Agents manage people’s career. If you have lots of money you have someone manage your career for you and continue to grow the buzz. If you do not have the excess cash, you have to do it yourself, which means there is a good chance no one is making your career their priority.

This week, if you want to become your own agent, David Lorenzo has said I can give away one of his books per day. Career Intensity

All you have to do is be the first person to email me your name, mailing address and phone. I will forward it to Dave and he will drop a copy in the mail. My email is ron@buzzoodle.com

Your workforce probably contains some ordinary divas. The question is, what do you do about them?.

First, what is an Ordinary Diva?

This is the employee in an organization that thinks they are doing the organization a favor by working for it. These people are not to be confused with the real divas.

What is a Real Workplace Diva:

• Irreplaceable
• High Profile, face of company
• Creativity drives product development
• Pays for themselves many times over with the value they add

What are the traits of an Ordinary Diva:

• Strong sense of entitlement
• Belief they cannot be replaced even though they can
• Complain to their friends because they are not appreciated at work
• Point out organizational flaws but do not step up to be part of the solution
• Always think they should be paid more despite ROI saying otherwise
• Causes moral problems with the teams they are on

A real workplace diva may be worth the headaches to make happy and manage because they provide a real value to the organization. Ordinary Divas in the workplace are just going to drag down moral, create negative buzz and hurt the organization over the long haul.

Depending on the severity of the divatude of the person, you may choose to work with them or simply move on and replace them. If you find that many people develop this attitude over time, it may be a good time to take a closer look at your workplace culture and ask yourself what is causing it.

One powerful way to create buzz for your organization is get to know people that speak and network often. Then provide these people with great (and I mean great) examples that help illustrate what they speak about. And let them know if it OK for them to use you as an example.

Speakers are often wracking their brains to find good, easy to understand examples that will help them illustrate a business point and show how someone can be successful.

I talk about other people all the time in my examples. I am always on the look out for new fodder. I know other speakers are too.

About 6 months ago I did a free speech for a chamber of commerce.

That led to a paid series of speaking engagements to a school system.

Tonight I am preparing to go and speak to a class on administrative management for public entities at the Masters level in a University. It is at the request of two people that saw the paid speech I did. Will I walk away with a contract tonight? Of course not, but I might plan the seed in these people that I am the guy to call for creating buzz and stronger community ties. Since I know some of them already have jobs in cities and schools, it may or may not result in additional opportunities.

Speaking Engagements are a great way to create buzz. One just seems to lead to another.

Get a FREE copy of Career Intensity. The book that is your roadmap to career success.

I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of the book, and David Lorenzo has said he will give away a few books to people that I specify deserve it. I get to make up the contest.

Since his book has a chapter about creating personal buzz, and that is my favorite topic, that is the contest.

Post in the comment section of this blog post a short story of some buzz you created at some point in your career for yourself that resulted in a positive change in your career. I will pick the best buzz stories and send your name and address to Dave (please email me this info so I can get the book to you. My email is ron [at] buzzoodle.com)

I will announce the winners by March 21st.

How often do you check your website traffic stats?

Surprisingly, many business owners put up their website and forget about it.

I have a friend that put up a website and was doing a television show. Some sponsors recently pulled out and the show was cancelled, and she felt the business was going to go under. Then she and I had a meeting on what was going on with her website.

She was surprised to find that she had nearly 100 people signed up for her eNewsletter, her site will get over 2,000 unique visitors this month, and her website traffic has gone up by over 100% in the last two months.

Armed with this knowledge, she is now reworking her business plan to do podcasts, blogging, video webcasts, ecommerce and more to capitalize on this audience she did not even realize she had.

High traffic is a hidden asset if a company has published some valuable information and does not realize how many people are accessing it.

I get a lot of calls from people that want to know more about what we do. If you call about Internet Marketing, SEO, eCommerce you will probably talk to someone smarter than me in our organization. If you call about Buzz or Word of Mouth Marketing, you will find yourself in a long discussion with me.

Many of the callers simply do not have the budget for our services, but I still usually talk for a while. I can rarely hold back the urge to brain storm a bit as well.

Even though sales people probably think I am giving away the farm, I do find there is a big difference between the 2 Minute conversation and the 15 minute conversation. For example:

• I learn a lot more
• I get referrals months later
• I get invitations to speak
• I meet interesting people
• I let myself enjoy talking to the caller and laugh freely
• I talk about cheaper resources they can us, such as books they could read

Those are just some of the things I get out of not screening my calls too severely.

In my opinion, David Lorenzo is doing everything right in marketing his first book, Career Intensity. He is building relationships that will make it a smash success. He also has written a book that will appeal to most professionals, although maybe not the business owners all the time. Empowering employees does have risks, after all.

