As the economy twists and turns with more layoffs mounting – having a strong personal brand is becoming ever more important from a career perspective.

But what does that mean? Do you launch a blog? Do you start a Twitter account? Do you launch your own Vlog? Or maybe some combination of all of the above.

To get some more clarity on this I interviewed Dan Schawbel the author of the Personal Branding blog. He will also be releasing a new book called Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (due out with Kaplan in April 09). In my opinion, Dan is also the hardest working guy in Social Media posting 10 times a week on his blog, publishing his own magazine and book as well as having a full time job as the social media expert for EMC!

How to create your own Personal Brand?

About Dan

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He is the author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 2009).”

Presently, Dan is a Social Media Specialist at EMC Corporation, which is one of the leading technology companies in the world. He has helped revolutionize the way EMC communicates and collaborates with all stakeholders. He has spearheaded the company’s Twitter, Facebook, social media press release/newsroom, social bookmarking and blogging strategy in the past year.

Dan has introduced a whole new generation to personal branding, as he opens up new opportunities and strives to elevate the practice. His Personal Branding Blog is consistently ranked in the top 70 marketing blogs in the world by AdAge, and has achieved syndication from Forbes, Reuters and Hoovers. Dan publishes Personal Branding Magazine, is the head judge for the Personal Brand Awards and directs Personal Branding TV.

He has written articles in major magazines and online resources such as BrandWeek Magazine, PRWeek, About.com, Web Worker Daily, T & D Magazine, Small Business Opportunities Magazine, MarketingProfs, Advertising Age, TheLadders.com and The American Marketing Association. He is a frequent media commentator, cited in such outlets as Fast Company, ABC News, Boston Globe, Monster.com, Young Money Magazine, BNET, ReadWriteWeb, Providence Business News, Marketing News, Brand Strategy Magazine (UK) and Yahoo! Finance.

These days many professional services and technology firms looking to differentiate themselves lean on an age old technique of creating thought leadership. But truly differentiated and provocative thought leadership is actually hard to come by. Most of the time, it is just interesting theory without any proof. Moreover, does the thought leadership actually drive the business and create sales or is it just content for content sake.

To get a better understanding of this space I decided to interview Bob Buday the co-founder of The Bloom Group whose firm specializes in the creation of cogent and well differentiated thought leadership. Bob is also the co-author of a new book Thoughts on Thought Leadership which is a great resource for anyone working to create thought leaders in their organizations.

How to develop Thought Leaders

About Bob

Bob Buday is a co-founder of The Bloom Group and has been a researcher, marketing strategist, and writer for consulting and IT companies for 15 years. Prior to launching The Bloom Group, Bob for 10 years was director of marketing communications at CSC Index. He played a leading role in making the consulting concept of “business reengineering” a household word, directing Index’s extensive publications, PR, and survey research activities.

From the development and marketing of reengineering, Index’s revenues grew from $30 million to $250 million in less than a decade. Bob was instrumental in the development and placement of two Harvard Business Review articles. He launched and directed the firm’s popular Insights Quarterly management publication, its annual study of information systems management issues, and its 1994 study of reengineering initiatives, which The Economist said was the most extensive study of reengineering to date. He also played a key role in promoting three best-selling books.

Transferring the lessons learned from marketing consulting concepts to the marketing of other complex products (particularly IT), Bob co-authored “Marketing Breakthrough Products,” published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999. His most recent Harvard Business Review piece, “A Consultant’s Comeuppance,” was published in the February 2003 issue.

Bob’s passion for research and writing about the business implications and applications of IT began in 1985, when he joined InformationWeek magazine as a senior editor. At InformationWeek, the No. 1 magazine on information technology for senior IT and business executives, he led coverage of the strategic use of IT and the software industry. Before joining InformationWeek, he was a business writer at The Orange County (Calif.) Register, where he wrote news and feature stories on companies in the real estate, consumer products, health care, IT, retailing and other industries. He has a B.A. in communications studies from Penn State University and did graduate work in an MBA program at California State University, Fullerton.

Marketing is the interface a company builds to interact with the marketplace and the customer base. The marketing group, combined with the sales force, is the point in the company where the market understanding resides.

This should be the group that drives the company, that sells the marketing vision and message internally, and if that is not happening or doesn’t seem appropriate, there is something seriously wrong.

Big M Marketing focuses on the broader more strategic use of marketing have having solid processes in place to take advantage of this. I sought the advice of Dave Guzeman president of Mindpik and author of a recent book called – Driving Marketing Success with Big M Marketing.

Proven Big M Marketing Techniques

About Dave

Dave Guzeman Mindpik’s Mastermind, has combined sophisticated technical savvy with keen marketing instincts for over 30 years. A veteran Silicon Valley marketer, Guzeman founded the Mindpik consultancy in 1988 to develop sales and marketing programs for new product launches, startups and turnarounds. Guzeman directs all of Mindpik’s efforts to build business plans for capital acquisition or sales of companies or products to targeted markets. Mindpik clients have included semiconductor powerhouses like Signetics (now Philips) to inventive start-ups like Music Semiconductor and u-Nav microprocessors.

Prior to starting Mindpik, Guzeman held executive marketing positions including VP of Marketing at Zilog and VP of Marketing & Sales at ZyMOS. At the latter, he was responsible for introducing the industry’s first PC clone chipset, a release that triggered the PC clone avalanche.

Guzeman started the Advertising and PR department at Intel in the mid-seventies where he worked with the company’s founding partners to launch the legendary 8080 microprocessor which set the architecture and instruction set Intel still uses today.

Guzeman came to Intel from Teledyne Semiconductor, his first stop in Silicon Valley, where he served as the Digital Product marketing Manager after graduation with a BS in Physics from Aurora University in Illinois.

Stop everything you are doing and listen to this podcast!

Seriously, if you have never met or had the opportunity to listen to Avinash Kaushik you must hear this podcast – I guarantee you will learn something from this podcast.

Sometimes you meet someone so passionate about something that it’s contagious and if you listen closely you can hear me firing off emails to my team in the background about what I am hearing and learning on this podcast.

I had the opportunity to do a podcast with Avinash to discuss some areas where marketers are doing things right and wrong but all of them are simple but extremely powerful uses of web analytics to make their websites and businesses better on the web. We also took some live Twitter questions as we were doing the podcast. But stop reading this and start listening to Avinash – its 25 minutes long but positively electric!

Secrets of Web Analytics – a podcast with Avinash Kaushik

About Avinash

Avinash Kaushik is the author of the recently published book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. 100% of Avinash’s proceeds from his book are donated to two charities: Doctors Without Borders, The Smile Train.

Avinash is also the Analytics Evangelist for Google and a co-founder of Market Motive.

As a thought leader Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web research and analytics, and combines that with this philosophy that investing in talented Analysts is the key to long term success. He is also a staunch advocate of listening to the consumer, and is committed to helping organizations unlock the value of web data.

He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences in the US and Europe, such as eMetrics, Ad-Tech, iCitizen, and SES.

You’ll find Avinash’s web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor.

Here are two links to posts about the dashboard (the first one was the one I had promised):

The “Action Dashboard” (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards)

Five Rules for High Impact Web Analytics Dashboards