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.

AdWords can be tricky. Especially, if you have never worked with online advertising before.
Fortunately for me, I was lucky enough to have worked with Facebook’s Power Editor for a year, before I ended up in the situation where AdWords was suddenly my responsibility in the company I worked for.

So, what did I do?

I went straight to Youtube. I can’t count the things I’ve learned on Youtube. If you have time for tutorial videos on Youtube that is most definitely a good way to go. I can especially recommend this video: Insights on the AdWords Auction

After many hours on Youtube and about 6 months of using AdWords, many of my inital questions have been answered and others have arosen. AdWords simply keeps on changing.

Anyway, here is my guide on how to get through the first steps of an AdWords campaign. Some of my take-aways are probably not best practice. Maybe something has changed over time, or maybe I simply just got it wrong from the start (please speak up if you know better alternatives).

All right, let’s go:

1. If you are in doubt about how to navigate. For a simple usage of AdWords, just click on “campaigns” in the top of the screen. This is usually where you want to be.

2. When creating a normal AdWords campaign (click the red button that says “campaign+) you should only use “Search Network Only”. I say normal, because usually people associate AdWords with the ads that come up when doing a google search, and that is exactly what the Search Network is. The “Display Network” is other pages like online newspapers and review websites. The two networks are different and requires different ads, therefore you should keep them separate (click on the picture to amplify it).

3. When choosing location, you want to think about your target audience. Do you want to pay, so that people in Canada can see your ad, or is your ad only relevant for people living in Vancouver? It’s one of the more simple elements.

4. Language is a bit tricky, because Google doesn’t distinguishdi between the written words but between domains. So, if you choose English your ad will appear on the English version of google.com/ca, and if you choose French, your ad will appear on the French version of google.com/ca.

5. When you are new to AdWords, and you choose your Bid Strategy, you always want to choose the manual bidding. If AdWords were to optimize your campaign effectively, it would need a substantial account history.
It doesn’t really matter what Default bid you choose, because you will optimize your bid for each individual keyword.
You should optimize it every day, based on the suggested bid that you can find in the keyword planner:

Budget pr. day is tricky. Normally you don’t want to miss any clicks, which means that you never want to reach your budget pr. day, BUT when you have a limited budget that will not be the case. Set a budget, so that the campaign can run for at least 10 days.

6. Ad Extensions is always a good idea since they are opportunities to give more information, and at the same time make your ad more visible.
The extensions are “Shipping info” and “Product Ratings”. Without those to extensions the ad would have been much smaller and would have had less info, which in the end increases the chance of a good landing-page experience.

In my E-Marketing class today, we talked about content and online communities.

As for preparation, we had 7 articles which gave us different perspectives on the importance of great content, and presented tools that could help us on our misson to produce great content. – In total, a very interesting class!

However, after we finished class, something struck me: One thing is content, but what about the medium that facilitates the content?

Every medium carries a message

The great Canadian thinker (the picture really shows how much of a thinker he was), Marshall Mcluhan, once said that the medium is the message, which, if taken literally, would ruin the whole idea about concetrating on great content. BUT that perspective is also a bit to radical from my point of view.

Instead, I will allow myself to use Lars Thøger Christensen‘s more moderate interpretation of Mcluhan, which states that every medium carries a message.From this perspective, content and the medium becomes equal, and therefore deserve equal attention.

To me, the most important take-away from McLuhan’s work, is his way of thinking about media: A medium is the medium of another medium.

It is kind of a tricky way of putting it, but when one relates it to content marketing, it suddenly makes much more sense. One could say that a sort of media hierarchy appears.

An example of a media hierarchy:

1. You choose whether to go with an online or offline medium. An offline medium as a handwritten mail can carry the message of effort and therefore caring, but it can also carry the message of being out of tune with the new and “online” world. It depends on the person receiving the mail and the content of the mail.

2. You choose which online and offline medium you want to use. If you want to reach out to people in their privat sphere, you might go with Facebook. You don’t go for LinkedIn, which carries a message about professionalism.

3. You choose who should be the sender of the message. If your company has received massive critique and you want to make an apology, you might want to put an important person as the sender, because that will carry the message of your company actually caring about the critique.

