I wish I were a marketer! I’d blog about….

A few posts ago I talked about creating a personal brand or identity through your blog. I gave the example of the marketing communications specialist that could really put this into practice.

Since then I’ve come across two marketing “things” (if I were a marketer I’d know what these were called) that I thought were awesome! If I were a marketing communications expert I’d create two separate blogs on each of these:

Thing 1: There is a running shoe store in American Fork (for local flavor, you can pronounce it “fark”), Utah that used to be called Hoppers. Pretty cute, I thought. The building is small but on a great intersection, with tons of cars passing all day long. Their old wooden sign was well worn, and I figured that Hoppers had been there for a long time.

I drove by yesterday (I haven’t been down there for about 6 months) and I saw they changed the name to… 26.2. At first I was thinking “radio station” but right away I got it – marathon!! Awesome! This is who they are… hoppers is fun and cute, 26.2 is all about bragging rights. Very clever!

Thing 2: I was gassing up in downtown Salt Lake at a 7-11 and the big ad on top of the gas thing (maybe I use this word too much) said “Free car with purchase of every slurpee“… and then right below that it said something like “just kidding. Now that we have your attention” blah blah blah.

I loved it!

Its amazing how you have to put those lame warning signs on things like blow dryers and lawn mowers (like, don’t operate in your living room or something dumb like that), but these guys can basically get you all excited about winning a free car…. and it works! I remember that stuff, which is what the marketers want.

Okay, so now I’ve proven I’m not a MarCom expert. Back to my point – these two things right here would be great to pick apart. It would be two weeks worth of blogging (one per week? Is that enough?) Imagine doing this for 10 or 20 weeks. And then going to a job interview, and anyone that interviews you has read your blog. Allowing them to peek into your brain like this could be more powerful than a shiny resume, or acing the interview. They can get substance and really tap into you!

Can you see how developing this type of personal brand could be so potent! As long as you do it the right way you will only be increasing your job security for years to come, as you develop yourself as an expert.

Here are two examples of bloggers that have been successful to this end (if you are serious about doing this, go through their blogs and try and pick out things that have made them successful – note this is different than bloggers that are just blogging about their job search process, which is okay, but you are not necessarily building a personal brand):

Russ – PR Expert – good job Russ!

Joel Cheesman’s blog has given him credibility as an expert, and look what it has done to his consulting business! This is what I’m talking about.

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BTW, here is a new job board from Joel: https://www.ucheez.com/addsite/share.php

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Update (October 14, 2006) – this post gets 99% of my spam comments so I’m turning off comments FOR THIS POST ONLY.  If you want to discuss it shoot me an e-mail (go to the contact us page on JibberJobber).