Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Links: Assignment 4/2, Project 2: Brand of You

Assignment Due April 2

Project 2 Syllabus: Brand of You

Personal Branding: Tools and Tactics

For a deeper dive on how to match specific tools to your Personal Branding goals, please review these blog posts. The author is Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog, on Twitter @DanSchawbel.



Build Your Personal brand on Twitter

Build Your Personal brand on Facebook

Build Your Personal brand on LinkedIn

Build Your Personal brand on YouTube


There are also websites that specialize in offering "Personal Branding." Here is a review of four popular personal branding websites

4 Personal branding websites - review / Mashable

Intro to Brand of You: Using Social for Personal Marketing

Companies large and small have begun to make significant investments in social media as a means of marketing their products and services.

But social tools can be used equally well to market the Brand of You. Creating, managing and maintaining a Social Persona is essential in our increasingly wired world, where recruitment and hiring happens online as often as in real life, and where your choices - good and bad - leave digital footprints.

Public figures like Alyssa Milano (Twitter) and George Takei (Facebook) have used social media to leverage their brand far beyond the influence they had in their original medium. In the world of politics, President Obama is credited with his use of Social Media for his fundraising and campaigning success. The same is true of athletes, entertainers, and experts who have used social media to enhance their "brand."

Here are several great articles to introduce the concept of creating and maintaining a Personal Brand. We will read a number of blog posts by Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), and publisher of the Personal Branding Blog, and is on Twitter via @DanSchawbel.


CLASS READINGS FOR 4/2:

Students - How to kick-start your personal brand online (Mashable)

Personal Branding 101: How to discover and create your brand (Dan Schawbel - Mashable)





Thursday, March 21, 2013

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Presentation Tips

Here are some of the keys to making an effective presentation:

Keep it simple: One idea per slide

Pick a presentation method that matches your message

Share a story, make an emotional connection

Verbalize your outline so your audience can follow

Use props, do a demonstration, mix it up!

Know the 'one thing' you want to leave your audience with

Dress professionally!

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse

Social Tech Etiquette: Is Voicemail Rude?

Fascinating blog in the New York Times on how digital-social technology is transforming communication etiquette.

In this day, is it rude to the receiver to leave them a voicemail? Should you just text "call me" instead? When is it appropriate to call someone on the phone?

These are some of the questions tackled in the article, and in the blogosphere in response to the initial story.

Opinions range from "don't call me unless you're dying" to "I miss the lost art of the phone call."

Are these differences only generational? Or is there also a degree of tech literacy involved, where we match the communication tool (voicemail, email, text) to the message? What do you think?

Location-Aware Social: Foursquare

Foursquare is a mobile application that combines the Social Impulse with the geo-location aware features of a mobile device.

Here's how Foursquare describes its features and benefits:



  • Foursquare uses geo-location to offer users food and activity solutions "near them."
  • It also uses geo-location to meet the social impulse: Foursquare lets you know if friends are nearby
  • You and your friends can also 'rate and review' - we trust the opinions of those we know most
  • Foursquare delivers value to users by passing through 'deals' from local businesses 
  • Foursquare offers incentives to users to 'be social' through gaming features like awarding 'badges' and earning the title of 'Mayor' of frequently visited locations. 

Monday, March 18, 2013

Making Effective Presentations

Improving your presentation skills is a great way to increase your effectiveness as a communicator. We all have endured the opposite. Here's comedian Don MacMillan's take on Powerpoint Mistakes to Avoid.



Here's a creative use of "whiteboarding" as a method of presenting the differences between traditional, boring presentations...and ways to make the presentation into a STORY.

When it comes to presenting Digital technology, there has arguably never been anyone better than Apple's Steve Jobs. As this video makes clear, it is no accident that Jobs was a master of presentations. In fact, he followed a set of key principles, principles you can apply to make your own presentations more effective.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Will Digital Replace Paper? (French Ad)

Since the Creative Media and Digital Culture program explores many themes related to the role of print versus digital forms, I'm passing along this amusing French ad which pits the two forms of technology against each other for a variety of 'everyday uses'.



Monday, March 4, 2013

Viral Video Case Study: Pink Gloves Dance

With more than 13 million views, "The Pink Glove Dance" is a true viral video sensation.

Filmed in Portland at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, the video features a diverse group of hospital employees dancing to the popular song "Down" by Jay Sean featuring Lil Wayne, all wearing pink gloves.

The result - a truly original way to promote awareness of breast cancer.



Along with spawning many remixes as well as sequels, the social buzz generated by the video and its remixes led to significant "free media" coverage by mainstream media outlets, including this story by ABC News Network:




The response to the original Pink Glove Dance was so overwhelming, that Medline wanted to make a second video. Here is "Pink Glove Dance: The Sequel" - which was NOT a viral sensation. Prompting the question: Why not? What was the difference?

Friday, March 1, 2013

Tips & Resources: Using FB and Twitter for Non-Profits

Here are some excellent resources for using Facebook and Twitter, especially for non-profit marketing.

Facebook provides an excellent step by step guide on how to set up and 'operate' a Facebook 'business' page, which can be for a non-profit or a cause or even an event:

Creating a Facebook PAGE for your Business or Cause


There are numerous articles on how to use Twitter for non-profit causes.

Here's a Mashable article that reviews 25 of the top non-profits and their use of Twitter. Lots of examples of best practices from these large non-profits that can be 'scaled' to the local level for smaller organizations.

And here's an article with 11 tips for non-profits for how to optimize their use of Twitter. Among the key tips:

  • Completely fill out your 'profile' to optimize search, and increase follow-backs
  • Create and tweet content and links that will make "following" you worthwhile to your target audience (make it relevant, make it timely, make it interesting).
  • Include click-through links
  • Don't just promote your own links, retweet and share links from other org's
  • Follow back everyone who follows you (then organize your followers with lists)
  • Respond to people who engage with you
  • Be conversational!