Quick Breakdown of The Digital Divide

My Personal Brand Statement

What is a Personal Brand Statement? 

A Personal Brand Statement is a couple of sentences which describe your individual strengths, who you are trying to reach, and what uniqueness you offer. Ultimately it outlines your: Value, Audience, and Uniqueness. Your personal brand statement is meant to be distinctive to the individual which many times is brought to light by using a tagline. An example of this would be McDonald’s famous tagline “Have it your way”. 

There are multiple steps to take when developing your personal brand statement. Here is a condensed list of aspects to consider:

1) Ask yourself who you are. Your abilities, personality, and passions.

2) Ask yourself what you do. what are your skills, objectives, goals, experiences, missions etc.

3) Ask yourself what you sell. what services do you bring to the table, and how do you execute them?

4) Ask yourself who you want your target audience to be. And what your competitive advantage is.

5) Consider why you should be chosen and how your skills will be valuable. 

6) Formulate ways of promotion, and how you can expand your network.

7) Discover how you can improve your experience.

8) Contemplate how you will measure your reputation.

Here is my personal brand statement: 

I am a student of the world and a natural networker. I use my open-mindedness, adaptability, enthusiasm, confidence and passion for the Arts and English literature to creatively write or publicly speak on behalf of innovative companies spanning unlimited platforms concerning countless subjects. 

I came up with this brand statement by being completely honest and open with myself when deciding my focus. I drew on my most valuable skills of writing and public speaking while stating my most desirable individual qualities, representing my uniqueness. I discuss that my preferred target audience is innovative companies who need a writer/speaker to creatively enhance their own materials. Overall my personal brand statement was formed by addressing my values, audiences, and overall uniqueness. 

Below is a systematic approach to building your own personal brand statement. 

Source: Stefano Principato (Flickr)(Opens new window)

Developing your personal brand

Caroline Lewis

 

Collusion Graph

Did you know that as you browse the Web, sites track you and collect information about you? Well they do, and until policies and regulations are put in place to protect web browsers this will only become more terrifying. In order to give you a sense of how this works I have downloaded a Google Chrome App, called Disconnect, that makes this ‘tracking’ visible to you. After downloading this App I surfed the Web for only 20 min and was shown a graph of 31 websites that were on my tail grabbing info and collecting images and phrases that I searched or clicked on. This is so they, mainly Google in my case, can advertise to me according to my previous web experience. The great thing about Disconnect is that you can click on these websites and see what exactly they do. Now some of mine were advertisers and some were analytic services.  The blue circles that you see in the below picture, are the sites I went to directly, all of the red circles are sites known to keep tracking profiles for users and social network sites, and lastly the grey circles may or may not be tracking me. Overall, this collusion graph helps users understand how their personal info is being spread across the net. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE!

Caroline Lewis

Conventional Norms in an Unconventional World

You may have noticed that we are now living within technological societies which have created significant changes to our social behavior. Web 2.0 and social media culture, specifically, has revolutionized the way friends, families and coworkers communicate with one another, to name a few. Nowadays if you don’t have a social online presence you’re considered to be old fashioned or ‘outta the loop’. This way of communicating through a new medium provides us with sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, and all the rest which have now progressed into virtual communities. While these are fantastic tools for connecting with new and familiar people all over the world these communities, like our own physical geographical communities, have drawbacks. Actually many would claim that these drawbacks such as bullying, blown up recently in the media, are essentially heightened online. Accountable for this is the lack of privacy laws, security, and monitoring online, not to mention the simple fact that people can now hide behind user names and pseudonyms.

The ability to post on someone’s ‘wall’ or @ reply another without them ever having meeting you or maybe not even knowing their names gives people the freedom to say whatever they please. Whether it’s bullying, blackmailing or even the use of profanity the fact is that the bad apples tangled in the web, create social problems for themselves and for others. If you’re now wondering if your one of these careless commenters or inconsiderate photo uploaders then I have two fundamental pieces of advice for you: if you wouldn’t say something to someone in person then NEVER say it online and take a second before you post something to think about whether or not it could be offensive to anyone who may read it. Don’t be the bad apple, keep your web clean!

Caroline Lewis