Dan Schawbel’s title suggests reinvention, but it’s really about refining one’s identity (and the perception of it) to align with who you are and what you do.
He presents a very detailed and comprehensive guide to employing a full arsenal of mostly online tools — including social networking — to develop a public persona that will enable you to be the go-to person for your area of expertise. In addition, he provides a very thoughtful set of self-assessments and bullet points for evaluating and acting upon the appropriate combination of tactics to ensure that top attention is paid.
Much of what he writes may be obvious to regular (and mature) participants of social networking sites, though it’s also a brave (and cowardly) new world out there, and the risk of tainting one’s reputation and poisoning the well in other ways has increased exponentially, at the very least. But Schawbel also throws in a bunch of fundamental tips for career development and life in general that make his book a valuable one-stop source of practical wisdom. Richard Pachter, McClatchy Newspapers
