I gave a speech earlier this week to the Dayton LinkedIn Group. In the speech, I spoke about some easy ways that individuals can use the web to build their personal brand. One tool I referenced was Squidoo – one of the most useful sites (or grouping of sites) on the web.
Squidoo is a powerful tool for sharing ideas, finding information, and building your personal brand. It is the brainchild of Seth Godin, one of the foremost thinkers in the areas of technology, business, and marketing. The idea is that everyone is an expert at something, and thus should be able to use the web to help others by sharing that expertise. Squidoo enables users to easily create a one page web site, called a lens, full of rich content, links, video, notes, polls, rss feeds, and other interesting items. The beauty of Squidoo is that you don’t have to know anything about writing code to use it, and Google loves it. It is easy to use, and provides in-depth information on hundreds of thousands of topics, and continues to evolve into a powerful research tool.
Well, many moons ago I built a Squidoo lens about me. After all, I fugured that if everyone is supposed to be an expert at something, I should be the foremost expert on the subject of me. It was up on the web for a while, but then I became dissatisfied with it. As a result I took the site down for a makeover. Then, as happens, I got side tracked with other things, and the lens sat dormant.
Well, after giving my speech, there was a huge interest amongst those who attended in Squidoo. Most had never heard of it, and many curious people have since emailed me for more information. All of this reminded me that I still need to bring back the lens about me – and so I did. View it here or by visiting http://www.squidoo.com/davidebowman. The lens was very easy to put together, and offers the world a different look at me and some of my work.
They recently rebranded the “people” section of Squidoo – giving it the clever moniker of SquidWho. Check it out, and let me know what you think. Then, start building your own lenses. Share your expertise with the world.
Some other lenses I have built include:
Dayton Weblogs – which I need to update
The Epilepsy Foundation of Western Ohio – a work in progress
