Personal Branding means narrowing your audience from “just everyone” to the people most likely to respond to your message. It means remaining focused while your competition markets to everyone with a pulse.

The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.

Last month, we discussed the basic underpinnings of positioning, that cornerstone of personal marketing that creates an indelible image of you in your prospect’s mind. However, we understand that to many people (including some advertising professionals), positioning is still a hazy concept. So we’re going to show you, step-by-step, how to create an exploit your powerful, unique marketing position.

Because it is meant to look fun, putting together a social media campaign – or integrating one into a larger online initiative – can be surprisingly difficult. There are many challenges to capturing and engaging user interests online – starting with finding the right person to lead that effort, says Andrew Ballenthin, president of Sol Solutions.

That point was driven home last December when Ballenthin put together Blog-Off II, a 12-day, seven-judge contest to test participants’ qualitative and quantitative effectiveness in social media marketing fundamentals.