I’ll start by saying this: I’m afraid that you might find me a bit pretentious if you read what I have to say on the subject of personal branding. But unfortunately, I won’t be able to present my argument without risking that.
So, I’ll tell my story and try to document my (perhaps to positive?) claims about myself and others’ perspective of me, as thoroughly as possible.

(That’s me)

Here it is:

When I talk to other students about “personal branding” and how to “create a career” by “networking with the big guys”, “creating a personal brand online” and all those fancy things, I keep on thinking that we may be too ambitious?

Some students want to have a higher klout score because digital influencers will see that, and that often lead to them talking about connecting to the digital influencers.
Others talk about “getting out there” in the world of big companies and powerful managers, by going to networking events and similar things.

My point is, I believe we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are students and the chance of us making a meaningful connection to one of the “big and important guys” is pretty small. I am not saying, that it can’t happen, but in my opinion it’s not very cost-efficient, if you believe in the saying that “time is money”.

What I see as students’ greatest opportunity is to create a personal brand that our fellow students can relate to. Most people don’t see their fellow students as sources of “career-creating” material, but my claim is that that is wrong.
The students that surround you, are the people that are interested in the same industry as you and they will probably work in the same industry or in an industry that is somehow relevant to yours.

–> AND the thing is, these people are close to you. Every week you have the opportunity to “show your skills and knowledge off” in class. Talk on subjects that the people, you want to influence, can relate to and understand. When you are given assignments, people will start asking for your help, if you come off as a person who knows what your doing, and that’s a golden opportunity to create value for the people you want to influence. At least that’s how I have experienced it.
Even though I have never seen my participation in class and work on assignments as personal branding, it makes good sense to interpret it that way when looking back.

Here are two examples of what I would define as my personal branding.
1. picture:  I uploaded my answers to an accounting exam on the Facebook-group for my programme at Copenhagen Business School, to help the people in their studying for the re-exam.
2. picture: I made a presentation on accounting, which led to jokes about me doing the lectures the following years.
(I know it’s in Danish, but you can put in Google Translate, if you want all the details)
3. picture: The Hootsuite report shows that my AdWords guide has the highest amount of clicks – by far. I made it after several people in my E-Marketing class asked me for help with AdWords.

I can name some other examples to make it more tangible:

My participation and networking in classes at University has led to me tutoring 5 people (officially) and getting four different jobs related to communication and social media.

I am not saying, that it doesn’t make sense to try to connect with the persons that are the “big guys” now. I am saying, that the people you’re studying with now probably know some of the “big guys” and may very well become the “big guys” in the future, and you have the opportunity to influence them right now. Why not do that first?

Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that Facebook is optimizing its newsfeed algorithm, so that the experience will be better for the users – not the businesses.

Now, Facebook has launched a tool that hopefully can benefit all parties.

The new tool is an upgraded version of the “hide this post”-function. Besides making it easier to unfollow people or pages, it also shows the summary of who you’ve the watched the most, both people and businesses pages. Facebook’s hope is that it will encourage people to give more feedback to Facebook, and thereby make it easier for Facebook to improve the “Facebook-experience” for each individual user.

I think, we have all thought about cleaning up our newsfeed and unfollow the pages (or friends?) who turned out to be quiet an annoying, digital acquaintanceship. However, this has been equal to a large amount of work, which has prevented people (or at least me) from doing it.

I see this tool as a step in the right direction for Facebook, not only for the individual users, but in particular for businesses. After Facebook have begun to implement a decreasing organic reach – Zuckerberg calls it a more optimized newsfeed – businesses have been struggling with low engagement rates, but this could change it. That does however imply that Facebook is successful in promoting this new tool.

If people starts to unfollow the pages which they in fact don’t find interesting, it could lead to a decrease in the average number of fans, but at the same time an increase in the engagement rate, as the pages would now only reach dedicated fans.

It will probably be a long time before we reach this point – and we may never reach it – but this is definitely a step in the direction.

I was looking through A&W’s website today, as it was a part of the pre-reading for next week’s E-Marketing class. After having visited most of the website’s different pages, it struck me how much content they had on the subject of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Not because it’s an unusual thing to see – because it’s definitely not. Everyone “has” to do it nowadays, so no, it wasn’ that.

I found it interesting because I linked it to the context of measuring success online. When I did that, the question about A&W’s CSR-content shifted from being about “why” A&W does it, to “how” A&W does it, and that is easier to answer and still quite interesting.

So, how did A&W decide on their CSR projects, and even more relevant for their current situation: How do they measure if their projects – and content about their projects – have been successful? How can they optimize the communicational frame around their projects, which they have already chosen?

The first thing I thought about, was to measure the success in page visits (amount of visits and time spent on site) and video views.
However, I kind of dismissed that idea when I clicked through one of their pages, that should illustrate that their burgers are made in a pro-environment way.

When I clicked the video, this happened (the video is playing in the background):

The video couldn’t even be played properly on their website…
Then I went and tried another browser (Safari) and it worked in one out of three times, so, it could just be browser problems.
But how many people would switch their browser for a CSR-video?

Then I checked how many people who had watched the video:

2.131 is not exactly a lot of views, if you are trying to convince Canada about your company’s good intentions.
But, then again, how many people go different burger restaurants’ webpages, to check out what it does for environment, before they decide where to go. I am guessing 1% or 2% under normal circumstances, which means that the number, 2131, could actually be massive, because those 2131 views represent the people that actually care and want to debate.

Or maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the number of views are actually too low, but people just don’t want to read about or see what a company does for the environment. They just want to know, that they are doing something. Then, the video becomes a symbol of CSR and the page visits and video views suddenly don’t matter much.

My point with this reflection is not conclude whether or not A&W’s CSR-content have been successful or not. On the contratry, I want to display that, that that is something I can’t do as a person outside the company. The process of evaluating success online is simply just to complicated.