Feels like I’ve got clarity and opened my eyes. Last week I finished reading the book Game by Neil Strauss. A sort of introduction manual to the world of Pick-Up-Artists and the social game of people. I found it very inspiring, especially from a social and communication view. How people work and act in social context. And I have though about that ever sense I started reading the book… That it all boils down to basically, who to market your self. This is important in many aspect, and people do it with out thinking about it. But if you’re aware of it, the chances will increase to be more successful.
I constantly think of how I market myself professionally in my work. To define what I want to work with, investing much of my freetime in that area and show it. A great example is this blog. One of the reasons I started it was to promote myself and my knowledge, accessible to everyone with a internet connection. And its a media form I strongly recommend to people, and to actively work with their self marketing process. To analyse one self, that’s my goals, strengthens and weaknesses. With that in mind, you have a better start when working with promoting yourself.
And blog is a wounderful form to do it. Easy, free and accessible! But if you start doing it, you have to (with everything) love what you do and it should come natural. You can’t force yourself to write if you don’t have the interest. I wouldn’t have my current job, if it weren’t for my actively blog writing and studying of Search Engine Marketing on my free time. A good example why I recommend people to work harder with new media like blogs and constantly updated with all the news in the fields that interest you! I scanned a few web pages on the subject Self Marketing, and the discussed many things like appearance and self-confidence, which is important to, but in my view only a small piece of the whole picture. But a good think to keep in mind, always be aware of what you publish when working with blogs, and how it will be viewed in others eyes.
I’ve heard many sceptical people on the subject of blogs. “Who reads them?”, “Aren’t they just filled with personal bullshit about uninteresting people?”. Yes there are lots of blogs about flat out shit, but people have trouble to understand the things with blogs in my experience. For me a blog is sort of a framework, webpage’s with technical features that makes them easy to work with. The hard question and work with a blog is what you write. A blog is really just the hardware, the platform, and you create the content. And the content is the only thing that matters! For example, I have laid out rules for my self not to write to personal things in my blog, and constantly think once or twice about what I write. That’s not to say I write strictly academic texts, my self as a person have to shine through. A mistake I made in the beginning. It have to feel like there’s a person behind the keyboard. But to me it’s a tool for my personal marketing, and a place to display my knowledge and store it, so I don’t forget. 
It’s just a matter of how you work with the medium.
The basic principle of Marketing are useful in many aspect of life. To analyse a situation or problem, and figure out the best approach. For example, when you want to hit on a nice girl on party’s or when your out. What are the condition of the situation, how do you wanna sell yourself and your image to her. Whats your Unique Selling Points? And instead of analysing the market (which you do in a way), you study the social situation, and adapt. And that’s one thing discussed in The Game, to be able and adapt to the situation when meeting new people. But I still believe its important to still stay true to yourself, and not become someone your not, or at least to a certain degree.
[Update]
By some strange reason, all my most creative thoughts come when I’m going to sleep at night (ench the reason why I’m often tired…). Last night I lay and remembered many things I forgot to discuss in this post, so I simply update it now.
One of the bigger points I wanted to stretch out, was the notion of working with your self as a brand! And what do I mean by that? Simply that the same principles for creating and maintaining a strong brand, can be translated and used on your self. You are your own brand, with value in the same sense as corporate brands. And who are you then? My view is that your brand value is the sum of your experience, moral valuation and knowledge. I might have forgotten something, but what the heck… The point is that it’s your job to work with yourself to increase or just maintain a high personal brand value.
And a personal brand, again like a corporate brand, will have different value or reference, depending of other people’s eyes or views. Everybody have some kind of relationship with a brand. Love it, hate it, don’t know it or something else, the variations are limitless. Even if people don’t recognise your brand, that’s a relationship to it (the most easy one to change). And the same can be said about your own relationship to other people. This is reason I mention the importance to adapt, to read the situation and people around to sell your brand in the best way. Here’s another similarity, corporations and marketers want people to have a good felling and relationship with their brand, to remember it and buy it again and again. Almost create an addictive feeling. They don’t say it flat out, but that’s their dream! And that feeling are the same you hopefully want people you meet to have. To remember you with a positive memory, and a feeling of talking more to you. That feeling Neil Strauss talk about in his book, to get the girls to want you more.
As with any market, everybody struggle towards being the leader, to dominate the market. Again the same can be said about people and groups. I can only speak from my view as a guy, but isn’t everyone in someway trying to be the alpha male (= market leader?). The one people remember and talk about, hopefully in a positive way. People look up to that person (brand) and want to be that guy. Sometimes described as a trendsetter that constantly ahead of the others who blindly follow. And here as with the rest of the world, there are many different markets. Different segments and nisched markets that require the ability to read the situation and adapt. When I read The Game, it often felt like many of the techniques and theories he presented could be linked to basic marketing theories.