A tremendous champion of WhyHire.me is Lyle Wetsch at Memorial University in Newfoundland. Lyle is a strong advocate of personal branding and using the web for effective communications and marketing. We got to talking the other day about our respective challenges in the classroom and evangelizing the notion that young, adolescent and post-secondary students today need guidance, education and mentoring when it comes to using the Internet safely, appropriately and professionally. Click to continue
This week the Algonquin PR students and I focused on understanding product branding, personal branding and developing their ‘Positioning Pitch’. In a WhyHire.me profile, students have 350 characters to develop their clear concise message which sets the tone of their personal brand. It should highlight their keywords which could include personality traits, skills, strengths, or values which they discovered in Dig Deep. Additional ingredients for their pitch include a ‘splash’ of proof to provide validity and a target which could be a position, industry, value system, or location they have in mind.
At first it seems easy to write a paragraph but soon into the process I start hearing: ‘this is hard’, ‘I don’t feel comfortable writing about myself this way’ and ‘I really don’t know what makes me unique’. These are initial thoughts that many people have when they start this process. However, it’s so important to put in the time to craft a message that is clear, unique and strong for not only your profile but your overall personal brand which will be used in meetings, interviews, emails, career fairs, resumes and more. Employers want to know what grads have to offer, what makes them different and how they can solve the organization’s business problems.
I look forward to reading their pitches as they start to pop up in our social network and I hope a few of these students will get a chance to use their pitches at the upcoming Algonquin College Career Week (Feb 8-12). Career Week features a job fair and a series of information session and networking opportunities for past and present students to connect with industry.
Amber Naslund, community manager at Radian6 and blogger at Altitude Branding, shared a post today, Social Media is a Co-op. I like her way of thinking.
Two hours earlier, we were the discussing how our learning content at WhyHire.me has to evolve and develop through collaborative partnerships. We do not claim to be experts in everything related to our program. Our team offers great experience in teaching, marketing, coaching, communication tools & approaches and technology development but there are many other pieces to our training that we want to continue to develop and evolve, and we are looking for partners to assist.
So, from Amber’s perspective, I’m starting my co-op. Over the past few weeks, I have been anxiously awaiting Sue Murphy‘s eBook, Creating Video for the Web: Tips, tricks and tools for telling amazing stories. Sue had been thinking of developing an eBook and we have been looking for some fresh and insightful content to share with our students on the subject of producing video for their profiles. Sue is making the content of her eBook available on her website at no charge.
This eBook will be a great new resource for our students. We hope to work with Sue in upcoming months to develop some customized content for our specific application and I will be putting together some new video assignments based on Sue’s content. The co-op starts.
As Amber Naslund states in her post;
“They’ll build social media like a co-op. Driven by a team united voluntarily, toward common goals, and equally invested in the outcomes.
Collaboration is not just a feel-good buzzword. It’s the idea that our business is built more efficiently through shared knowledge, and shared responsibility.”
I look forward to more collaborative work with Sue Murphy and others with specialties and knowledge that will make the teaching and approach of WhyHire.me more powerful and engaging for our students. We can’t do it alone. Well, I guess we could, but like Amber, I don’t think that makes the best product, service or experience for our customers.
Just before Halloween, I connected with Dawn Mular, the world’s top recruiter on Twitter and CEO of the Helping Friends Career Network. Dawn was very easy to connect and interact with, given the nature of what she does. She takes a genuine interest in people, collaborative technologies and helping put people to work.
Many times over, school administrators and HR professionals ask why students should be coming out of school with an online brand. I was keen to get Dawn’s perspective on how social media has changed recruiting and how her clients react to seeing more than a traditional 2-page resume about a candidate. For those that are interested in downloading the entire 10-minute podcast, simply click here.
For those interested in key sections, you can download and listen to key extracts:
- How the Helping Friends Career Network got started
- The secret to her success becoming the top Twitter recruiter
- Client reaction to social media in the recruiting world
- Stepping outside the traditional recruiting box – how and why
- Important employment trend – green businesses will mean more job / project opportunities
- Advice to Educators and Leaders – become part of the movement
- Bring transparency and authenticity to the classroom
A seasoned HR professional I met today was keen to understand how employers were responding to online profiles being development by students and working professionals. I offered him personal evidence of the impact that online personal branding had on my consulting business and I pointed him towards new age recruiters like Kirsti Stubbs at Starbucks Canada. Ashley Ferguson also offered this feedback about her initial entry into the job market last spring.
