3 Good Articles About Personal Branding

The biggest decision you will have to make this semester will be made in the next 1-2 weeks: defining what your personal brand is about.  Many students struggle with this.  Some think of too many things they want to write about.  Others can't think of anything - though often they actually have thought of something but need some help defining it and some validation that it okay to want to write about.

Here are a few resources to look at as you begin to think about your personal brand:

Don't forget about your Emotional Appeal
There are many introductory articles about personal branding.  Some are awful.  This one isn't.  I really like how the first step of defining your brand has to do with what the author calls your "emotional appeal."  We often forget that we have a personality that can come through in our writing.  The characteristics that make up that personality are powerful branding tools - because they are so personal and elicit emotional responses.

Make your Brand Statement a mantra
I love this helpful post by former Apple Evangelist Guy Kawasaki on creating a concise three or four word mantra rather than a mission statement.  Mantras are memorable - and that makes them powerful.  

An alternate view
This article by Ryan Rancatore appears to recommend not having a personal brand statement - but read a little deeper.  What he's really saying is that if you have one, you have to really live it. 

Your personal brand does not have to encompass everything you are - just what you want to focus on right now.  Good luck!

Google Plus Integrates with Blogger

Google has been integrating a lot of its web services (like its photo sharing tool Picasa) into its social network, Google Plus.  Recently it added some Google Plus integration with Blogger.

The catch is that to get it, you have to connect your Blogger blog with your Google Plus profile.  Once you do that, here's what you can do to better integrate Blogger and Google Plus:

1. You can "tag" Google Plus friends in blog posts. 
Easily tag your Google Plus friends in a Blogger post by typing a "+" symbol and then typing their name out.  For example, to tag my UNI colleague +Michael Prophet in this post, I just typed the "+" symbol and start typing his first name:

I then selected his name at the top and a link was created to his Google Plus profile.  Notice as I was typed the word "Michael" it also showed me other Michaels in my circles, as well as Michaels on Google Plus that are not in my circles (so I can link to profiles of those not in my Google Plus circles).

2. Use the Google Plus Followers Gadget

The old school "Google Friend Connect" has been retired by Google (though it still works for the time being).  A better tool for listing followers of your blog is now the Google Plus Followers Gadget.  You'll notice this gadget installed on the right hand side of this page.

3. Notify Google Plus friends when you publish a new blog post

When you publish new blog posts, you now have the option of notifying your Google Plus friends - Blogger automatically adds any Google Plus friends you may have mentioned in your post.

Notice that it also put the name of my blog post and "search description" text in the status update.

4. Blog visitors can "+1" content

This is not a new feature, but there is also a gadget available that allows readers to "+1" a blog or blog post.  This is akin to "liking" a page on Facebook.  You'll see a +1 button also on the right hand side nav bar on this page.

For this class, I've considered using a tool such as WordPress for blogs, but with the great integration with Google Analytics and AdWords, I've stuck with Blogger for the time being.  And though I don't use Google Plus a whole lot, perhaps this will be a reason to start.

Mobile Marketing Playbook

As we enter the last few weeks of class, you will need to download and read the Mobile Marketing Playbook.  This is a document created and produced by the innovative digital agency 360i.  It is also available on the mobile resources page.

Kiip - Rewarding Gamers for their In-Game Achievements

Kiip is an app that connects marketers to gamers in a new and interesting way.  Kiip congratulates players for their in-game achievements by unlocking real sponsored rewards.  For example, if you make it to level 5, perhaps you get a $5 Starbucks gift card.  If you beat a global high score for the game, perhaps you win something much bigger.

 

Founded by young entrepreneur Brian Wong (who graduated from college at age 18 and was running business development for Digg.com at age 19), Kiip has raised over $15 million in venture capital funding to date.  

Read this Forbes.com interview with Brian Wong from April of 2012.

What do you think of Kiip's business model?  Would you appreciate a real reward for a virtual achievement?

Cool Party Trick: Tweet from the Command Line!

Twitter is one of the most powerful social platforms to tap into because 1) Tweets are concise and standardized, and 2) Tweets are transparent and open for all to access and use. Many companies have developed ways of collecting and analyzing tweets to create useful insights about what is being discussed on Twitter.

I started reading the excellent Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell published by O'Reilly, one of my favorite publishers of technology books. The book discusses how the incredible social data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites can be programmatically accessed and harvested for later research and analysis. (If you are interested, you can follow the author of this book on Twitter @ptwobrussell and @SocialWebMining)

Chapter one discusses how to access Twitter through a command line interface and Python using Mike Cardone's Python Twitter Tools. 

After being sure that easy_install was working (and knowing that Python was already running on my Mac OS X laptop), It was easy enough to get PTT installed - using Terminal (the Mac OS X command line terminal emulator), I just typed in:

$ easy_install twitter

Once installed, you can tweet from Terminal with a simple command like:

$ twitter set "Class work day in #unidigadv #blogging #tweeting"

One quick command, and a second later, my tweet was live:

Class work day in #unidigadv #blogging #tweeting
— Matthew Wilson (@cecilkleakins) October 5, 2012

Now that's a pretty cool party trick, but the real power of accessing data from the social web lies in integrating the Twitter API with a programming languages like Python or Ruby to gather, analyze, and visualize the data in interesting ways.

If you're interested in learning more, check out this book - or its companion volume, 21 Recipes for Mining Twitter.