Discussion 200 words:

Reread one of the articles from Module One: 

A Brand for Everyone: Guidelines for Personal Brand Managing

. Then, answer the following questions: How do you plan to use digital and social media to develop your personal brand? What will you do to reach your personal goals? What have you learned in this course that you hope to apply to your career as you move forward? Share any resources (

like these 41 free resources

) that you have come across that might be helpful for emerging professionals, and explain how the resources may be applied. More specific examples include 

WordPress

, 

SurveyMonkey

, and 

MailChimp

.

When responding to your peers, discuss additional strategies or ideas that can be applied to help your classmates continue to enhance their personal brand. What impact does change have on personal brands? What can you and your peers do to prepare for this change in the future? Share any additional resources that may be helpful for emerging professionals, and explain how these resources may be applied. Share your thoughts.

Refer to the 

Discussion Rubric

 for directions on completing these discussions.

Response 1(50 words):

We covered so much material in this class that I almost forgot about this great article – the one that started it all!

I am not sure of how I will use social media to promote myself out in cyberspace. As a direct result of this class, I have decided that I want to have a social media presence. Since I plan to leave my current job (soon, I hope!), I have been thinking about what kind of persona would emerge from scouring the various social media platforms. To keep it professional, I plan to polish and strengthen my LinkedIn account. With time, it would be valuable to my career move to comment and/or recommend industry articles to stay on top of trends and stay current on who’s-who in education. Now, about Facebook and Twitter: I just don’t think that I will be making time to develop a brand or presence there. I like to think things through before I take a stand; however, the speed at which comments and updates are posted on those platforms is simply not appealing to me.

I had fun with the blogs in this class – highly recommend reading them if you have nothing better to do! (LOL) I didn’t think that I would enjoy writing for cyberspace, without a specific audience or real objective other than personal perspective and commentary, but I did! Maybe I could start a blog as my own soap-box and talk or rant about the precarious state of public education in the hope that someone will read it and maybe agree or offer an opposing view; I would enjoy that level of intellectual interaction… And I could promote my blog on LinkedIn and see where it might go.

For my younger classmates, I would recommend, above all else, to be cautious with what you post, who or what you “like” or whom you follow because the internet never forgets (this comes from an old Bob Seger song, “Rock ‘n roll never forgets”). Rightfully, people change, as do their priorities and taste but in a society that is fast to cast the first stone, changes in views and opinions can have lots of unintended and uncontrolled consequences. I realize that this may come across as self-censorship, but there is a difference between measuring your words and suppressing them.

Be well, be connected, be social, meet people in real life!

Response 2(50 words):

After rereading Module One, I have learned so much in this course that I can apply to my own business.  I have seen that during these 8 weeks, I have learned how to use Social Media just not as another business platform.  I plan on using digital and social media to develop my personal brand by being creative and grabbing my customers attention in every post.  I will continue to understand my audience on social platforms. I will also use digital and social media as a real way to connect with customers and not use that as a bland opportunity for a marketing promotion.

To reach my personal goals with my business, I am going to test everything and find out what will work.  I will have to give it time and be patient, which isn’t always one of my greatest virtue in life.  I am going to continue to work on being passionate about changes. 

One thing I have learned in this course is how to promote and use visual in my presentation. After doing the final project, I compared the presentation to another presentation that was roughly put together for our church play, “The Grinch who Stole Christmas”. I am now redoing that presentation and using visual and the note section to promote it to get sponsorships. I have learned a lot about social media in this course and how to use it for marketing ideas. Market research is an area that I am going to work on and continue to learn about. I will collect data and research similar companies to apply it to my market strategies.  

In the next few weeks, I will be looking into the free resources to see if any of them will be helpful in my business.  I have never done a blog before or use WordPress.  After doing these blogs for this course, I have decided that I am going to use blogs as part of the business aspect.