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Business & Tech

Control Your Personal Brand or Get Left Behind

Karen Kang has helped some of the nation's most successful companies develop their personal brands. Her new book teaches you how to develop your own brand.


Karen Kang learned a thing or two about branding as a principal and partner for RegisMcKenna, the firm that put Apple, Intel and Genentech on the map, and later for her own company, BrandingPays, based here in Palo Alto.

But Kang has a new message for 2013—personal branding. She’s just released the book, BrandingPays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand.  The book is aimed at professionals and entrepreneurs, students and recent graduates, and provides inspiring examples of how branding spurred success.

According to Kang, your personal brand will make or break your next career opportunity.

"Consider yourself a free agent—no one else is looking out for your best interests but yourself," says Kang. "You need to be crystal clear about who you are and the value you bring to a world where constant change is the only norm."

Here are the five steps:
1. Define your unique "cake," or rational value.
2. Develop the key messages that support your cake.
3. Put your cake and icing together.
4. Define your ecosystem.
5. Develop a two-part action plan.

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You say that you’ve done all that? The book also examines issues that limit success. “Figure out what your goal is,” Kang told Patch.  “Then position and brand yourself for that goal.  For instance, if you are a product marketer and you want to reposition yourself as an innovation expert and trainer, you can map out your strategy, messages and ecosystem to attain your goal.  You might start doing public speaking and blogging to get better known for your innovation leadership ideas, volunteer to lead innovation interest groups for industry organizations or start an innovation group on Meetup.com or LinkedIn—two social networking platforms.  Before you know it, your brand will be associated with innovation and you will be ‘unstuck’ from your past branding as a product marketer.”

Follow Kang on Twitter @karenkang, and at www.facebook.com/brandingpays.

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