The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [99]
As a result of all this name recognition, demand for her services is booming, and she is now charging $100/hour for her consulting (any recent liberal arts grads out there like that figure?). All of this smack-dab in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Marian is certainly doing a lot better than her fellow classmates. “I think one person whom I graduated with has a full-time job; everyone else is struggling or has taken a bunch of part-time jobs. This guy I graduated with had a bunch of honors and fancy awards—he was very, very smart. He’s working at Starbucks because he can’t get a job anywhere else.”
In addition to her lucrative freelancing over the Internet and Skype, which allows her to divide her time between London, New Zealand, and New York, Marian also now sells a course she’s created online, called the “Pajama Job Hunt,” so that others can have the same success she’s had in using social media and personal branding to get jobs.
Marian’s advice to recent grads? She told me: “Every industry, from what I’ve found, has the top 20 blogs and people who are the online influencers. You need to get online and make friends with them, and read everything you can and comment on those blogs. Let’s say you want to get into nonprofit, you would Google ‘nonprofits on Twitter’ and you’ll almost certainly find that someone has written a list of the ‘Top 25 Non-Profits on Twitter,’ or the top hospitals or ad agencies or whatever. Literally, it does not matter what industry you want to be in, there is a community of those people on Twitter. Network where those people are and make friends with them. I mean it’s really not that difficult. Get a Twitter profile and just start engaging with that community around your desired industry and profession; you then become known in that community and then it becomes easier to get a job.
“Ignore your career counselor and don’t even stress about your resume—have a good one because people will ask for it, but don’t put too much emphasis on it. Build an online presence. In my generation, the whole Facebook social media thing is for connecting with your friends and posting pictures of you doing Jell-O shots. But you can do so much more with it.”
In short, none of Marian’s success depended in the slightest on the fact that she had a college degree and a polished resume, or on anything she studied in school. It depended on her being savvy about building a brand for herself.
■ THE CONCEPT OF “BRAND” EXPLAINED IN ONE SENTENCE
Perhaps no single word in the English language has more overblown puffery, smoke and mirrors, and verbal diarrhea written around it than the word “brand.” If you wanted to, you could spend a small fortune on a library full of books about the concept, and you could go drop twenty-five grand, a hundred grand, or even a million bucks on some corporate consultant to “brand” you, the word having become a verb as well as a noun.
I’m about to cut through all the bullshit and give you a onesentence definition of the word:
Your brand is what people think about when they hear your name.
Voilà, I’ve just saved you tens of thousands of dollars in hiring “brand consultants,” and years wading through books full of trendy, semimystical corporate-speak about “brand leverage.”
If people think “trustworthy, confident, intelligent, funny, hip, savvy, and up-and-coming” when they hear your name, then that is your brand.
If people think “wannabe loser