BIZBarcelona - Salón Emprendedor

Cualquier profesional que quiera estar en el mercado hoy en día tiene que desarrollar una marca personal y actuar con “transparencia, consistencia y constancia“. Lo recordó Enric Jové, director del departamento de Economía y Empresa y Área Digital en ISM-ESIC Campus Barcelona, durante su charla en el BIZBarcelona [vídeo], en la que también destacó que el CV no ha muerto sino que se ha transformado y que el formato multimedia gana cada vez más puntos. Lo recalca a diario Dan Schawbel, experto en Personal Branding con más de 119.000 seguidores en Twitter y autor del libro Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success.

Schawbel subraya que la marca personal es una oportunidad única para destacar, para “posicionarse en un mercado de nicho” y encontrar trabajo. “Invirtiendo en tu marca personal, consigues hacer más con menos, especialmente cuando usas el poder de las redes sociales”, insiste el experto en su blog.

Para empezar a construirla, dice, es útil formularse ciertas preguntas, como:

-Si pudieras hacer sólo una cosa el resto de tu vida, ¿qué sería?
-¿A quién te gustaría parecerte y por qué?
-¿Cómo te describe tu entorno?
-¿Te gusta el camino que ha tomado tu carrera?
-¿Puedes describirte en cinco adjetivos?
-¿Puedes enumerar 3 puntos fuertes y 3 puntos débiles de tu personalidad?

Luego, Schawbel recomienda configurarse alertas de Google y Tweetdeck para saber qué dice la gente de nuestra marca para poder seguir trabajando en ella. Aunque sin obsesiones. Estar bien posicionado en el mundo digital no significa necesariamente ser mejor, advierte.

Sometimes, changing the order of the factors do alter the product. Commutative property does not work when we talk about organization’s social media strategy. Forrester Research presents a four-step process that puts people first and leaves technology as the last question to be addressed. The methodology is called POST and it stands for People-Objectives-Strategy-Technology. In that order. Leaving People in the last position can turn a POST into a STOP.

Therefore, it is not enough to add social media to the marketing mix just because everyone else is doing it. The first thing to think about is who are the people you would most like to attract via your presence in sites like Facebook or Twitter. Then, what are your primary objectives and what kind of strategies you plant to implement. Eventually, you have to decide what technologies you are going to use. The methodology forgets to mention an important issue: you also need to know how are you going to measure your social media results. Business people still want to know the ROI of their results.

It all seems pretty obvious, but as the experts participating on SIME ‘Making the Marketing Click‘ session pointed out, many companies still think on selling stuff  and forget what the customers want. “Marketing today is not about talking to people but about having conversations”, said Peder Rotkirch, from Join the Carnival. That entails a listening attitude but also bringing relevant content to the users, as Sebas Muriel, from Tuenti, underlined. Content is king. Provided it is appropriate and engaging. The spam sales pitches do not work anymore. So, let’s concentrate on POST.

This video introduced the ‘Making the Marketing click’ session, with Peder Rotkirch & Patrik Danielsson, from Join the Carnival, Sebas Muriel, from Tuenti and Aleix Marcó, Letsbonus, who discussed on how marketers operate today and how has the consumption of information changed. They all agree that “companies and brands are more open to real time social experiences“, that “marketing today is not about selling stuff, but about having conversations” and that “you need to find out what people like and bring them relevant content”.

Opportunities are there. ‘Malgré tout’. Ola Ahlvarsson, serial entrepreneur and chairman of SIME, the event about digital business included in BIZBarcelona, repeated it several times during the morning. First, during his “global journey in digital opportunities” and afterwards during the interviews with marketing experts, investors and serial entrepreneurs, who echoed his words.

“Its a better time than ever to be raising money as a first time entrepreneur”, said Jyri Engström, Founder of Ditto.me. Erik Wikström, founder of Icon Media Lab, Letsbuyit and Result, added that “the biggest thread is not to do anything“. “Act, do something, create a website, talk to people…”, he exclaimed. “Everyone should be an entrepreneur”, he added. “The only way to know if you can do it is doing it”, he concluded. Even when investors insisted on saying that “ideas are not really worth that much” and that the most important is “execution“. And probably because “what motivates you is not making money but making meaning”.

Examples of success are there. Ola Ahlvarsson remind the audience that Facebook has more than 700 million users, that 50 million people have liked the ‘Like’ button, that apps seem to be the universal currency which is changing consumption, that most of the surfaces of your house will be smart, that cloud computing is a challenging phenomenon to the computing industry, that interfaces are more important than games themselves, that language is not an issue anymore, that the innovation model of Apple is Apple and that Google wants to create a ubiquitous media realm…

Does this mean we are going tech crazy? Yes, said Ahlvarsson. “It is going to be crazier than before“.  “Futurists make prophecies, but usually they do not happen”, he winked just before insisting on the fact that “there are more digital opportunities than before” and reminding that “crazy ideas”, such as kingsclub.se, a social network devoted to truck drivers, “work on the Internet”.

Dennis Crowley

“It’s a little bit of a friend finder, a little bit of a social city guide, a little bit of a game”, according to its co-founder Dennis Crowley, and the next shiny thing on the social network horizon, as stated by some analysts. Facebook and Twitter pop the “what’s up” question. Foursquare simply tells people where you are, but it has captured the attention of the social networks sphere in just a few months.

The location based social network, designed to “incent people to explore cities in ways they haven’t done before”, has already been embraced by more than 200.000 users, while marketers still ask what is all the fuss about and whether they need to pay attention.

Certainly, Foursquare isn’t the only location based network –Gowalla being its main competitor-, but Twitter wasn’t the only microblogging site on the Web horizon either. And here it is. On March 2010, the platform created by Jack Dorsey has recorded a 1,500% growth in the number of registered users and the number of its employees has grown 500%, according to the first email newsletter on the company’s progress by the website’s co-founder Biz Stone.

Some tech-bloggers think the game-like nature of Foursquare, which enable users to earn points by ‘checking in’ at various locations, is engaging enough and can drive new opportunities. For the record, The Financial Times has just signed a partnership deal with the company to let users “unlock” its paywall system when they check in at a designated spot.

What are the possibilities open up by location-based marketing? Put differently: do marketers need to start taking notice? In two years time, will people care about how many checkins they have? Is there any possibility that Foursquare become another Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google in 2005? Will it compete with Facebook if the largest social network does Geolocation right?

These are some of the questions Dennis Crowley, who has been named one of the Top 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and who is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, will answer in HitBarcelona. Not to be missed.