4. You choose the “medium” of your content. That could be an apology – as stated in the example before – or the medium of the content could be a question. Depending on how “equal” the relationship is between your company and your customers.

And I could go on like this for quite some time…

My point is, we should always take the medium into account, when we talk about creating content, because you want the message of the medium and the message of the content to tell the same story.

I read an article today that learned me something that I thought I already knew – I just wasn’t really aware of it. Funny feeling. It was an article on Facebook by the Danish Social Media Expert Jacob Holst Mouritzen. The article’s key point was that there is a problem with the way we measure the engagement rate on Facebook. Jacob Mouritzen made several good points, such as:

• Today, we measure it by taking engagement (likes, shares, comments) and divide it by the total fans on a given day, but that doesn’t work very well with Facebook’s current algorithm. It doesn’t work because the algorithm decreases the reach to our fans and therefore businesses usually pay to increase reach – but the paid reach is not included in the calculation of the engagement rate. That makes the engagment rate misleading.
• The engagement rate can also be misleading because it doesn’t include the other possible interactions: Click on the link, click on the video/picture or likes on other users comments.

However, the point that really caught on to me was that, even if you calculated the engagement rate in a more accurate way (use reach on post instead of total fans on a given day), it still shouldn’t be the metric which guides your social media strategy. At least not on its own.

There are many ways of achieving a higher engagement and most of them will probably boost your engagement in the beginning, but hurt your brand in the long run. If you let the engagement rate control your strategy, you may end up  only posting give-aways and photos of funny animals.

When you think about, it’s quite simple. And I feel certain that I already knew this in some way, but sometimes it’s necessary to be reminded about the simple things.

This blog post will build on what was stated in my previous blog plost:

We – the digital people – are now intimate with our technology and therefore it influences our behavior on an unconscious level.

Building on that, I will try to explain the consequences of another statement from my previous blog post:

We are always online.

At first sight, it appears that new technologies has given us the gift of freedom, by allowing us to transcend our spatial (I’ve always wanted to use that word – it really just means “space) boundaries.
BUT what Søren Schultz found in his research, was that we feel something very different from freedom. Instead of feeling free, we feel a need or an obligation to always be available. We have to be available –> because people expect us to be availiable –> because we are now able to always be available.

When the new technology freed us from the constraints of space it  bound us to the constraints of time instead. Schultz named this phenomenon time dependence.

When I first read about this I was quite suprised, because I could relate to the feeling described in the words time dependence. It is the feeling I get everytime I am in class and my iPhone vibrates. It’s the feeling I get when I am having a conversation and my iPhone vibrates.

I know I am not supposed to check it, but I want to.

The conclusion of this blog post is the same as the last one:
As an eMarketer you need to be careful not to overextend when you post things online or send out e-mails because, in many cases, you may be poking the always-available-people in real life!

Now we are moving on to some of the really interesting stuff. It has do to with the second of the three characteristics that Søren Schultz found in his research on the digital natives:

“We are now intimate with our primary technologies”

What does that mean? That means that we ,in many cases, need to stop thinking about technologies as tools at our disposal but as something that influences our behaviour in a complex manner.

Lets use the iPhone as an example of this.

Søren Schultz asked people if their iPhones had sound toggled on or off, and people below the age of 30 answered that it was always turned off. The answer to why people had the sound toggled of, was that they always had their iPhone with them – always – and they had the vibrator on, so they would notice the call or text anyway.

The essence of this is that the iPhone is not something we think about bringing along anymore, it’s not something we think about using – we just do it by instinct.

When we stop reflecting on why and how we are using the iPhone, then the iPhone starts to influence our behavior and way of thinking. As McLuhan once wrote it “the technology becomes an extension of the human being”.

Another example of this, is the function in the Facebook message-tool which enables you to see, when the other party has read your message. Don’t tell me that it hasn’t made you answer the message faster?

I believe that we need to take account of the way that we have become more intimate with our techonology. It means that we – as eMarketers – can almost always reach our target audience through e-mails or any social media, because it goes straight to their Smartphones. And they always bring their Smartphones along.

