Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. He's also the bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success and Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.

Don't miss a MarketingProfs podcast, subscribe to our free newsletter!

I invited Dan to Marketing Smarts to talk about personal branding in the age of social media. We also spoke about how managers should approach millennials and how millennials should approach networking.

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation.

Adjust your attitude if you want to improve our prospects: 89% of people fired in their first 18 months on the job are let go because of a poor attitude (05:21): "It's very easy, for the most part, to replace you. So, if you have a job, congratulations, but you can lose that tomorrow…. If you're not in the right position, if you're not happy there, if you don't have a positive attitude based on the environment you're in, it's going to be hard to be successful and you're probably going to be replaced pretty quickly…. It's business. People want to work with people they like. Managers already know who they want to promote before they even...compare two individuals based on what they do, based on their jobs. [Soft skills] are more important than ever before."

Get your high-schoolers on LinkedIn now (seriously) (13:25): "One of the trends I'm looking at is people developing their careers earlier in life. Right now, it takes Millennials to the age of 30...to get an average salary of $42,000, but I think what's going to end up happening is that people are going to have to start getting internships and building their careers in high school. One of the indicators that that could happen sooner rather than later is that, if you're a teenager, you can have a LinkedIn profile. You need to start preparing for your future today."

Work on improving your Klout score, even if you don't think it should matter (20:32): "I was recently hired to do a project because of my Klout, on top of other things, but that was something that they factored in.... They said 'well, we looked at your Klout score and it was high enough for certain categories so we thought you would be influential….' It's a number-driven society, and I think from a marketing aspect people don't have all the time in the world. So, basically, Klout and of the platforms are filters. I'm not going to look at 1,000 profiles to decide who to hire…. Instead, I'm going to use Klout scores to really narrow this down and find the best people in certain topics…. I think that's why people are going to gravitate towards it."

For more information, visit DanSchawbel.com or follow Dan on Twitter: @DanSchawbel.

Dan and I covered a lot more ground, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

...sign up for free to continue reading

Don't miss a MarketingProfs podcast, subscribe to our free newsletter!

Published on January 29, 2014