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[Rhea Thomas]

Community
• Remember that community and marketplace are two different things.
• Make your site and your efforts heavily about other people. It comes back.
• Make it easy for your community to reach you.
• Contribute to your community’s blogs and projects.
• Thank people often for their time and attention.
• Celebrate important information in your community (like birthdays).
• Be human. Always.
• Your community knows more than you. Ask them questions often.
• Apologize when you mess up. Be very sincere.
• Treat your community like gold. Never subject them to a third party of any kind without their consent.
• Knowing more about your competitors’ communities is a useful thing, too. Learn who visits, why they visit, and how they interact.
• Measuring your efforts in building community grows out your brand as a natural extension.

[Rhea Thomas]

Face to Face
• Have simple, useful, crisp business cards to share. Always.
• Be confident in person.
• Clothes and appearance DO matter. WIsh they didn’t, but they do.
• Have a very brief introduction / elevator pitch and practice it often.
• Ask questions of people you meet. Get to know them.
• Don’t seek business relationships right off. Instead, seek areas of shared interest.
• Know when to walk away politely.
• Don’t try to meet everyone in a room. Meet a half dozen or more great new people.
• Never doubt that you are worth it.
• If you’re terribly shy, consider finding a “wing man” for events.
• Doing homework ahead of time (finding people’s most recent blog posts, googling them, etc) helps one feel “in the know.”
• Make eye contact. It’s MUCH more powerful than you know.

[Rhea Thomas]

Promotion
• Use Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Google Reader to drive awareness.
• Promote others even more than you promote yourself
• Bragging isn’t useful to anyone besides your own ego
• Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people
• Don’t digg/stumble/link every single post. Save it for your very best
• Another promotional tool: guest blog on other sites
• Another promotion tool: make videos on YouTube with URL links
• Another promotion tool: use the status section of LinkedIn and Facebook
• Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.
• Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it.

You probably have some great ideas to add to this. I’d love to hear what you want to add, or feel free to blog your own list and add value to the project that way. In any case, I hope this was helpful, and I wish you great success in your efforts to brand yourself and show the world what a rockstar you are.