Since I started web marketing at Oracle in 1997 (in Redwood Shores, CA), I was lucky enough to be on the forefront of experimenting with email campaigns (before Constant Contacts), web seminars (before Webex), landing pages and content management systems (before Vignette, HubSpot). It was all pretty bleeding edge and exciting. At the time, the sales organizations at Oracle were skeptical as to how all these new tools could help generate leads. The prevailing marketing wisdom was all about direct marketing – calling, emailing and generally, interrupting people.
Marketing went off and started experimenting with communities, blogs, and engaging customers online. The ClueTrain Manifesto was a great book that really fired us all up and challenged us to rethink what “engagement” was all about. By engaging with customers and prospects with authentic content, offers, and two-way dialogues, marketing was able to establish a conversation with a prospect, before a sales rep called. All of a sudden, sales were emailing and calling into prospects that were interested in sales conversations.
Online marketing and social media have changed the sales and marketing game. All you need to do is look at the change in marketing spend that is predicted over the next several years. This rather long winded parallel suggests that online marketing will be embraced by hiring professionals and their internal clients. How the web evolved in the B2B and B2C sectors is a strong indicator as to how this will unfold in our daily lives as job seekers and hiring managers.
Students and working professionals can add web marketing/social media engagement to their job search methods. What is the payback for a hiring manager?
- They are better equipped to learn more about a candidate before and after an interview;
- Seeing how a candidate presents themselves online is key – it is getting increasingly difficult to shield anyone on the Internet these days;
- It offers a candidate’s perspective on industry issues and how they relate to project experiences gained at post-secondary school;
- It presents entirely new ways to gauge a candidates passion, initiative and leadership potential.
The web changed everything, including personal job search and ongoing career management.
Displaying yourself means taking a strategic view of all your opportunities to record and capture yourself presenting to your class, gathering field data or simply practicing your craft. When you get your course outline and list of key assignments for the term, think about all the opportunities you will have to capture select moments on video or with your camera.
What are select moments that represent branding opportunites?
- Field research
- Class presentations
- Interviews with specialists
- Group work with your team
- …there are endless possibilities to capture compelling content that speak to your professional interests, passions or experiences you will have college or university.
Two journalists from an Australian TV show, brought their digital camera to a staged protest during a guest lecture from John Yoo. He is the lawyer that wrote the legal brief that suggested torture was simply enhanced interrogation. In this case, I do applaud the two gentlemen for acting out in protest to this man’s views.
I missed class last week, so we had to move things into a higher gear for the students this week. The clock is ticking and they need to be ready for the job market in a few months.
Our focus this week was on making sure that they had done all their required research to clearly position their personal brand. Their personal research has revolved around defining their values, understanding their personality and looking at their strengths from a few different perspectives including on-line tools, their achievements and what their classmates have seen in them.
They have also been asked to think about their target. What audience are they looking at? Where do they want to work? What industry? What position? They don’t have all the answers, who does, but they need to have a target to start with. This is another part of their commitment to define their personal brand.
I threw a few big questions at them also including;
- What do you have to do to get to where you want to go?
- What do you want to get out of the next step in your career?
In January of 2008, I made the decision to start a personal blog about things that interested me in my professional life – technology and communications. I wanted an opportunity to comment and post ideas that were outside the realm of Facebook and my corporate blog at my office. When it came time to seek out my next consulting project, the effort paid off. People I met had read my blog and took an interest in the subjects I was tracking and commenting on. The interviews were extensions to the conversations I had initiated online. I really enjoyed the experience – it gave me an incredible perspective on the power of personal branding and how much it has changed since the advent of desktop publishing back in 1984.
This google analytics chart shows the web site traffic I experienced as I went through the interview process. My conversations were spreading across the company! 
A friend (Robert Saric) went through a similar experience last summer. His blog posts generated all kinds of interest that landed him a key contract.
These experiences demonstrate the power of social networking and personal branding. Dan Schawbel has a great personal branding process at this link. Check it out!
