The 2K11 24/7 CIX: Your Personal Brand, Your Business — Event in Review

Yesterday, I found myself in a room with less than a dozen people — more than 90% of whom I’d never met before — and we were all there to discuss the topic du jour: one’s Personal Brand.

In what would have otherwise ben a regular Monday night (Dashing off to Dodgeball, Drinking with the Dodgeball Team and Dodging Dodgeballs), Kevin saw fit to intervene, letting me know about an event series that he’d been attending. Kev is generally in the know about the different social media and web development events going on around Toronto, so I’ll often lend an ear when he’s trying to tell me what’s going on.

$10 and a quick jaunt later, I was at the Camaraderie Co-operative where the event would be held. And it was at that very moment where I learned an important lesson — no two tweetups/meetups/events are created equally. Not all of them come in large packages. Where I was used to conferences of 1500, Twitter-organized parties of hundreds and speaker engagements of dozens, this was a small, intimate group there to discuss and learn about a topic of interest. You had all the time in the world to get all of your questions in. It was small enough so that you got to know a bit about everyone in the room. And since there were only so many people around, the information was tailored to the audience, not simply rehashed from documents that had been passed around a number of times from hand to hand. In short — it was probably the last thing I expected.
We focused not only on how one should go about developing one’s personal brand, but also about how one should portray that brand on the big three social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook). To show that even if you think you’re a pro that you can always learn from just about anywhere, here’s a few things I quickly learned from this event:

  • While I make great use of my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I could do a far better job at optimizing my LinkedIn account (and I wish I’d been at the April 11th event, since that’s what that session was all about!) — past creating a very detailed profile, I haven’t really done too much with it
  • When posting content to the Internet, one should make a message tailored to each individual audience, since you will very likely have a different audience on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (which is a very good tip that I’ve never followed and will start to)
  • New tools and things to read, such as TwitterFall and Mitch Joel’s ”Six Pixels of Separation”, which Kev had suggested to me earlier
A good number of people had to skeedaddle right after the event though, so I didn’t get to meet everyone, but I did get to know a fellow civil servant, someone looking to develop a company specializing in personal branding and the speaker for the event, Sue Varty (Marc Roginsky had been there but had to leave early), slightly better by the end of the night. It was informative and if you’re pretty new to Twitter and looking to learn how to optimize it, maybe you should look at checking out the April 25th session!

So with that, I’m off to keep working on my personal brand. Want to help? Make sure to spread the love — tell people I’m here to try to improve lives.
One day at a time.

—Casey E. Palmer
109/365

The 2K11 24/7 XXXIV: Voice Post - Friends. How Many of Us Have Them?

The 2K11 24:7 Xxxiv by Casey Palmer  
Download now or listen on posterous
7 XXXIV.mp3 (3332 KB)

Hey all, and welcome to today’s post :) Today I’ve done some reflection on my friendships and what it means to be a friend. There’s much to do in order to have meaningful, lasting friendships, and I chose to touch on a bit of it in today’s voice post. Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear all about it — the comment box is below to use to your liking :)

Have an awesome night!

—case p.
34/365

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

In fact, depending on how you measure the timeline of Rome’s development, some would argue that it took as long as 870 years! But I’m not here to wax history to you. Dunno if I’ll get this post up in time, but eh.

So yes, if you want to achieve a goal, you need to give it time. Even the things that appear to have been accomplished overnight are often done as the result of months of prior work and preparation.


I didn’t get much feedback over the first post so I’ve been thinking about what I should do. Now that Sean Ward has espoused to me the benefits of using iMovie on my fantabulous Mac, I’ll be getting some good quality content up. But aside from that, what do I do right now that will make 2011 more productive and better than any year before?
What came to me in conversation last night is that I’ve set a number of goals for myself in 2011. Individually, they’re all likely quite attainable; but as a whole, I’ve likely created quite the project for myself. As the 2K11 24-7 manifests itself, I can already sense that it will take all of my cunning, wit and attention to make sure that it goes well - but as we can see from the shilling i’ve done for my Wolfram|Alpha contest entry, I’ll at least take a shot at a challenge :)

How do I measure progress, though? Am I just doing a general calculation to measure how awesomely my 2011 is going so far? If so:
SUN JAN 2
  • Karma Points = went the extra mile to return a friend’s cell phone to her that she forgot at a NYE bash; played around with some of the kids at church; helped a church Elder deliver communion to some of the attendees outside of the sanctuary
  • Fun = hung out, fondued and Taboo’d with friends from my banking days
Speaking of which on the latter - hilarity! Two guys vs. three girls - we totally dominated (but to be fair, Mike and I have been friends for a while, and we played against our girlfriends - fiancée in my case - and our friend, so our synergy was WAY better); but some cards worked out really well and others not so much:

Clue: WHINE
Casey: When your girlfriend doesn’t get her way she might…
Mike: Complain, argue, whine…
Casey: YES
(Casey and Mike get hit)
Clue: JUMP
Casey: Kriss Kross made a song about THIS
Mike: Jesus?
Casey: What?!
(eventually used a clue about using your legs to get you in mid-air)

Otherwise, yeah! Still learning, still floating towards some unknown goal without direction - guess I’ll check in with you guys later today :)
Have a great day!

—case p.

2/365

Sorry. We are experiencing some physical difficulties…

—case p.