Developing Your Personal Brand: Interoffice Email Communications

Communication with your colleagues is an integral part of developing your personal brand. Our relationships with colleagues affect our personal brand in many ways, and the best way to ensure your reputation is not tarnished is to be conscientious on how you communicate within the office. You never know if one day a promotion depends on a peer review, or you need a reference for a new job. I urge you to consider your personal brand in every email, phone call, or conversation your share with your colleagues. For this post, I am going to focus on the topic of interoffice email communication.

How you communicate via email and how it affects your personal brand.

In my mind there are four kinds of “emailers”; The Non-Responder/Mass Sender, The One Liner, The Life Story Teller, and The To-The-Point-Action-Item Sender.

Top 10 Tuesday: Books for Business Folks

I will be featuring a weekly Top 10 Tuesday list. This week's Top 10 focuses on books I have read that inspire me to improve professionally.

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

Though published in 1937, the principles of this book are still applicable today, whether for business, or self-help. How to Win Friends and Influence People is written to the point and its techniques can be applied in any social situation. The stories and real life examples assist readers in seeing how the principles are applied.

This book is highly criticized in the foreword of Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Personally for me Covey’s criticism did not sit well, as Carnegie’s points are very applicable in regards to interpersonal communication and show you how to respect others in a mutually beneficial manner.

I suggest giving this book a read and seeing if its principles have an effect on your business and personal relationships.

2. Good to Great - Jim Collins 

In Good to Great, Collins discusses the finding of his research team focusing on what characteristics are found in great business. In Good to Great, “greatness” is defined as financial performance which is several multiples better than that of the market average over a sustained period.

Of the seven characteristics described by Collins, the Hedgehog concept sits best with me. The Hedgehog concept states that organizations have three overlapping circles; What makes you money? What could you be best in the world at? And What lights your fire? By continuously ask yourself these questions you can improve your organization’s performance. In my humble opinion this is something that can be applied to the individual and transform you from a good employee to a great employee.

Developing Your Personal Brand: Dealing with Trolls

I believe strongly in developing your personal brand, as such I have started a series of blogs dedicated to the topic.

So, you have developed your personal brand using advice from the blogosphere and other resources and you have begun putting your social network footprint on all the leading sites with positive return. Great! "But wait, Matt," you say, “I have this one person who always responds negatively to my post."

Awe yes, the Internet Troll. These people find joy, pleasure, or something that goes beyond all understanding of those of us who just want to be nice.

Selling your ideas to your organization: The internal salesperson

How often has this happened to you: You have found a way to improve a product, an internal process, or you have discovered a tool that will increase your efficiency? You know this to be true and in your excitement you go to your supervisor and ask for the item in question only to get a response like “Sorry, Jan. It is just not in the budget,” or “I think we will keep the process as is, it works now, why change it?”

All the work you put into that idea. You know it will improve your position, because let’s face it, you know what you do in your position best, right?

Top 10 Tuesday: Productivity Tools

I will be featuring a weekly Top 10 Tuesday list. This week's Top 10 focuses on the productivity tools I utilize. 

Productivity tools are as abundant as there are people who use them. The following list is my Top 10 productivity tools I use on a daily basis.

1. Ipod Touch (4th generation)
My Ipod Touch is basically my computer whenever I am outside of the office. I utilize my Ipod for email, tracking website performance, social network marketing (LinkedIn and Facebook), as well as keeping track of my thoughts and ideas via the standard Notes app.

Should I go straight to a MBA after earning my Bachelors?

One question I have been asked a lot by subordinates, interns, and friends considering a MBA, is whether or not they should make the jump right after undergraduate. This is a very good question to ask, and if you are considering going from an undergraduate degree straight to a MBA there are some things you need to consider.


I personally went from Bachelors degree to the MBA program. Looking back on this process now, I certainly would have done things differently. The following g outlines hurdles I experienced along the way taking the process of bachalors degree to full-time MBA.

Today's Professional: What this blog is about?

Today's Professional takes a look at the business world today. I will examine everything about what it means to be a professional, from what you wear, to how to handle tough situations at the work place. My goal with this blog is to write about my experience in the workplace and have a platform for sharing successes and failures I experience.

A little background on myself, I currently live in sunny Reykjavik Iceland and work as the global sales and marketing manager for an information security company. I have worked in the management consulting field, and in the insurance industry in the past. I graduated with a MBA in international business in spring of 2008, just before the economic crisis was upon us.