Be the face of your brand. Your customers do want to learn about you as a person, so they make a real connection. Sure, you want them to like your brand, but you want them to fall in love with you.

Richard Branson does this best. He’s intimately connected with the Virgin brand, and his personality drives the brand. If Branson wrote a blog, you could believe he was writing it himself, couldn’t you? Can you think of any CEO of a large organisation who has that sort of personal credibility? Heck, can you even think of any other CEO of a large organisation at all who does anything for their brand apart from the occasional media statement?

All the new Internet tools are personal tools: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, MySpace. They’re designed to show a personality – your personality. They’re powerful marketing tools, but they shouldn’t be used only for marketing your business. They’re just as important for marketing you.

Amazon.com, Apple and Facebook are brands in their own right, so they don’t need Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg to show up on their Web sites.
But your Web site is different. Your face is your brand, so show it! For example:

• Write in a friendly, informal manner.
• Show your photo on your home page.
• Publish your e-mail address.
• Tell people how to follow you (you, not your business) on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Publish a blog to share your thoughts.

This is one area where we in small business have a huge advantage over large organisations. Most large organisations don’t have a personality, they have a brand. Even people with personality aren’t allowed to show it, in case it harms the brand image. So you end up with bland, not brand.

That’s why it’s rare to see a large organisation using these new Internet marketing tools well. Imagine a big bank asking its customers to follow them on Twitter. Even if they convinced us it’s not a cynical marketing exercise that’s just paying lip service to the new technology, how would it work?

• Would it be the bank’s CEO sending the Twitter messages?
• Would they respond to customer complaints?
• Would they take up an issue on your behalf and get it resolved?
• Would they be allowed to criticise the bank?
• Would they engage in real conversations (as opposed to corporate speak)?
• Would they truly engage with individuals (as opposed to just sending marketing messages)?

As small business owners, we have – or should have – a relationship with our customers. They know us, they trust us, they know what football team we support and they know where our kids go to school.

This is not about you knowing what football team they support or where their kids go to school. You might know that, and some salespeople are taught to connect with their customers at that level. But this is the other way around: You’re giving them an insight into you, which is a completely different thing altogether.

If you’re uncomfortable with that, get over it! You shouldn’t share every aspect of your personal life with your customers. And you should definitely think about your privacy and security when you choose to share with people outside your family and close friends. But be willing to show a bit of personality, so they can connect with you as a person.

Dr. Gary Canton, a professor of applied nuclear physics and energy-development technologies at MIT and a leading expert in American nuclear-power applications, was rejected by MSNBC producers for being “too boring for TV” Monday.

“We could deal with Dr. Canton being so short …. And we could’ve made him up so he didn’t look like he spends all day in front of a computer. We even considered cutting away to stock footage so our audience didn’t have to look at him for too long. But when it turned out that listening to him is about as interesting as picking the lint off his lapels—well, there was nothing we could do about that.”

Now it turns out this is from the satirical newspaper The Onion! However, it does raise an important point: It’s no longer enough to just be an expert. To be an authority, you need to be quotable and memorable as well.

I think there are now two kinds of e-book: The “special report” kind and the legitimate “electronic alternative to print” kind.

I used to tell people to only focus on the first kind: the specialised, single-topic, high-content, niche-market e-book that might be more of a booklet (Paradoxically, though, you could sometimes charge more than you would if it was a printed book).

But now that e-readers have gone mainstream (e.g. Amazon.com recently sold more e-book than print versions of its top-selling titles), we should also start thinking of the second kind of e-book – i.e. something that’s identical to the print version, but lighter, cheaper to produce, friendlier to the environment, faster to market, cheaper to buy, delivered instantly and in virtually unlimited supply. I’ve recently started buying books this way, and it’s a trend that’s going to grow world-wide.