Crush It! Read Online Free PDF

and Emeril. They built their empires out of being who they are and never backing down from it. But the major benefits of personal branding are not limited to the A-list celebrities. In fact, personal branding is what gives everyone an unprecedented shot at joining their ranks. For example, think about what some people might consider second-tier celebrities like Ashton Kutcher or Kerry Rhodes. Kutcher was already famous from his stints ontelevision, not to mention his marriage to Demi Moore, but there is no doubt that his brand has blown up since he started leveraging social networking tools. Rhodes, the New York Jets football player, has been using Twitter with incredible success to make his brand bigger. D-to-C-level entertainment figures like Will Wheaton, Brooke Burke, Levar Burton, and Fred Durst are building great opportunities that will likely propel them from B- to A-level status. How do I know? Because I can see how many people are following them on their Twitter accounts. Now, usually I advise people to ignore the quantity of people following them and focus instead on the quality of their interactions with those followers—it’s a lot more indicative of how well their brand is doing. Many decision makers, however, still aren’t aware of this important detail, and therefore the preceding celebrities will benefit from those nice numbers we’re seeing. Where the eyeballs go, opportunity follows.
    Last, but by no means least, are the people whom you might have never heard of who are putting out great content and leveraging social media and killing it, like Dave Morin @davemorin, Chris Sacca @sacca, Justine Ezarik @ijustine, and Kevin Rose @ kevinrose. Their personal brands are skyrocketing, and there’s no reason to think that eventually they won’t become household names.
    You see where I’m going with this? The first generation built their brands on television and movie screens, radio, magazines, and newspapers, and the new one will do the same online at a much lower cost, with no need for a gatekeeper’s approval. Get into position, because the big killing is coming around the corner. The field may be different, but the game is just the same.
    building my brand
    If you watch me on Winelibrarytv.com, you’ll figure out my personal brand pretty quickly. I’m the wine guy who tells it like it is in plain English. It’s a brand that I’ve been able to develop from a very early age, thanks to growing up in the wine industry. I’d attend $1,000-a-head tastings and rub elbows with experienced connoisseurs who had lived a long time in the wine trenches. This meant that they had lots of expertise to share with a relative newcomer like me. It also meant that they carried a load of baggage in the form of preconceived notions of how things should be.
    They’d swirl and smell and slurp and spit and then spout the same classic terminology every time, how the bouquet was rose petals or the finish was silk. I would stick my nose in my glass, suck in a mouthful of air and wine, and the only thing running through my head would be, “Man, this really tastes like Big League Chew,” or, “If this isn’t a Whatchamacallit bar, I don’t know what is.” It’s not that I couldn’t spout an A-to-Z wine-tasting lexicon and didn’t appreciate the complexity of an excellent vintage. I knew my Malbec from my Montepulciano; I just didn’t see why I had to use the same forty-five-cent words to describe my experience when drinking it. On top of that, everyone, including the reviewers, was drinking and admiring the same damn stuff. If Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc were featured as the best white of 1998, we’d see a surge in demand for it at the store. Never mind that as far as I was concerned the Babich was a million times better and a better deal since it cost about half the price.
    It was clear to me that the industry was stuck in a rut, andmy experience in the store told me that people were dying for someone to take the