 Hi, this is Gerhard Leonhard, media futurist in Basel, Switzerland. I want to talk to you about the topic today that has been requested in my speaking gigs many, many, many times over in the last year, and that's the topic of personal branding. In today's world where we're all connected to the internet and where we're all doing things that are sort of public in many ways, most of us in business, we're wondering sometimes about our own brand, you know, what are we becoming on the internet? I get these questions all the time. How do you do this? How do you actually build a following? If you're a musician, if you're an artist, if you're a brand, if you're a car company or an insurance company, you have to build a following of some sort. So here's a couple examples. I like to make heavy use of mobile devices. I think this is the future. Many researchers are predicting that in the next five years 90% of all internet access will be strictly on mobile devices. People are going away from the computer because the computer is about work and the mobile device is not so much about work. So when we're consuming content or doing other fun stuff, we'll be using mobile devices even when we're at home, connected to different kinds of networks and those devices will become extremely cheap. So it won't be a thousand dollar iPad. It'll be a 50 dollar Chinese device or even a 10 dollar device that we can use for reading. So mobile is very important. So I have this thing i.mediafuturist.com. It's a mobile version of my live stream, what I publish. I have a mobile app, which I think is very important. I use a company called Mobile Roadie to provide this. They have very good structure and deals for people who are sort of mid-level, small, medium-sized enterprises. Very good stuff. So you should go mobile, have mobile apps, have mobile versions of your web page. If your web page is not mobilized or using Flash, not a good idea, you have to go mobile. You have to also get into quick response codes, which you can see here. This is my code. All you need to do right now is take out your iPhone or Android phone and zap the photo and click on Recognize. And then it basically goes out and connects you to my web page. So these kind of codes are very important for the future because they're sort of like shortcuts in real life. So you can have a code on your car, your t-shirt, your book. And of course lots and lots of products are doing the same with the barcode that you may be aware of. And of course radio frequency chips. All my books are online. So this is, you see on the right side of the slide, my book called Music 2.0. It's a free book for downloading. You can buy it on Amazon, but you can also just read it on the mobile. I have a mobile version called MusicFutures.com that is optimized for mobile reading. So you can read it on the Blackberry, on the iPhone, wherever you want to read it. This is very important. It's also very cheap to do. So if you haven't gotten into mobilizing your website, your assets, your should. On the next slide I'm showing my Twitter wheel. I think it's twitterwheel.com. We can make this kind of thing. This shows you how I'm connected to other people. I currently have about 18,000 followers. I'm following about 17,000. Ask me to more. It'll be more hopefully. But the number is not important. What's important is the quality of the connections. So the people that I like to do work with and some really great people like Clay Scherke and Don Tapscott and many other people around the world. And of course the likes of the Huffington Post and many others and the Guardian paid content and so on that I like to listen to. We're all connected. And in the end what it comes down to is how many connections do you have that are meaningful, not how many garbage connections you have of anybody in the world that wants to connect to you. So this is of course really important to build a brand. Quality of connections. Don't take people that are not a fit with you where you don't really know where they are. Select who they are. On the next page you can see the result of my workers that people are giving me online recommendations which mean a lot more than any book I've ever written. So if you go to the link then you check out my name G Leonhardt. You look at my profile you can see 150 recommendations from my clients and you know that somewhat 150 people can't all lie at the same time. So you take this more serious because it's public right. My stuff is being reviewed publicly. This is crucial to a brand is to be transparent to be open. If somebody says that your slides suck then you fix them. Has happened to me. I did it. And I'm always collecting this guy in Moscow. His name is I think Zoran and he sent me lots of input about my slides for free basically telling me what I should change to make it better. So people have done that. And so I have improved marginally as you can tell in these slides. But these recommendations are crucial. On the next slide you see my LinkedIn network does currently 2,500 or so. I don't talk to all the people at the same time of course. But again connectivity is crucial. Through those people I have a connectivity of 2 degrees away, 6 in the 12,000 people and 3 degrees away, 12 million people. So if I want to talk to the CEO of NBC I can get a recommendation from somebody on LinkedIn. And this is crucial about making those connections. Took me 10 years to build them because again I'm collecting people. You see on the next page in these slides you see what people are saying about me on Twitter. Which is now public. So you can check me out on Twitter and you can say you want to get this guy to come and talk to your nut. It's all completely out in the open. And that's the way that you should market yourself going forward immediately mobile interactive transparent. Next slide shows you sort of an illustration of my LinkedIn network. Looks a bit like a fish here but it's like basically thousands of different connections that I have through people. So if I want to find something, if I want resources, I want recommendations. If I go to Singapore I'm looking for a restaurant. I don't have to go to Google. I can just ask my friends and my connections on LinkedIn. This has a lot to do with branding because in the end it's those other people that will amplify your brand and recommend you for work. And that's basically how it works. 81% of all transactions on the web and otherwise as well, which is word of mouth, are being done through others. So we're buying stuff. We're hiring people. We're doing all this stuff because of recommendation of others. We're not doing it because we read a fact sheet or owner's manual. So creating a magnetic brand is crucial whether you're a musician or a writer or a producer or whatever you are. A magnetic brand means you're so interested and you do so good work that you attract people by your work. You don't have to advertise and yell at them and tell them to come over. For example, a magnetic brand clearly is YouTube. You've never seen any signs on the side of the road saying use YouTube to watch videos. This is not needed because people are telling each other already the same thing. So this is a real magnetic brand. For example, also Harley Davidson, Southwest Airlines, Virgin and so on. Those in Apple of course, those are brands that sell themselves. So that's basically what branding is all about. And personal branding is in my view also heading in this direction. I hope you enjoyed this short episode of Gertube. Check out mediafuturist.com and Twitter G Leonhardt. Thanks for listening. Bye.