100 Tips & Tools to Build Your Brand While You’re Still in School

From Donna Scott, at the Online Degree Programs blog ...

As an online student, you have a unique opportunity to work on building your brand before you’ve even graduated. Using online tools and more, you can get established early on, so you’ll have a wealth of opportunities and resources available to you when you’re ready to take advantage of them. Read on, and you’ll find 100 tips and tools that can help you build your brand in school.

Development

These tips will help you get your brand developed.

1. Learn about yourself: Take the time to examine yourself and what your values are.
2. Work for free: Gain great experience you can put to work later by working for free.
3. Think about your name: If you have a common or badly associated name, you may want to consider using a unique variation of your name.
4. Gain experience: Get a job while still in school to help develop your brand.
5. Be distinctive: Do something different, so you’ll stand out among the rest.
6. Develop strong self esteem: Make sure that you’re projecting confidence in yourself and your brand.
7. Stay active: Make sure you’re always in the job market-you will appear more valuable if you’re constantly in work.
8. Define and discuss your personal values: With a sense of what’s important to your public personal values, you can define and share your brand.
9. Complete additional education or training: Even though you’re still in school, there’s always room to think about more learning to gain experience.
10. Determine your expertise: Find your expertise, and establish yourself as the authority on that topic.
11. Highlight your accomplishments: Share your awards, credentials, qualifications, and any other important achievements that are related to your brand.
12. Determine your benefits: Define what your personal benefits are and share them.
13. Stay true to yourself: In defining your brand, make sure that you avoid trying to be something you’re not.
14. Be specific: Make your brand tie in closely to your niche or specialty.

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"All I do is work here"

From Seth Godin's blog ...

"Over the past few months, I've had quite a few interactions with several people who work at a (previously great) brand.

One person will email to ask me for a favor or a connection, and I'll point out that just yesterday, I got three emails, all spam, from three different people at the organization either selling me something irrelevant or sending me a press release I didn't ask for. And the unsubscribe button doesn't work. And I've unsubscribed ten times before. When I pointed this out, he said, "Oh, that's those guys. I'm not related to them, all I do is work here. If you don't like getting that stuff, you should take it up with them."

Then, a few days ago, I heard from someone in a different group at the same company, asking for help with a project she was working on. I explained that the last time I helped someone in her group with a project, I was misquoted, my time was wasted and they violated whatever trust we had. Susan said, and I'm quoting precisely the same line, "All I do is work here. They pay my salary, but I'm me, not them."

No, Susan, you are them.

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Outsourcing Fabulous: The Personal Brand Assistant

Chris Meyer (co-author of Blur, It's Alive) and I had a great conversation about this idea a couple of weeks ago. Now, from Peter Hirschberg's weblog on disruptive technology ...

"I've been part of an email thread at Monitor Talent about "Personal Brand Assistants," a term I never heard of until today. Think folks who might help you manage your online presence. At first I thought, "How absurd." But this was a serious thread that demanded a serious response.

So I decided to write a job description. Which I posted on Craig's list. It was flagged and removed as fast as you can say, "Whoa, that's not in our terms of service."

I can't believe Craig is killing new job opportunities at this moment in history. (And I'm not even gonna make the cheap Craig's List joke that comes to mind...) So for an economy that sorely needs new jobs, here is the newest of all:

Personal Brand Assistant: Can you help make this brand fabulous?

Wanted: someone with the unique talents and drive to help build one of the most important brands of all, me. The brief: in order to be me, to do a really good job of being me, I need to twit, blog, respond, post pictures and engage with the market 27 hours a day. You see the problem. In the age of television being me was a relatively mindless thing to do. No longer. And that's where you come in. Now that I realize that I'm a brand, the matter of brand development, Search Engine Optimization, beating the competition, and looming large in the loomisphere has become of utmost importance.

As a Personal Brand Assistant you'll be a key contributor to the team that is the digital me. You'll report on parties and post embarrassing photos. Respond to events in technology and media in real time while minting status updates in Facebook. You'll make my twitter followers feel special, because they are special. You'll help insure that my 2,100 facebook friends have a friend. One that cares. Listens. Is authentic".

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7 Branding Trends for 2008 You Won't See Anywhere Else

From the Fusion Brand Blog

What are the seven branding trends that will affect you most in 2008?

ProfitBrand Trend #1. Next era of online advertising rises

"Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? … You will."

That was the world's first banner ad (as well as one of the most prophetic), which kicked off the first era of online advertising. The AT&T ad ran on October 25, 1994, on the HotWired site.

This long-lasting era of online advertising has been substantially enhanced through the years to counter the slow glazing of consumer eyes, and now offers a variety of sizes, animation and tracking. Such banner or display ads account for about one-third of online advertising revenues, despite the fact that the click-through rates have declined dramatically from the early years. However, video advertising (which includes video search and mobile TV) is breathing new life into this genre, and will certainly capture many more dollars next year.

While the first era will be with us for a long time, the second era – symbolized by pop-ups and pop-unders -- is hopefully on its last legs. Surely, camera company X10 and the travel site Orbitz deserve places in Advertising's Hall of Shame for their Internet carpet-bombing. (However, beware of "pop-up audio," an emerging format that forces visitors to hear an entire ad without being able to turn it off). Revenue figures are hard to come by, but one estimate claims 20% of the $9.5 billion spent on casino and porn advertising goes to pop-ups and pop-unders.

The third era is sucking the lifeblood from newspapers. Online classified advertising, best symbolized by Craigslist and also-rans like eBay's kijiji , captures at least $50 million annually of high-profit advertising that used to go newspapers. It is also a dagger poised at the heart of MLS, the real estate monopoly for brokers and agents. Classified ads account for about 17% of total online advertising, which various research firms estimate dto total $17-$20 billion in 2007.

The next era is, of course, search advertising, with more than 40% of the Internet advertising pie. The value of search advertising comes both from the ability to target someone interested in an offering and pay for performance. As a result, the average cost of a sale for paid search is $26.75 per order, compared to $71.89 for a banner ad. No wonder US advertisers spent $8.3 billion on online advertising in 2007, up from $7 billion in 2006.

This era will explode if Google, which controls an estimated 70-85% of the paid-search advertising market, completes its acquisition of DoubleClick. Imagine what marketers will do with the offspring of the marriage of the largest search query database with the world's largest online behavioural database.

The latest era, now just out of the blocks, is social advertising, where advertisers will be able to piggyback on the social interactions on online users. Already, movies, books and companies have been putting up profile pages on MySpace, and then accepting "friend requests" for advance or "insider" information. Facebook users can treat brands as their "friends," and each online interaction with the brand can be communicated to their own circle of friends. USAToday achieved an amazing 380% increase in new reader registrations when it added social media services such as discussion forums, story recommendations, reviews and more. A companion trend is social shopping, which involves sharing shopping wish lists, experiences and purchase tracking.

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