Winter is a time of celebration and friends and family often exchange gifts. No matter what holidays you celebrate, holiday shopping lists can be difficult as you search for the perfect fit for everyone. That difficulty increases with those up-to-date techy friends—and that includes those delightful digital marketers in your lives.

Not to worry, we’ve got you covered here at Delightful. Check out some of our favorite gifts for digital marketers, online content experts, and search engine aficionados. Find yourself the perfect present, or pass this list along to your loved ones.

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A defining characteristic of Twitter has long been the 140 character limit. A challenge for many to create a cohesive story, users frequently turned to numbered tweets, external links, and smartly edited graphics to convey their points across this platform. When Twitter announced a switch to 280 characters for all on Nov 7th – everything changed.

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Developing your personal brand and sharing your story is wonderful when things are going well, but what happens when things go wrong? Perhaps your career was affected by a colleague’s gossip or your stellar product launch was closer to a fiery inferno. Your Amazon seller reviews come back not only poor but also mocking. Maybe your personal information got shared publicly, or disaster strikes and your service is disrupted.

It’s not a matter of if something bad will happen, but when. How you handle these troubles can be a tipping point that makes or breaks your brand. In the face of adversity, here are some things to remember.

Owning Your Mistakes

An excuse is not equivalent to an explanation—and no one wants to hear it. Describe what happened and own the error. Don’t pass the blame along to a third party. By admitting that a mistake was made you demonstrate honesty and integrity. You may be surprised at just how empathetic your audience may be towards human error.

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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!

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

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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.

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The Autumn event season is upon us, and the Delightful team is attending and supporting client events around the globe. We love the opportunity to work with companies to amplify and extend the impact of their event marketing through social media and video.

Event amplification allows clients to get more from the significant investment they make in event sponsorship and attendance. It brings the valuable content shared at an event to a larger audience, optimizing it for people “outside the room”.

It also helps to increase the visibility of the personal brands of the leaders and speakers that travel sometimes vast distances to stand on stage and impart their knowledge.

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Following our Best Use of Technology win at the Content Marketing Awards earlier this year, the Majestic in Space campaign continues to impress award judges across the USA.

We are thrilled to announce that the partnership we helped to create with Majestic and Made In Space, has resulted in us being shortlisted in the Content Marketing category at the US Search Awards this year.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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