Personal Branding Knowledge Is Still Just Beginning…

March 16, 2008 by Jonathan 

UMass Students Are Sucked Into the World of Personal Branding « Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel: “ About Dan Schawbel Publications Press

I often read Dan Schawbel’s for insight and on how to improve my own . You did realize that I have a personal brand didn’t you? :-)

I do in fact have a brand that is pretty apparent right here on JonathanCoffman.com. It’s one that encompasses my abilities to take new and in-the-pipe technologies and make them work in the real world, right now.

In the post that I’m linking to, Dan tells the story of a recent visit to the of Massachusetts and how the student he talked to almost all were on Facebook, but very few had even heard of LinkedIn.

This really exemplifies the need for and social- to be a part of the final curriculum at our nation’s universities. These students know and understand how viral messages get spread, how to network online, and how to control how they look, but they don’t understand quite yet how to apply those to multiple outlets across the web.

For the last 2 years I’ve offered extremely cheap to my peers at the Missouri School of Journalism. What I offer them is 10 gigs of storage space, , etc all for $20 per year. $28 if they want me to buy and manage their domain name as well.

It provides plenty of space and help for building a personal portfolio (which every grad needs) and it’s not going anywhere, I have too many personal and professional sites to just walk away from the web.

But here’s the real story: I’ve gotten several signups lately and I setup times to meet with each student who wants the deal to talk to them one-on-oine about how they want to use it and how I can help.

One actually emailed me last week saying she was going to have to wait to get a portfolio because ‘I’m saving up for Spring Break and I didn’t realize I could move my files around so easily.”

Well I’m sorry folks, but if you can spend $20 for a full year of online personal web presence, (2 or 3 drinks in Cancun for Spring Break of your senior year in ), you probably don’t need to be trying to get any that would require an online portfolio or web presence.

Let’s just hope this particular person is smart enough to not post all of those crazy Cancun pictures to after the .

This is just yet another example of why we need proactive education on social-networking and identity management. Firms like , , etc all have enormous amounts of data about US, and if you’re managing that information yourself, you’ve left yourself open to all kinds of abuse and inaccuracies.

Possibly Related posts:

  1. How To Get Hired Using Social Media
  2. The Basics of Managing Your Online Identity
  3. Google Alerts for Personal Branding Management
  4. Learn To ‘Social Media’
  5. Why Life Has Been Crazy: My Huge Job Announcement

Filed under: Blog, Personal Development and Branding, Social Media
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Comments

One Response to “Personal Branding Knowledge Is Still Just Beginning…”

  1. David Sandusky on March 16th, 2008 6:16 pm

    You are correct. Colleges and Universities need to adapt quickly to industry change at an even faster rate than we do in our own career strategies. The new Center for Innovation in Denver and other entrepreneurial schools do this…traditional, not as much. I hear the same think about my Strategic Career Plan workbook from my much older client base…they say required reading and critical thinking for students. I agree! What do you think, Jonathan
    http://www.yourbrandplan.com/plan.html

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