Christmas has arrived and I wish everyone a fantastic holiday break. Hopefully you are surrounded my friends and family. If you’re browsing for something to read this crisp, food-filled day, I recommend the following posts. Cheers!

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Reboot Your Morning Routine - The Night Before

Start Your Day with Mental Stretches

How to Make and Keep New Year’s Resolutions - Bonus 10 Easy Goals for 2008

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Effective marketing is based largely upon strong brand recognition. A service, product, etc. must make the potential customer aware of its benefits in a pleasant manner, in order to become enlisted for use. The same things can be said for a professional in the job market.

Let’s make a few notes about Countrywide Financial, and see how these qualities would pan out for someone in the workforce. Shall we? Yes, let’s do just that.

• Tarnished and rapidly dwindling reputation
• Financial hardship
• Incessant self-promotion
• Annoying representation
• Poor explanation of offerings

All of the above are true in the public’s opinion, and I believe we can learn valuable lessons from these 5 points. As I mentioned earlier, it would be wise to analyze how Countrywide would fair as another body in the workforce. Without further adieu…

When reputation is damaged and down, it’s critical that it be restored as much as possible and in swift fashion. Countrywide continues to make little effort in the area of damage control and would have a heck of a time trying to get re-hired after clearly accepting being fired, tarred, and feathered. This of course, has a direct impact on income. No paycheck means no money in reserves and well, no-one wants to be there very long.

Let’s say, for the sake of this contrast, they got their act together and managed to pull a few strings for an interview with a respectable business. Countrywide has a week until the appointment but continues to call 50-100 times a day, sometimes one after another, and consistently repeating the same lines about how great they are. Can you imagine how annoying that would be?

Many of us don’t need to imagine because we already have to deal with the constant t.v. spots with a severely annoying yes-man telling us about zero this, zero that, zero THIS, ZERO THAT…but no real substance as to why they’re supposedly the best thing since sliced bread. In the end, Countrywide gets fired before they’re hired.

Now, I assume you do not want to be fired before you’re hired. So, take some time to reflect on marketing you find to be ineffective and annoying. Mull them over in your mind and determine what exactly about the turns you off. I guarantee those points can be related to the workplace and will provide great insight into how to properly brand one’s self in the public workplace.
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Update: The Motley Fool feels the same way I do…

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I want to go out on a limb here and quickly post something that has been sitting on my mind for a while now. In this day and age of “web 2.0″, Googleism, IPOs, and such, there are thousands upon thousands of self-proclaimed “web experts”, “search marketers” and “next door millionaires” coming out of the digital woodwork. Very, very few are actually worth their weight in salt and it can make sifting through the blogs of wannabes, well… extremely annoying to say the least.

Materialism is something ingrained with the hoity-toity crowd but boy does it ever show on the web. In a digital environment where anyone can be anything they want, flashy self-promotion runs rampant. I’m tired of so-called “experts” dishing out the same junk, over and over, and you should be too.

Why am I saying all this? It’s because the superficial identities of those who wish to be online superstars because they can’t in real life, parallels with the real-world workplace. More often than not, the happiest, most successful people are humble intellectuals who shy away from any form of pseudo celebrity status.

If your goal is to be successful (however you personally define it), then focus on the hard work and dedication it takes to get there. Name-dropping at conferences where third-rate lazies self-congratulate each other, doesn’t move forth towards worthwhile goals.

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