Yet another great post from Thinking Aloud, a thoughtful and interesting blog by Inaki Escudero. So good in face that we're not only linking to it, but we're straight-up copying it here. (Although obviously, we're giving him full-throttle credit.)

On personal branding ...

6 great questions to ask yourself. And you should be prepared to answer.

I interview a lot of creative professionals: Art directors, designers, copywriters, interactive designers, developers, planners and strategists, producers and I even get to talk to account people.

In most cases I don't follow the "resume-driven" script. I much rather look for non scripted answers. I look for the real drivers, the human needs not just needing a job.

I honestly love interviewing candidates, but most of the times I'm left with a dissapointed feeling. I think people for the most part don't prepare well for an interview.

This is more tragic when we think that in advertising, branding is the most important concept one must understand.

Personal branding, just like corporate branding is mostly about differentiation and to be substantially different is about knowing yourself.

I thought that I could help potential candidates by providing a list of questions, which answers could help you during the process of branding yourself:

• What value are you working on?
• What do you do to build, manage and maintain your network?
• If I Google you, what will I find?
• What is the last thing you created?
• What do you do to expose yourself to new ideas and new thinking on a regular basis?
• What keeps you awake at night? 
• What's your goal?

Your brand has a lot of competitors out there, make sure that your stand for something else than money, titles and ego driven awards.

For all of you 'classic' David Ogilvy-esque copywriters out there, you may be running into today's challenges of form vs. function. Here's a great article about how a balance of fluff and findability is shifting the power towards search and social.

Our favorite section of the article is this below. Click below to read the full article.

At first I was skeptical, borderline insulted. But when I saw how a slight tweak to my text would make my page views skyrocket, I became a convert. Now, instead of organizing my thoughts into pithy paragraphs for readers, I engineer my words so they’re algorithmically attractive. I rewrite my headlines to make them more enticing to Google. I tag them with dozens of relevant phrases to boost my authority on specific topics. I add search terms to my text to further optimize my SEO ranking. I admit that I don’t totally understand what that last sentence even means.

Here Are The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This:

1.    It has changed the way I write. If a bulleted listicle is proven to perform better than a well-crafted essay, I’m going to write the listicle.

2.   My headlines are noticeably less interesting than they used to be. But, as an editor once told me, clever headlines are dead, unless you’re The New York Post.

3.   After I publish a story, I spend an hour feeding it to social networks and aggregators when I should be writing the next piece. That doesn’t even count the hours spent composing the perfect social media haikus that serve as the lead-ins to my links. It’s reducing my per-word rate to pennies.

4.    I stay up at night worrying about how many people will tweet my as-yet-unpublished story. Add to that the endless perusing of other people’s Twitter streams to see what they’re reading and writing about and where my work can fit into the conversation.

5.    I wonder if I’m still a writer, or if I’m a content creator.

Read full article here: The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline, by Alissa Walker from Good Magazine.

It's not shocking to say this, but once again Bart Cleveland is right on point.

Ad Professionals Should Spend Less Time Remembering When
We Work in a Change Industry, so Start Acting Like It
By: Bart Cleveland Published: March 10, 2011

From AdAge.com. Original article and comments here.

Our industry is all about change. At least, we say we are. We say we believe in creating the next great wave of advertising. If that is so, we should take a look at the evidence.

Do we take risks and inspire?
Maybe not. There's a lot of the same ol', same ol' still being offered as fresh thinking. Perhaps because we are too afraid of losing what we have left to risk it all for something better. Regardless of whether it's from a lack of belief -- or apathy or laziness -- we are squandering a great opportunity to lead. If we believe we are the agents of change, we must change ourselves as well. Like Gen. George Patton, we need to attack without worrying about our flanks. We're moving forward too fast for the enemy to catch us. By the time they realize what we're up to, we're kicking them in the backside.

Are our recommendations relevant to our client's objectives?
A better question might be, do we know our client's business objectives? How deep are you delving into your client's world, both internally and externally? The more an agency understands the business goals of a client and the obstacles keeping them from success, the better marketing principles can be applied to removing obstacles and achieving those goals. You will also become much more important in the eyes of your clients, not to mention trustworthy.

Organize the toolbox. Get rid of the gimmicks.
Today the marketing landscape is more confusing for advertisers than ever. The toolbox is filled with new gadgets that are being misused. There's a lot of snake oil being peddled and we agencies should be showing the right way for our clients to go. That necessitates knowing the way.

Innovate integration.Perhaps a lack of conviction is why clients are showing less loyalty than ever. Integration is the new buzzword, but its implementation is a contradiction in most cases. My agency refers to it as the "jungle." A tangled mess of tactics that in most cases, work against one another to create a consistent brand story. Integration is an evolving method. There's room for innovation in how to use it to get the best results. Those that do so early are going to lead our industry for the foreseeable future.

A little over-the-horizon looking should come as second nature to an industry that prides itself on having the pulse of "what's next." Instead, we seem to cling to "remember when." Take a look at what you're offering your clients. Is it advertising? For your sake, I hope not.

We will definitely read this, although we might not write about it here. But we couldn't stop laughing when we saw the pairing of the article title on AdAge and the photo of the author. Do not look directly into his eyes.