Personal Branding Trend #3 - VIDmail by William Arruda

Email is so last decade. Good riddance because email is one of our weakest forms of expression. Words only account for about 7% of a communication and words are pretty much all we have to work with email. As video becomes easier to create and distribute, it will eventually replace the ubiquitous text-based email that we’ve been using for about 30 years.

Look for changes to existing email software and new products to support this evolution from text to video.

VideoBIO currently allows you to put your videoBIO in your email signature. And there are new companies and offerings springing up such as Talk Fusion that make it possible to easily build and send video email, or VIDmail. Look for more of these services and emails integrated with text, images and video.

Traditional email will be enhanced with video. Are you ready to send video email that best represents your personal brand?

Robin Recommends:

I have scheduled my videoBIO for February and although I know that it is just a talking head, it is the beginning of my video creation plans. I also think video podcasts and audio clips will be winners over text, as I prefer to see and hear over reading long text.

Cheers,

Robin

Personal Branding Trend #8 - Personal Portals by William Arruda

As many of you are aware, I have been certified through Reach Personal Branding and now I have the benefits of a Preferred Strategist to share with you William Arruda's 11 Top Trends for Personal Branding in 2011.

As a teaser, I will provide the trends over the next 11 days by presenting each one individually with more detail. I start with Trend #8 - Personal Portals, and have included Williams video for more clarity on the subject.

An excerpt from Williams trend files:

"Many of you have spent time in the past several years creating a LinkedIn profile, building a Blog, creating a Twitter bio, friending on Facebook, etc. This has fractured your brand to various sites all over the web. There‘s the Facebook you, the YouTube you and the Twitter you, etc. Each person who connects with you via one of these sites, sees only one facet of the gem that is your brand. This has made it challenging to provide the complete story about who you are and what you do."

Enter personal portals......

Personal portals, such as about.me and flavors.me are a new category of online tools that allows you to link all the different facets of your brand in one place. They let you create one customizable web page that connects all your profiles from various social networks.

Watch Williams video to learn more.

I presented this trend first as I have recently developed my Personal Portal with the help of my brilliant Partner Don at SteelID. Don not only took a cool photo of me behind our studio, but he took the time to design my About.Me/RobinBramman page to include my brand attributes and presented it with coolness.

I show you the before and after below to outline how important it is to work with a professional integrated designer to present your brand online.  Many people go for the DIY (Do It Yourself) and end up placing their brand at risk.  

Before

After                                                                     

Stay tuned for more trends to follow and share your trends by commenting below.


Cheers,
Robin