I picked up Gary Vaynerchuk's new book "Crush It!". I had the pleasure of seeing Gary give a presentation at FOWA Miami and the man can totally get you pumped up. So I really wanted to get this book to understand more about what drives him and if it's something that can help me in my professional and personal life.

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The main premise of the book revolves around building your brand, something that I've been working hard on for some time. Yes, I have a brand and it's called "Rey Bango". This is why every account I create on social networking sites and even the domain name of my site is based on my name. In reading through the chapters, it was cool to be able to identify the things that I had already done and if anything, the book served to as reassurance that I was thinking along the same lines as someone very successful in brand building.

While I did like the book as a whole, the biggest value for me came after chapter 6 when he discusses about cultivating your community and ensuring authenticity in your approach. Much of what he discussed resonated with me because of the efforts I've made in helping to build the jQuery community as well as building my personal network of professionals. I especially liked his focus on maintaining authenticity & transparency with your community (i.e.: keep it real).

Prior to that, the information wasn't very useful to me mainly because it focused on things I had already done to build my brand. If you're just getting started on that though, I do feel that every chapter can be extremely helpful in understanding how to build awareness about you and your passion.

This is the first book I've read in a long time where I genuinely didn't put it down from the moment I started reading it. It's a short read (~150 pages) and I finished it in a day but it was well-worth the purchase. I'd say that anyone who is genuinely interested in raising their profile and building their brand should pick up this book. Don't expect it to be a step-by-step tutorial with a lot of hand holding but do expect some good examples of what you can do and a decent explanation of the tools you can leverage to build your brand.

