One of the most important aspects of marketing for a business is building your brand.  Making sure that when people think about your products or services, that the appropriate mental, and even emotional tie-ins pop into their minds.

When discussing branding however, it is important to also recognize the value of “personal branding” and how closely tied it is to corporate branding.  So much of business is based on relationships.  How many of the companies that you deal with deal with you because of who you are, not just because of who your company is?

In building your personal brand, Social tools, social networking sites, social marketing, and the like can be of huge value.  But if you’re not careful they can also be a huge waste of time.  Twitter may be great for the types of relationships you maintain, or it could just be a nuisance.  The same can be said of MySpace, Facebook (although with the API for Facebook now we should be seeing some really interesting things develop), and a plethora of others (heck, there are even applications now that let you drag and drop components to create your own social networking applications in just minutes.)

A couple of social applications that have gain a lot of traction with business professionals, but are just lacking in too many features for the more aggressive social networker are Plaxo and Linked-In.  Linked in is great for finding people, and leveraging personal networks to find skill-sets and ask some questions.  Plaxo is nice for keeping my address book up to date.  But these ponies are going to have to learn some new tricks to stay relevant in comparison to the newer, cooler tools out there.

Enter Plaxo Pulse.  I read a wonderful, very detailed writeup today about Pulse.  It looks like Plaxo has made some real strides forward:

•  Allows you to store information about the contacts, rather than just what they provide (unlike linked-in)
• Categories (Family, Friends, Co-workers, People to keep track of so I can avoid them, etc)
• Can sync with your linked in data
• Ability to comment on other people’s updates “congrats on the promotion,” etc.

And lots, lots more.  Go read the full post by Dan Sweet to see even more exciting features, as well as a few short comings you should be aware of.

This entry was posted by Steve Spencer on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 8:29 am and is filed under Advertising, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.