Tell Your Story By Embracing Your Experience

I have a story.

You have a story.

We ALL have a story.

If our personal brand is all about what kind of experience people have with us online and in-person, that experience has a past and we need to embrace it.

Tell_your_story_Delightful_Communications

During a personal branding workshop I delivered last week, we talked about our professional past: what was our educational experience? How did we get into our niche? What were our professional passions? What did we find hard? Where did we want to be in 3 years time from a career perspective?

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