Book Review: Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success
by Dan Schwabel
# ISBN-10: 1427798206
# ISBN-13: 978-1427798206

PRO: A snappy, positive, clever book on personal branding that makes it exciting and interesting, explains its importance, and has a lot of good advice.  Helps anyone get going into personal branding in the internet age.

CONS: An erratic writing style.  Depth of information varies erratically.  Its pitch to Gen Y may turn off Gen Xers who would benefit.  Some questionable social conclusions.

SUMMARY: Me 2.0 is an excellent guide to personal branding in the internet age – what it is, how to do it, why to do it, and its impact.  A must-buy for serious professionals.

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Make your Own Job Title!

Here's an exercise I want you to try – and do it right as you read this.

Sit down and create your ideal job and give it a title.  Do NOT use any existing job description, and do not use any existing job title.  In fact, if you can, when you create that job title, try not to use any words in your current job title if at all possible, even if its close to ideal.

(If you're a fan of fantasy RPGs or games with "class" structures this may be easy for you)

Ready for more?

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Stereotype-Fu

I was reading an interesting article on how stereotypes can derail your personal 'brand'. It made some good points, and I responded with some of my own strategies. I'd like to go into my own ideas of dealing with stereotypes.

If you're reading this blog, changes are you're a professional geek/nerd of some kind, or hope to be. Pretty much you've got plenty of stereotypes to deal with professionally and unprofessionally – the lifeless nerd, the socially incompetent geek, the perverse otaku, etc. You've dealt with them for a long time.

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