Feeling left behind when it comes to new technologies? Do you know instinctively that you should establish a public professional presence but don’t know where to start? Do you want to expand your professional network, and access to people with incredible expertise?

One way to increase your corporate value is to ensure that you have a strong and easily-identifiable personal brand. It’s not enough simply to have good references or have no embarrassing pictures on Facebook.

Whether it be to the corporation that employs you, or a professional practitioner demonstrating your potential to clients, your brand forms an impression before you hit the meeting room, and extends far beyond the resume.

Creating and protecting your personal brand is an important career strategy, and not just for independent consultants. An online professional presence has become the single most important self-marketing tool for demonstrating expertise and professional credibility. Learn to use social media in a smart, responsible, career-enhancing way.

Is this workshop is for you?

This workshop will be helpful if you:

• Don’t have your own website or blog or aren’t posting to it regularly
• Don’t have a LinkedIn profile or aren’t actively using it to build your personal brand
• Don’t have a Twitter account, or have one but aren’t sure how to use it effectively
• Wonder whether social communities (Facebook, MySpace, Ning) are useful for you
• Want to use social media without it becoming a waste of time
• Want to put technology to work for you without making big mistakes along the way
• Want to take pride in your presence online for your career, practice, or small business

Participants will learn:

• The six basic aspects of personal brand management
• How to create a distinctive, unforgettable brand
• Techniques for presenting an integrated brand
• Tools that can help to easily manage a personal brand

January 16, 2010 workshop, co-sponsored by STC Canada West Coast
Location: Downtown Vancouver >> Register online

January 30, 2010 workshop, sponsored by Intentional Design
207-14888 104th Ave, Surrey >> Register by email or pay through PayPal

If you’ve never been to CANUX, you’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Being up in a resort-like mountain setting at the Banff Centre imbues the workshop with some cosmic-force creative atmosphere. There are a few days left to sign up with the advance discount, so don’t delay if you’re sitting on the fence.

• October, New Orleans, LA: Lavacon
  A conference for techcomm managers and project managers, this year’s theme is professional and career development. If you sense a career change in your near future, or are out of a job and want to move to a field with a future, I’m presenting two sessions. One is on content strategy; the other is on managing your personal brand online.
• October, webinar: Leveraging Content Assets on a Tight Budget
  Part of Aptara Corporation’s Thought Leader webinar series, you can learn how to align technology and processes with business goals, leverage existing content assets for better user experience, and creating an optimized content supply chain
• November, Banff, AB, Canada: CANUX
  I’ll be presenting a case study at this 2-day Canadian User Experience workshop. If you attend, you’ll also get the infamous Kristina Halvorson, whose keynote my presentation follows
• December, Boston, MA: Content Management Professionals Association Summit
  The theme of the trade association summit this year is open source standards. My presentation on “open source content” is a little different aspect of content strategy.
• December, Boston, MA:  Gilbane Boston
  I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on Content Modeling and Information Architectures for Content Management, which is a critical aspect of content strategy.

If you can’t complete your professional development in the content strategy area during 2009, there will be multiple opportunities during 2010. Stay tuned!

Here are the content strategy panels on the table:

• Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.
  Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones, threebrick
  Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For, Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish
  Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data, Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish and Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.
  Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
  Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy, Elena Melendy, Independent Content Strategy Consultant and others
  Content Strategy: Where UX, Design, and Content Play Nice, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
  Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones, threebrick

Voting ends on Sept 3rd, so to choose the panels you want to see on the roster, vote now.

Janus is in the enviable position of living and working “across the pond” where talking about dysfunctions isn’t sanctioned by threats of lawsuits and exposed to the “shoot the messenger” syndrome. On this side of the pond, a CM consultant is expected to turn away, tight-lipped, and not expose irregularities to public scrutiny. When one sees, for example, a CMS contract awarded to a questionable vendor – the vendor rep who leaves the group RFP debrief, where requirements were being discussed, and courts the IT Director instead – any questioning of this manipulation of the system will work against the consultant. It’s as if ethics takes a back seat to the expediency that requires membership to the inside track.

Janus Boye is organizer of the J Boye conference series. At the Philadelphia, online professionals can share knowledge, hear great keynote speakers, and further their professional development. If I weren’t already committed to going to the STC Summit, I would definitely be there.