Marci Alboher, the online career columnist for the New York Times, has a great thread on self-promotion. Start with this posting on her blog and then go backwards.  Don’t forget to read her NYT columns, titled, "Selling Yourself By Showing Yourself, In a Good Way" and "Tools and Tips for to Create Buzz Around Your Ideas" that started the discussion.

As a solopreneur, self-promotion comes with the territory if you want to eat. I call it visibility, publicity, "getting out in the world."

I’ve also seen how self-promotion is not only appropriate but necessary as an employee. How can you be of greatest service to an organization if they don’t know who you are and what you can do?

My other random thoughts on self-promotion:

• If you are worried about being too pushy, vain, or obnoxious in talking about your work, you probably have nothing to fear. The people who give self-promotion a bad name are the ones who don’t have any of these worries on their radar screen.

• The crucial question around self-promoting is this: "Self-promotion in service of what?" I know. It sounds pretty obvious.  But when we get down to what it looks like to do this in a genuine way, it comes down to service. How am I using my gifts? In service of what?  Helping others?  Promoting a cause?  Getting a message across?

• People can sense whether you have good intentions for tooting your own horn. So get over it.  Become big in the world. I wrote an article, titled "How Big Will You Dare to Be?" that expands on this idea.  Really, you don’t have time to waste, waiting for someone to give you permission to be as big as you can be.

I’m curious as to what this posting has triggered in you, what self-promotion Gremlins are lurking close by.  Let me know your thoughts.