I have noticed a few authors who have been taking advantage of the nature of the internet and blogs to launch their books, and Rohit Bhargava is the latest. He has offered a five question interview with him and 57 bloggers have taken him up on the offer - that means 285 questions which took him 10 hours to answer! I’m sure it was well worth it though

I was actually going to interview Rohit anyway because he has has a fantastic blog on marketing, advertising and PR. He leads the interactive marketing team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and prior to that was Executive Producer of the interactive team at Leo Burnett in Sydney, Australia. He blogs at Influential Marketing Blog.

Today Rohit is launching his new book Personality Not Included, which Timothy Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek describes “Personality Not Included breaks down the old barriers between marketing, advertising, and PR and shows you how to nail the single objective of it all: creating powerful conversations with your customers and getting them to choose you over the rest.

You have posted over 500 articles to your blog over the past few years and obviously the blog has been the main element of your personal branding. More recently people have been spreading themselves and their content over more and more social networks. Moving forward to the next 12-24 months do you think a central blog will still be necessary or will people spend more time on other platforms that they don’t fully control?

I think the personal blog will continue to be important for the main reason that I think it represents an evolution from the social network profile. As an example, I think that there are many active members of message boards who have evolved to starting their own blogs as a more ownable space to share their opinions. I think that’s the next stage that many active social networkers will reach. Do you need both? No - but I think they will be coexisting for a long time.

The big ticket item in the new personal branding toolkit is the Social Media Bio. Yours can be found here. What do you think are the most important elements to include and if it is meant to replace your resume what is the best way to promote it?

Good question - I think the days of the two page PDF resume are definitely over. I’m not sure I would ever hire anyone who just had that as their core identity online anymore (of course, I’m probably in an industry that demands more social media saavy). I think the most important thing you can include is a bigger picture idea of yourself than just the courses you studied, the job titles you had and a couple of personal interests at the bottom of a page. What makes you a potential employee that would stand out among others? If you were being put next to another several candidates who had the same education, and similar experience - what would make you different? That’s the best way to think about how to have your personal brand online. The Social Media Bio I created is one template. Others come from services like a new site called VisualCV or even LinkedIn’s updated personal brand friendly profile structure. Next week I will also be publishing another piece of bonus content around the book that should share even more useful information in this area.

From a marketers perspective each social media platform is another marketing channel, and most brands are trying to keep on top of a few. I was just watching Gary Vaynerchuk at WineLibraryTV and he lists Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, LinkedIn, Youtube, Myspace and of course his own network Cork’d. Your blog sidebar lists Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Technorati, delicious, and many more. How can a single person keep on top of all the conversations in their slice of the web?

This is a great question, because it speaks to the idea of overload. Namely, with that many networks, you simply can’t pay attention to all of them. So what will usually happen is you will break out your use into two categories and this is what I have done. I have some sites that I consider utilities and I use them all the time. For me, those would be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr. All other sites fall into a category of what I would call presence or visibility … these are the sites that I have signed up for, have a profile on, but don’t tend to use all the time.

You have already shared how to use blogs for personal branding in your post Using Blogs for Personal Marketing. If you were talking to a startup who had absolutely no web presence and they wanted to get started online what are the first steps you would suggest they take?

I think it’s almost a no-brainer these days that having a blog associated with a startup is a great way to share the process of starting a new business and inviting people in to collaborate with you. When you have a platform like this, people can follow your new business, find ways to participate and you can share a running commentary that is really impossible in most other venues … so having a blog would be my most common recommendation. The other element of this is that you need to have a destination online where people can learn more about your business and how to get involved in it. If I read your question right, the startup doesn’t have a website yet … so that would be key as well.

I have seen more and more books launching with a big dose of internet marketing. You mentioned on your blog that you used a very similar process to Tim Ferriss (who wrote about it at Noah Kagan’s OKDork) to actually get the publishing deal, but I’m curious about the next step. Tim didn’t really do any book tours or signings, but spent the time networking with bloggers and doing lots of podcast interviews to reach a huge amount of people.

Ryan Allis recently launched his book, rallying a team of internet marketing affiliate guys to bundle a massive list of free gifts and promote the book to their lists with the aim to flood Amazon with orders on the launch day and rise to the top of the best-seller list (he got to #2). How are you planning to expand your book launch online?

Already I’ve seen:

• Your 57 blogger interviews
• The “25 & $200 book launch” facebook group
• The personality project
• The various social network presences
• Is there more?

You’ve already listed lots of great activity here and actually, Tim’s story does offer some great lessons and I owe him quite a bit because he helped introduce me to his agent, who I am now with and was integral in helping me to get my book deal. There are a lot of pieces to my marketing strategy online, but it all relates back to a simple premise. I need to convince people that personality matters. It matters for what brands people love versus ones that they just like. It matters for how long you manage to keep employees happy and part of your team. All the elements of my marketing, from the Facebook groups and parties to the blogger interviews are meant to focus on that strategy. If I can do that, then my book is the only solution for individuals, entrepreneurs, marketers and businesspeople on how to find and use their personality to grow their business.

Thanks Rohit. You can buy the book Personality Not Included at Amazon.

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Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by Ross