We all have one. Many of us have more than one. This is your most effective way of delivering your brand every day. Are you making the most of it? Look at an article in Fast Company magazine that gives tips on now to maximise your band in this way. It certainly got me to relook at what I send out every day.

Most portfolio workers are also digital natives and live and work in a digital world more than most. It is interesting therefore to get Richard Harper’s take on this topic. Richard is a principal researcher at Microsoft. Note in particular his view that future communication will rely more than ever on the written word.

Interview with Richard Harper from NESTA UK on Vimeo.

Do you feel like these people?

check out SHINE

As Apple users – well, we both have Apple computers, iPads and iphones – we still do recognise that there really are other pieces of impressive kit out there and android devices are certainly making an impact recently. My attention was drawn to a US careers site that recently had a whole posting on the android apps that they reckoned were really useful in managing your career. To give you a flavour the headings are:

1. Touch Calendar,  2. PrinterShare Mobile Print,  3. CraigsApp,  4. Evernote,  5. Groupy,  6. RepliGo Reader,  7. Job Interview Prep,  8. RealTweets Job Networking,  9. Astrid,  10. Compass

11. ConnectIn,  12. Quick Contact,  13. Google Voice,  14. Job Interview Questions,  15. Resume Tips,  16. Mobile Career Companion,  17. GOALS ToDo Full,  18. CB Jobs,  19. Alarms,  20. Business Motivation Quotes

Us – biased? Of course not.

We always make the point that portfolio workers more than most people need to keep up with current trends in new technology so here we reproduce IBM’s recently released annual Five in Five list of innovations that the technology giant thinks will take off in the next five years. Are you ready for these and how can they help you develop your portfolio careers?

Can you wait?  Well yes. But for the geeks amongst us it will be fun.

Peter Osborne has started a very interesting discussion on this topic on our linkedin portfolio careers group. He also has a fuller posting in which he discusses these 8 ‘lessons’ that he has learned. I was particularly interested as a couple of weeks ago I did a keynote speech specifically on portfolio careers for the over 50’s and in 2 days time I am doing another one for 200 accountants aged over 50 and who wish to explore portfolio careers as a possible career pattern. One of the items that I discuss concerns what you need to do to market yourself when you are over 50.

Marketing your brand when you are over 50

• I make the point that the advantage of being a mature worker is that you bring a lot of stability, experience, presence, knowledge and wisdom to the table. Personal branding is  key these days. It’s what makes you stand out from the crowd. Make sure you get noticed for all the right reasons.

• It is crucial that you are clear on your motivated skills, your values and your passions. That applies to any age but is especially important here as you will be more time limited. Sorry to sound depressing!

• Again – relevant to any age-  but especially here because of  potential age stereotyping. You really need to focus on the the first impression you make? Appearance, voice, face. Decide what fits for your brand. And smile! It is likely to be reciprocated and the positive psychology researchers tell us that the physiological act of smiling is hard wired into our neural network so that you will also feel happier. Which means you will make a better impression.  Especially as we know that rightly or wrongly people form these impressions within 30 seconds of meeting you.  They will make  assumptions about everything from your education and your wealth, your credibility and your success, your trustworthiness and your believability – even your sexuality and desirability.

• Create the marketing materials used to communicate to employers: business cards, a cv, cover letter, references document, web site, blog, or work portfolio. Google me is the new business card. Over 77% of employers will Google a job candidate; 35% of those candidates won’t get the job because the boss finds negative or explicit content on social media Web pages. Research your digital footprint.  Try for something different. Katie and I both use a special bookmark designed to promote our book and containing the crucial contact information about us.

• You must understand and be familiar with new technology. Get your grandchildren to teach you! Exhibit how you stay on top of technology. For example, establish or update your LinkedIn profile or develop a web portfolio to show your ability to incorporate cutting-edge marketing tools and put the URL on your résumé.

• Talk about new things that you are enjoying learning about – as that is one of the other stereotypes about older people.

• Build a network before you need it. 70 percent of participating executives found their current positions by networking. Yet professionals tend to network only if and when looking for their next positions. 46 – 60 year olds spent three times as long networking as their younger colleagues. And before our Gen Y friends comment that this is simply because older people are slower that is not what the results show!

It would be interesting to get other tips for this age group. I will of course credit you if I put them into my talks!

makes you think ?

Excellent article which summarises what is known about Twitter use. It certainly confirms my limited experience – limited because I make little use of it. All my postings are tweeted and that is about it for me. There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year.

Some of the findings which stood out for me:

Most tweets are babble

While not academic research, some insight into what people are talking about on Twitter comes from an analytics company who categorised 2,000 tweets collected over one week. They fell into six categories (similar percentages were found by Java et al., 2007):

1. Pointless babble: 41%

2. Conversational: 38%

3. Pass-along value: 9%

4. Self-promotion: 6%

5. Spam: 4%

6. News: 4%

20 per cent are ‘informers’, 80 per cent are ‘meformers’

* Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users

* Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.

Informers tended to have larger social networks, perhaps because they passed on more interesting things and weren’t talking about themselves all the time.  This split hints at the different ways that people use Twitter. It also suggests that the conversational aspects of Twitter may have been overstated. If 80% of users don’t reply to others then it’s not that social.

Trends are one-time and short-lived

Tweets on a particular topic rarely last longer than a week and usually no more than a few days. Most topics only trend once, then die, usually never to return. 85% of these trends are news-related.

10% of Twitter users contribute 90% of the tweets

The mood of the nation

Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US, analysed their emotional content, and produced a ‘mood of the nation‘ video. It shows how the emotional content of people’s tweets changes over the day (red is negative and green positive).

So – as I of course classify myself as an Informer I will now tweet this to my embarrassingly few followers!