It’s been an amazing month sharing my personal branding journey with all of you. I have received great feedback, engaged in some interesting discussions, and made some good friends along the way. For that, I thank all of you who took time out of your busy lives to read (my often long) blog posts and would love for you to continue following on my via email, RSS, and Twitter.
The value of taking a periodic step back
As I reflected back on my personal branding journey this past week, I thought about all that I have learned about what it means to create a personal brand today. Things such as the tricky balance of marketing yourself while not being seen as a pure self-promoter, the value of forming relationships via social media, or developing a brand that makes you a purple cow are just a few of many lessons I learned that will help me in building a strong personal brand going forward. However, what may have been the most important thing I have learned on this journey is that developing a strong personal brand can be used as a psychological tool for personal growth.
Instead of just seeing personal branding as tool to market yourself, it is important to see it as an avenue for digging deeper and deeper into who you truly are and who you want to eventually become. In today’s ever changing, hypercompetitive working world we are always on the go and often so focused on getting to that end goal that we don’t stop and see what’s right in front of us. Therefore, it is important for us from time to time to take a step back and ask ourselves if our current personal brand is in line with what we are passion about. So when you get a chance, set some time aside, look at the bigger picture, and see if your personal brand is aligned with your both your passions and professional goals.
Continue focusing your brand
While I decided to develop my brand that encompasses all my varied skills, talents, and work experiences into one identity, I have come to see that you simply can’t focus on all of them at once. A problem I often have is I sometimes take on too many projects at the same time and spread myself thin. Well, if you add too many slashes to your personal brand there is a potential to spread others people’s attentions too thin also. Therefore, as time goes on I will continue to tighten up my brand more and more while exploring the passions that are most important to me.
One example of getting more focused is deciding on the topics I will be writing about on my personal blog here at www.marcossalazar.com. As I was thinking about new blog posts I wanted to write, I realized I needed to focus my topics so people can know what type of information and resources I will be providing. This is why I have decided to put my writing under a smaller of themes:
1. Psychological Development for Young Professionals
2. Career adventurism in the 21st century
3. Gen Y & Millennial issues (work, social, professional, & psychological topics)
I may throw in occasional posts from some of my other slashes such as girl and women leadership, social media, exercise and fitness, and a new area I am exploring – Gen Y & Millennial politics – but for the time being my writing will be focused on these three themes.
In addition to my blog, I have learned how valuable a tool Twitter is to raise awareness about your brand out. Therefore, I will also be focusing my Twitter streams just like my blog. I love how Dan does such a great job of being a resource for topics related to Personal Branding and highlights them with caps at the beginning of most tweets. I will be doing something similar but will focus my tweets on the topics above.
Syncing your growth
As you evolve as a person, so should your brand. In the 21st century we are not going to stay in the same job, or even the same field, for the rest of our lives. Therefore, as your passions, interests, and talents expand, so should your personal brand. This may not necessarily mean going the route I have gone of developing a whole brand around all of your passions and talents but rather, learning how to integrate your growth to serve and further your personal brand. Good luck and hope you enjoyed my personal branding journey!

On this last phase of my personal branding journey, I wanted to make sure that everything about me online matched up with the personal brand I was creating. So I Googled my name (as well as Binged it) and found that there were a number of tech forums I had posted to many years ago that showed up. And more recently, I had a number of comments showing up from the
There are many sites out there you can do this with besides your personal website, so I suggest only focusing on the major ones to save yourself time. Therefore at a minimum make sure your personal website, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are up-to-date. Then when doing a search for you name and you realize you have a profile on many other social networks, you can decide if you want to keep them or need to delete them.
So, in the third step of developing your personal brand found in Me. 2.0 – Communicate Your Brand – I will go over what I think are two of the most important strategies you can use today to communicate your brand effectively without being seen as a shameless self-promoter. They are developing meaningful blogger relationships and using Twitter as a connector and being a resource.
However, in promoting my personal brand of being a
In writing this post, I started thinking about Jim Collin’s book
So then the next question is where do you find these bloggers that you would want to develop strong relationships with? In the past you could find them on blog rolls, but since I started my personal branding journey I have come to see
This is why a blogsite – a hybrid of a blog and a website – is so essential to creating a strong online presence and is one of the main principles found in
How does this impact my narrative?
When I got asked what I did in New York, the person also said, “Nice shirt!” That night I was wearing one of my
This illustrates an extremely important idea to keep in mind when communicating your personal brand:
So at the party, when I was telling the story about BoroThreads I could tell they were under the impression that it was my full time gig. So after I was done, I casually mentioned, “Oh, but for my day job I am a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts.” This seemed to have come out of left field and I did this on purpose because
What do Bono, Diddy, and Tim Ferriss have in common? They are all modern day Renaissance Workers.
In many ways, the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker was laid out for us by our educational system. Most students are required to take liberal arts classes where they learn about topics unrelated to their major (sadly, colleges still don’t do a good job of helping students see how the knowledge and skills they learn in one field could be beneficial other fields as well as in the potential career paths they may take after graduation).
On March 12, 2009, Bernard Madoff pled guilty to 11 felonies and admitted to operating what has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by an individual. Prosecutors estimate that his 4,800 clients lost over $64.8 billion.
In my own professional life, my day job is a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts Research Institute. However, on a daily basis I am constantly using the creative and entrepreneurial skills I developed when opening up my clothing business, am being sought for my technology skills, and am helping IT, Marketing, and Communications create a social media strategy that will increase awareness of our new 


