Make It With Michael

By Barry Feldman You’re a sales and marketing machine. You’re constantly selling yourself and your ideas. You’re attaching your name to a specific area of expertise and delivering useful content – online and off – to earn more visibility and build trust with your peers. Or you’re not. In either case, you have a personal brand. The question is: Are you working on it to accelerate the success of your career? If so, this post, and my new book, The Road to Recognition , is for you. In the book, co-author Seth Price and I, present 26 big ideas to help develop your personal brand. The chapters presented A-to-Z style, are also crammed with actionable advice. I’m happy to share the ideas with you here and now. 1. Authenticity The road to building a compelling personal brand is paved with authenticity. Understand your personal brand’s all about the real you. Look within. Create a compass based on who you are and the qualities that set you apart. How might you leverage your strengths? ...

By Emily Copp When you’re struggling to come up with new, exciting social content, it’s helpful to look back at your “North Star”—a past post that was really successful. By understanding what went well and why, you can set guidelines that will help you consistently produce high-performing content. We chatted with our social team about Hootsuite’s top-performing social posts, and they gave us some lessons on how to create awesome content every day. 7 lessons from our top-performing social media posts 1. Keep the copy short Writing for social media is no different than any other form of copywriting—being concise is more difficult than it seems. When dealing with complex topics, there’s a tendency to over-explain or oversell. And while that’s okay for a first draft, our social team spends a lot of time distilling concepts into a single sentence or idea. Keeping headlines short is better for click-throughs and shares. For example, in our social apps post , the copy that accompanied...