JCOM 2160: Branding Yourself

In the journalism world of today, branding yourself on the web can be one of your best tools. I recently started this blog and am working to collaborate entries about my thoughts and knowledge about public relations. When I am writing, I often times find myself double checking my work and making sure it sounds just the way I want it to. Posting your work makes it a lot more serious than just turning it in to a professor. It is crazy to think that anyone who wanted to could be viewing my profile. Alfred Hermida wrote, “With journalism shifting toward an era of the personal, rather than the institutional, brand, students need to consider how they are going to stand out as the expert in a knowledge-based economy.” I personally feel that blogging is a great way to showcase your skills and talents as a public relations student. Although I am not interested in becoming a journalist, I can still display my writing skills as well as blog about my event planning and media relations skills.

Here are ten tips I found to develop a personal brand:

1. People in your field should know who you are.
2. Someone who Googles your first and last name should be able to find out who you are.
3. Your online self-representation should demonstrate that you are a serious, ethical journalist.
4. Samples of your best work should be linked to your home page or online (HTML) resume.
5. Your real work experience should be easy to find and easy to scan quickly. People will want to check this for verification, so dates should be clear, not obfuscated. Example: “June – August 2006″ is clear and honest. “Intern” is honest when “reporter” might not be. Consider “correspondent” or “stringer” too, when accurate. Lists of dodgy freelance work make you appear dodgy. Links to work add credibility. (Use PDFs for work that has been locked behind a pay wall or deleted.)
6. Make sure your online pages can be read easily on various cell phones, including the iPhone.
7. If you supply a link to a PDF of your resume, make sure the pertinent job or freelance-experience information is also available via simple HTML (not exclusively in the PDF). Word Docs are not good for online resumes. A Google Doc would be better.
8. People who might want to hire you need to be able to find your contact info EASILY. Don’t make them hunt all over for it. If you supply an e-mail address, make sure you check mail at that address just about daily, if not more often.
9. You need to be around, to be visible, to be seen — people should see your name in comments, retweets, etc.
10. People online should point to you from time to time, as I have pointed to Joe, Dave, Ryan, Greg, and Lauren in this post. This confers authority on you. Brands rest in part on authority, in part on name recognition.