His website – www.rtodd.com – has been a regular touch point for me ever since.
He has recently published a book that sets out a recipe for establishing your personal brand (he uses the term trademark for a variety of reasons). Part of his thesis is that the collaborative tools of Web2.0 (the Read/Write Web as it is often called) have altered the rules for creating your personal brand and provide you with opportunities to raise your profile and, importantly, to measure how your profile is doing.
What sets this book apart in my eyes is that Todd adds value in interesting ways. Apart from just presenting bland statements about how ‘blogs are good’ and conferences are great ways to see new places and meet new people, he presents a set of tools to measure and score how well your ‘trademark’ is doing. He also sets out a reasoned argument as to why establishing a personal trademark for yourself may well be the career survival tool for the Read/Write Information Age.
He brings together a variety of references and marries them together in support of his argument – and above all he provides examples of how you can ‘speak with data’ to track how well you are meeting or exceeding your own expectations of what your ‘brand’ might be. From checking the site stats for your blog to your technorati rankings to having a ‘scorecard’ of the things you’ve done to promote your brand, Todd give some keen insights.
The fact that he is a world-class recognised authority on the management of meta-data is evidence of the success of his formula. The book at times reads somewhat autobiographically and it is clear that this is not a book based on a theoretical view of things or an attempt to leap on the airport business bookshelf bandwagon but rather an attempt to share a recipe that has worked.
I’ll certainly be taking stock of how I’m doing. This blog is a key part of my personal trademark but after reading Todd’s book I think that I might need to balance the scorecard a little bit more. The framework he presents gives me a road map to do this.
Trademark2.0 can be purchased from LULU.com. Just click on this link to be taken to the book’s page on Lulu. If you don’t want to buy from Lulu, the ISBN for the book is 978-0-6151-5688-0 and your local bookstore should be able to order it for you. Better yet you can buy Trademark 2.0: Defining Your Value in the Web 2.0 World
This is a really cool book. The basic premise is that you can make money in the margins through the wonderous world of the Interweb thing which has removed traditional economic barriers to sales success (location, inventory storage etc etc). Apart from the thinking involved, which is explained very clearly, one of the biggest boons to me was the links and pointers to useful on-line services that I can use to support a professional Association I’m involved with (the 
Where the Long Tail examines the infinite applicability of Pareto efficiency (read the book and that will make sense) Freakonmics examines the way in which we often assign root cause to things with out a sound evidentiary base. From why crime rates didn’t explode in the US in the 1990s to why drug dealers live at home, this book is a thought provoking romp through the fallacies of “conventional wisdom”. I like it because it shows the value of speaking with data – having actual statistics to back up your arguments as well as the impacts of jumping to conclusions about the real causes of any effect.
All of life is an accumulation of little things and eventually one little thing causes a situation to change dramatically. Be it the sudden popularity of a brand of shoe or the jump from a minor outbreak to a disease epidemic, everything comes down to a single tipping point. Read in conjunction with Freakonomics and The Long Tail, this book gives rounds out the macro implications of micro things – be they the small unit sales of niche books on Amazon (which add up to big money volumes simply because Amazon never runs out of room) or the impacts of seemingly unrelated issues on a chain of events (such as Roe vs Wade and the crime wave that never happened in Freakonomics).