What Is Lance Up To These Days?

It’s 2:00 AM and the blinking cursor on my blog entry page is taunting me.

My wife Jen, who got home from work at 10:00pm, went to bed two hours ago. She thinks I am nuts.

My office desk is littered with scribbled notes, various forms of caffeine delivery and a CD I finally took out of the player because it had repeated five times.

I’ve been sending and responding to e-mails all day, on and off the phone and just popped out a guest post for another blog.

This is what I do now and I love it. It has been a crazy couple of months.

The most frequent questions I’ve gotten since I started my new job are what is MeritBuilder, what am I doing for them and how hard was it to abandon day to day HR work? I am putting it all out there. Full disclosure, right?

What is MeritBuilder?

MeritBuilder is a personal branding platform that anyone can use to collect accolades and achievements. Sound simplified? Good.

So imagine for a second that you are a career professional and you hear the hype about building your personal brand (especially online) so that you can actually be recognized for the work you do. Smart move. Time to do something. But get this:

1. You don’t want to blog about work. Maybe you don’t like blogging or you’d rather write about kittens or football.
2. You want to use your Facebook to communicate with your friends. You’d rather not open it up and try to build your brand that way.
3. Twitter is cool but it is hard to get a feel for a brand 140 characters at a time.
4. Setting up a personal website? Sure. As long as you don’t have a popular name and you want to maintain it and keep it up to date (look at mine, it is destitute).
5. One of those online resume services might work but you’re not necessarily looking for a job.

So you can build a profile at MeritBuilder and have people give you feedback in an environment that specifically designed for the purpose of building a positive profile about yourself. And the best part (at least to me) is that companies can incorporate this technology to build an effective employee recognition program that helps employees and enhances the company’s brand organically through the praises of co-workers, managers, customers and vendors.

Okay, Okay, We Get It. So What Do You Do?

So I head up outreach for MeritBuilder. That means I get to talk to people about our product. A lot. Social media? Check. E-mailing? Check. On the phone? Check. In person? Check. I talk to our development team about what potential clients are dying for and what they aren’t so hot on. I work on the way the company presents itself to all of you. So I get to talk about employee engagement, employee incentives and company culture all day.

What does that mean for the audience here? Not much. Except you get a post like this once a blue moon and I probably won’t be talking about competitors (just makes things easier). This isn’t turning into an employee engagement and personal branding blog though. Look at the last few posts. That’s what this blog does best.

People have also asked me how they can help me in my new postion. I’ve got to admit, these people rock. So what can you do?

1. Try out the product and give me honest feedback about it. I can hook you up with the paid standard edition just for giving it a try (just contact me after you sign up for the free version).
2. If you are a company that is intrigued, I can get you a better look at what the corporate product looks like. No hard sell or anything like that. We’re looking for companies to partner up with that make sense while we continue to gather feedback from our corporate customers.
3. If you like the product and you have a blog, Facebook, Twitter or whatever word of mouth reach you can muster, spread the good word and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Going from a startup with little brand awareness to something that people start recognizing becomes less about me and more about how we can spread the word organically through our fans.

Moving On From Day-To-Day HR

I’ve got a post I am working on that I don’t want to spoil about this topic but I wanted to throw this out there. Moving on from day-to-day HR was actually an incredibly difficult decision. I know the work is difficult but it is also incredibly rewarding when done right. And taking myself out of the mode that I’ve been in for the last five to six years? I’m still working on it and it isn’t easy.

That being said, it is an awesome change of pace. And there is a reason I am staying close to HR people. You all rock and I want to continue to be a part of the grand conversation.

Tagged as: career in transition, career transition, hr, meritbuilder, my awesome readers, my new job