Book Review: Me 2.0 by Dan Schawbel

Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success was written by Dan Schawbel who is an award-winning authority on personal branding. He is a leading voice on the subject for Gen Y and writes the popular Personal Branding Blog, publishes Personal Branding Magazine, judges Personal Brand Awards, and directs Personal Branding TV.

As a past contributor to his magazine, I have been fortunate to be a part of Dan’s personal branding journey. I am very impressed with how Dan has excelled in personal branding at such a young age.  I can relate to Dan’s story because I understood the value of building relationships while a freshman in college.  For the past 15 years or so, I have been branding myself within the business community as a business networking authority. In fact, I bought my personal domain, Jacobsohn.com, in 1998 when most people were not thinking about this yet. I have been using this in my email address ever since. Shortly after setting up my email, I created a personal site that was part branding and part resource at www.jacobsohn.com.

So, what Dan writes is accurate and works. It takes many years to build a brand, however, with today’s technology, you can accelerate it much quicker. While I didn’t have the luxury of this technology when I started my journey in college, I have leveraged several new tools to enhance my brand.

The book is broken up into the following sections:

Part I:  The Rise of Personal Branding
Part II: Command Your Career in Four Steps
Part III: Now You Have Command

Within each section, the author provides a lot of detail with real world examples of how to build and sustain your brand. Dan starts out with a history of personal branding and social media, which is an important foundation. As the author mentions, the personal branding phenomenon really came into the mainstream with Tom Peter’s article The Brand Called You, which appeared in the August 1997 edition of Fast Company.

Dan shares with us his own journey into personal branding. In fact, he has built a four step process that has contributed to his success. The four steps are: Discover Your Brand, Create Your Brand, Communicate Your Brand, and Maintain Your Brand.  If you are able to learn these four steps, then you will be able to jump start your career.

Much of what Dan writes is geared towards the Millennials who are largely just entering the workforce. Don’t let this stop you from reading this book because there are many good tips for any generation.

Personal branding is one of the main reasons that I have been able to build a trusted and diverse network of people who I can all upon anytime. Take yourself serious and find ways to become memorable through personal branding.

Pick up your copy of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success to learn how you can enhance your image and become more successful.

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