Bentley College Students Learn How to Blend Social Media with Personal Branding

Yesterday I went back to Bentley College and gave a talk on the fusion of personal branding with social media. This time the students were taking one of the first ever social media classes. From my 4 years at Bentley, it was obvious that this school was far ahead of others, with leading technology, such as the stock trading room and state-of-the-art library. I’m glad they recognized the role of social media in the school curriculum, but my mission was to teach them how they could apply their classroom learnings to their own lives. Part of their course assignment is to blog about their journey in social media throughout the semester. I actually think this method is a great way to teach students first hand about blogging and by using it as an inter-class communication device they are learning by doing. As you can tell from the pictures below, I ran into some technical issues when I was filming the presentation, so instead I just took snapshots. If anyone can suggest a better way of podcasting, please let me know.

Image 1: This picture depicts me introducing myself, stating that I work full-time at EMC as their first social media specialist and how I’m a personal branding expert. Notice that I’m wearing jeans in these pictures. I typically dress more business casual during my presentations. My thoughts here are that my audience is college students that tend to dress very casual when attending classes, so in order to become more affiliated with them and at their level, I wore what they did.

Image 2: When I viewed Seth Godin’s post called “Why bother having a resume?” I felt it was a perfect fit for an entirely new slide I wanted to introduce to students. The quote I included was “Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for… those jobs don’t get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever.” Every opportunity I get now is not on a job board, but rather through an individual looking for a specific type of expertise/talent. College students are notorious for resume submissions to the usual suspects. I also mentioned that 75% of jobs are taken through networking. If you aren’t building your eBrand or networking at this point, then you are passing off jobs to others who are.

Image 3: This one dates back to one of my original philosophies behind personal branding, which is that you can apply corporate and product marketing concepts to the individual. Here I discuss the “Marketing Mix” or the “4 P’s of Marketing,” which is one of the most well known and used concepts in the practice. Person is the product being sold to a recruiter. Place is the location of the company. Price is your total brand value and promotion are the strategies you implement to gain visibility and attention.

View the presentation

[slideshare id=318718&doc=keynote-bentley-college-round-2-1206311322380162-3&w=425]

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