This will be fun to watch and even more fun to participate in.

Disclosure: I am not being paid by David, but I have agreed to help him promote it because he has gotten to know me over the last year and I like what his book has to say.

Here is an interview I did via email. I got him to talk about his strategy in creating online buzz.

Career Intensity Interview with Dave Lorenzo

This is your first book. What are you doing to create a buzz around its release?

Buzz sells books so I’m doing many traditional things as well as many things that are unique to Web 2.0. We have a terrific publicist promoting the book like crazy to print and trade press, TV and radio but I’m most excited about the things I’m doing on the Internet. The Career Intensity Blog is gaining popularity each day. I also have many friends who blog – like you – who have agreed to read the book and tell their readers what they think about it. If you know any bloggers who want to read the book, let me know.

After the release of the book I’ll be posting podcasts and video on demand on The Career Intensity site. My team is all fired up about the video portion of what we will be doing. We want to make it like Rocketboom for careers. It will probably be a once every couple of weeks to start but we hope it gains momentum and becomes a more frequent thing.

We’re also taking a contingent of people to Book Expo America (BEA) for the official release of the book. BEA is the largest trade show for the book industry in the world and we secured a boot right in the middle of everything. We’ll be doing podcasts and live blogging the whole thing. Who knows which authors will stop by the booth? It will be full of surprises.

We’re literally coming up with new things every day.

How did you come up with the idea for Career Intensity?

I have always been fascinated by success. Throughout my career I have studied successful people so that I could model their behavior. At some point I became a good listener and people began to ask me for career advice.

In writing Career Intensity I just imagined having a conversation with a friend who wanted to “build the perfect career”.

What did the cycle of continuous career improvement come from?

It really came from the conversations I had with superachievers (highly successful people). They all work constantly to assess their current situation, create value and demonstrate value. They do this over and over again.

What about the 4 types of workers you found in society? Where did they come from?

I created these 4 archetype work personalities so that people could understand the challenges (and ultimately the potential) related to just showing up for work everyday. Just showing up and staying with one company for a long time is not enough anymore.

Now everyone needs to think like an entrepreneur – even if you work in a corporate environment. The entrepreneur’s mindset of value-creation is a necessary component for success in today’s business world.

You encourage people to look at themselves as a brand. Why is this necessary?

If you want to achieve your career goals, you need to influence the perception of others. You’re essentially selling yourself everyday – either to customers or to coworkers and your boss. Your brand is the perception others have of you in their minds. You need to understand how you want others to perceive you and then go about creating that perception.

The key is that your brand represents the “true you”. The challenge is to uncover what is great about you and make sure people know about it.

Tell me about creating personal buzz. Why is that important?

Buzz is the ultimate form of advertising. It is powerful and contagious. The challenge for each of us is to get people to talk about us in a positive way.

Because of its personal nature – spreading from one person to another – buzz has a dramatic impact. In the context of your career, you want to create positive buzz and you want it to spread quickly.

I am a bit late on this one, but check out the video of Seth Godin talking to Google. Interesting stuff.

I was talking with Steve Smith today after a presentation of mine he attended. He was telling me about how a start up is signing up people for their text phone pay system. They have an interesting viral effort going on and I am just posting Steve’s email (with permission) to illustrate what they are doing and how they are getting people to sign up. Steve is a Microsoft partner.

——————–

Ron,
Michelle and I enjoyed the presentation this morning, good job! We came away with a few new ideas for our sites and business, so it was definitely worthwhile for us. I hope I didn’t step on your toes at all with my input.
Regarding the TextPayMe thing, it’s an interesting Buzz Marketing technique they are using. They’re basically a startup and they’re getting a very wide number of people to talk about them by giving away XBox 360′s to anybody who can generate 36 leads within a certain time frame. It’s harder than it sounds – I think they will end up giving away about 10 of the systems for the most recent promotion (ending March 18th). So, for $3000 they are getting a tremendous number of referrals and leads.
Personally, I need about 8 more leads to win an XBox. My blog entry about the service is here:
ASP Advice.com Blog

My referral link is:
Text Pay Me

If you’d care to sign up with that link (and anybody else in your office), you get $5 for doing so that you can play with and test out the service (basically let’s you send up to $500 to others via SMS text messaging, which you confirm via a phone callback and a PIN number — it’s like PayPal for phones). Email me a link to anything you post, and I’ll link back to you in a post later today or this weekend.

Thanks,
Steve

PS – Let’s try to meet regarding the text link project some time next week, perhaps we could invite you and Yasir to our office or something.

–
Steven Smith
President, ASPAlliance LLC (aspalliance.com/)
Microsoft Regional Director