BUT that also means that we can easily overextend. When we think that we are pushing something through a public channel, such as social media, we are actually poking (the Smartphone vibrator) people in real life – because people are always online and they don’t want to be offline. From that follows that they cannot turn the digital messages off, as they could with the TV-commercials!

Therefore is their no such thing as a good, old-fashioned digital mass media and that has made the process of reaching reaching people much more complex.

In my last blog post I wrote about the digital people and three characteristics that describe these people in the way they behave and construct their identity in this new digital world.

This blog post is devoted to the first characteristic – one of the most interesting findings in Søren Schultz’s research. That is, that we have lost control of our own “image” in this new digital world and that has changed the way we act and think.

Back in the days a great thinker, Erving Goffman, argued that human interactions could be described through dramaturgical terminology. If we simplify his theory it’s like this: We had a (privat) backstage where we displayed our “true” identity and where we could rehearse our act so that we were ready to act in the front stage (public).
Our identity was private by default.

The thing that Søren Schultz states now is that we don’t have a back stage anymore or not even something in between. With the emergence of social media and the new technology everything has become public by default. You don’t know when someone is going tell something about you in a Facebook post or a tweet. You don’t know when someone is going to take a picture of you – because (almost) everyone carries a sort of camera now a days!

– A small test to prove the point: How many of the pictures of you on Facebook have you have you uploaded? I think I have uploaded 5% of the pictures I am in. And I am guessing it’s the same for you?

We have lost control!

Identity has moved away from being a more static and private thing into being a process that plays out in public. When you cannot control WHAT your identity is and how other portrays it, the only thing left is  to control HOW you react to your identity.

And this applies to businesses as well! You cannot do a traditional one-way-push-celebrity-endorsement-we-gonna-tell-you-what-we-are-CAMPAIGN anymore. Because you do not own the right to portray your company’s identity – everyone does and everyone can!

From my point of view, two things follow from this:

1. Stop thinking that you are in control and start taking others saying about you serious – that goes for companies as well as private persons.
2. Instead of telling me (the customer) about you (the business) in an absolute and transmissional way, you need to give me the tools for me to start a dialogue about or with you. Because I want to do that: When I start a dialogue about your business it gives you or my friends the tools to portray my identity in a way that i want it.

It can suddenly turn into a positive spiral.

Today my E-Marketing professor, Julio Visko, walked the class through the different stages of relationships between a customer and a brand. The second stage is called “intimate relationships” and that thing – right there – really got me thinking.

In an everyday context an intimate relationship is something that is build on elements such as trust, loyalty and positive, shared experiences. In simple words, both parties know each other, understand each other, and to me that is exactly what the second stage of customer-brand relationships is about.

BUT my big question is: Do we really know who we are dealing with? Do we know who these “digital people” are – the ones that are using all the new technology?

While studying in the interdisciplinary programme “Business Adm. & Corporate Communication” I have learned a lot about segmentation, marketing, communication plans and so forth. But from my point of view it’s crucial to understand the sociological perspective on the digital, as the digital expert Brian Solis also argues in his book “Engage”. We need to understand the digital people before we can carry out the marketing projects and build intimate relationships with them!

So, who are we dealing with?

Søren Schultz, professor at Copenhagen Business School, has offered an interesting perspective on this subject. He argues that the new technologies and social media have dramatically changed our behavior and the way we construct our identity. Drawing on Goffman and McLuhan he explains how his research finds that:

1. We have lost control of our own “image” to such a degree that what once played out back stage or in the middle region is now happening front stage. Everything is public – and that goes for brands as well.
2. We have become intimate with the new technology in the  way that McLuhan argued when he wrote that a technology becomes an extension of the person that uses it.
3. The new techonology has brought along a new form of dependence. We have transcended the constraints of time and space but that means that we are now supposed to be available at all times. You could say that we are in some way dependent on time.

Now you’re maybe thinking: “Well, that sounds like some pretty dramatic and yet quick conlusions” – but fear not. I will devote my next 3 blog post to elaborate on the subject of “who we are dealing with” and the thoughts and research behind these findings. Because to me, that is absolutely crucial.

/Marcus Feldthus