Jeremy Goldman - Getting to Like How to Boost Your Personal and Professional Brand to Expand Opportunities, Grow Your Business, and Achieve Financial Success

Praise for Getting to Like:

Sharing your story is like breathing oxygen in the digital age. It is a must for a professional to thrive. Your personal brand is the key to opening the gates to the right partners, collaborations, and growth opportunities. Jeremy and Alis book Getting to Like gives you all the tools you need to find your authentic voice and figure out how to share it. I more than liked the book, I loved it. You will too.

Michael TS Lindenmayer, coauthor of Arts Principles

Zagat and Goldman have created a masterclass in personal branding. As approachable as the Dummy series but with the tone and smarts of TED, Getting to Like provides readers with the reasons why building your personal brand should be as tantamount as a basic education and delivers a practical framework for developing and maintaining it. This book should be required reading for professionals and students alike, especially given just how dominating social media is in todays world.

Michael Barber, founder, Barber & Hewitt

In an age when technological change has radically transformed the marketplace, nothing is more important for the young and ambitious to understand than that success depends upon branding, both in the personal profile one projects to the world and in the business image the world sees. In Getting to Like, the landscape of this new world and the primacy of branding is described with the clarity and urgency it requires. Read this book and succeed!

Frdric Fekkai, celebrity hairstylist and beauty legend

Personal branding will have a significant impact on your professional opportunities throughout the career cycle. If you fail to gain visibility you will become lost in the crowd of nameless profiles. Now more than ever, you must establish your unique digital identity, and build meaningful relationships with your audience. I found Getting to Like to be a practical, actionable primer to help you stay one or two steps ahead of the curveand your competition.

Matt Britton, author of best-selling YouthNation and founder and CEO, MRY

Getting to Like

HOW TO BOOST YOUR PERSONAL AND
PROFESSIONAL BRAND
TO EXPAND OPPORTUNITIES, GROW YOUR BUSINESS,
AND ACHIEVE FINANCIAL SUCCESS

Jeremy Goldman and Ali B. Zagat

Copyright 2016 by Jeremy Goldman and Ali B. Zagat

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

G ETTING TO L IKE

E DITED BY R OGER S HEETY

T YPESET BY K ARA K UMPEL

Cover design by Brian Moore

Printed in the U.S.A.

To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.

The Career Press, Inc.

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Wayne, NJ 07470

www.careerpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP Data Available Upon Request.

There are so many people to thank that were sure to forget someone and get in trouble. But well try anyway!

First off, wed like to thank our spouses, John and Victoria. John is Alis, by the by. Our families, in general, are pretty great and deserve acknowledgment for their incredible ongoing support, love, and understanding of our weird writing schedules.

We also want to thank our secret digital networking group, Mosaic. Its a referral-based group of supportive digital marketers and other professionals who are invested in one anothers success. Wed especially like to thank Katie Keating, Lauren DeGeorge, Abby Whitmer, Matthew Capala, Esther Brown, Carly Fink, Vie Quartuccio, Sonya Magett, Leiti Hsu, and Diane Rankin, who chimed in when we were looking for names for the book youre now reading.

A quick shout-out to Grind, the amazing coworking space in New York City that hosted many of our meet-ups, interviews, marathon writing/editing sessions, and occasional disco naps. We couldnt have done it without you (and your copious supplies of coffee).

But the #1 acknowledgment we have to give is our third team member, Luke Robbins. We were looking for an intern when we met Luke, who had recently graduated from the University of Michigan. We quickly found that Luke is a stellar natural writer with great storytelling skills. Frankly, we wouldnt be surprised if he surpassed us. You can find him on Twitter @LukeBRobbins. He writes in quite a few different places and maintains a blog at Concerningwriters.com.

While running for president of the United States in 2012, Mitt Romney famously said: Corporations are people, my friends. Actually, we think the converse is true: People, in a sense, are corporations. Until recently, we thought that only companies had brand identities. That is, until we started thinking of celebritiessuch as Kim Kardashian, Beyonc, or Donald Trumpas having them, too. Today, were increasingly aware that each individuals reputation and attributes constitute someones unique personal brand.

Just like household name brands, you have characteristics that define you: ways that you think of yourself and ways that others think of you. Your personal brand is made up of thousands of choices and opinions, from the simple to the complex. Everyone youve ever met has formed opinions about you. You may not be aware of your brand, and that means it might not be the best, most accurate representation of who you are and what youre capable of. Effective personal branding isnt about putting on a show or figuring out how to do as little work as possible while getting the most financial reward. Life is too short not to be the best possible version of yourself.

So, who needs to care about personal branding, anyway? Is it really that important?

The short answers to these two questions are a) Virtually everyone, and b) Yes, it is. How people see you matters. This is a fundamental truth of being a human being.

You have a brand just as much as you have a reputation. Are you the life of the party? Well, thats part of your brand. Do you tend to take control in a key business meeting? Thats part of your brand, too. Are you prone to making bad jokes when youre nervous? Thats part of your brwell, you get the picture.

So lets talk about some potential situations you may be facing right now. You might be trying to: