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| Kyle Jackson |
That kid. The one always riding a unicycle. The one always screaming death metal. The one always wearing neon pink to class every day. Whether these students are aware or not, through their uniqueness they are marketing themselves to their fellow classmates, colleagues and faculty. Yes, they are certainly memorable, but are their quirks working for or against their image?
Each action you perform, from a firm handshake to the promotion of your beliefs through a social network, for better or worse becomes a facet in the product that is your individual persona. This process, known as personal branding, is the way in which people market themselves or their careers, often in same way that an organization markets a brand. According to Dr. Neil Hair, project lead for RIT’s Innovative Learning Institute, using these concepts, students can build support networks, extend their professional reach, make memorable impressions and be the clear choice for employers.
Before becoming project lead, Hair was a full-time professor at RIT’s Saunders College of Business. He won the Eisenhart Award for Effective Teaching for his advanced online marketing course, which studied the concepts of personal branding. For years Hair has spoken at international and local conferences on the topic and it has been one of his primary and most passionate research topics. He has become an expert and has developed his own unique brand, which includes always wearing black.
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| Kyle Jackson |
Hair loves (and has always loved) the color black, and admits to being a bit of a goth at heart. He made a conscious decision to start wearing all black when he teaches, as part of his personal brand and a way to market himself to his audience. “It is something I believe in. I want to be known as that person,” says Hair. “That is just one visual cue for the people who know me to latch onto and remember me for.”
Wearing all black is just one aspect of the physical nature of his personal brand, which also includes using business cards with QR codes on the back to show that he follows current technological trends and knows what he is doing in the business space. When physically interacting with others, Hair has to consider how he presents himself, how he shakes someone’s hand or presents a business card, how he addresses others and how he can communicate most effectively.
Hair believes students need the most help with the physical dimension of personal branding. When entering college, many students do not know how to conduct themselves in a corporate setting or present themselves to future employers, which could be costly when trying to get their first job. Building a face to face strategy can make all the difference.
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| Kyle Jackson |
The other side of Hair’s personal brand is his online network, “where most people will see or interact with their perceptions of the person that is Professor Neil Hair.” Using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and his own website, Hair can portray his own life as both a professional business and a man who can have fun as a passionate home brewer and registered bartender in the state of New York. A man who is respected in the classroom yet also has a “wicked sense of humor.” Hair believes that allowing employers to see a you as a complete package is perfectly acceptable, as long as everything you does is socially appropriate.
Of course, Hair did not just generate his personal brand out of nowhere. He had to think long and hard about what image he wanted to exude and how he would go about building his network to reflect that desired image. To begin the process of creating a personal brand, Hair recommends that students do some soul searching for who they want to be and what they want out of life, using five simple questions as a guide, similar to the planning cycle for any marketing campaign.
The first question students should ask themselves is, “Where am I now?” According to Hair, in order for people to determine what their strengths and weakness are, as well as where they stand in relation to their competition, they have to ask where their reputation is currently and what they want to be known as.
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| Kyle Jackson |
Once this first point is answered, one can look towards the future and ask, “Where do I want to be?’ This is all about setting an endpoint, whether that is working at a certain company with a comfortable position and salary, or knowing inside and out the workings of one’s dream business.
The third question, “How might I get there,” looks at all of the options and tries to find the best road that will lead the individual to a successful personal brand. The question attempts to force the student to think about creating a set of criteria for judging good ideas from bad, and short-term ideas from long-term ideas.
The next question, “Which way is best,” is about the physical methods of reaching the endpoint, including what type of business card exemplifies a specific personal brand most effectively, or how to run a website to most efficiently engage networks. Hair describes this step as the “tactical components” of the brand one is trying to build.
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| Kyle Jackson |
The final question, and in Hair’s opinion the most important, is, “how do I ensure safe arrival?” This step requires setting limits for what an individual wishes to accomplish, considering a budget of time and money, and making sure goals are achieved as a means of checking performance.
While students can use industry leaders as archetypes that employers are looking for, Hair encourages students to remember that in order for a personal brand to be successful, it has to be tailored to the individual.
“It’s kind of a balance between you sitting down and thinking about who you are, where you want to go, and looking at some of the leaders in the field,” says Hair. Again, the personal brand is more about the individual than his or her field or major. A student building their brand in conjunction with the progression of their classmates is not as important as building it based on key personal objectives.
Once people complete these steps, students should know what they want to communicate through their personal brand. For Hair, his personal brand needed to “show my professionalism, how effective I am in the classroom, that I am a good friend, a good colleague and an instructor that actually cares.” Thus, when he was designing his brand, he built in features, or messages, that showcased his desired image.
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| Kyle Jackson |
One message that students should aspire to communicate to potential employers is their personal, emotional and intellectual growth over the four to five years they spend at RIT. Hair recommends that every student take a photo of themselves on day one and save a copy of their resume as baseline data at the point of entry.
“Being able to see and compare and contrast the two shows immense personal development,” says Hair. “Employers are interested in that, they want to know what bang they are getting for their buck, and one way in which you can do that is to show these development processes, and what you look like now as opposed to what you looked like before.”
With each new phase of life, which at RIT could be different each year with its new challenges and opportunities, students should reevaluate their objectives and make sure their brand still encompasses those goals. If not, it is time to change or mold the brand to fit one’s new lifestyle.
For most students, the first time this major shift in objectives will come is when they enter a management role. At that point, when the student now has people under him or her, is a natural point to start thinking about how to move the brand forward.
Hair’s own brand has had to evolve with his new title, as will often happen when new jobs come along. A new role means new work routines, new skill sets and new goals. Where Hair used to work in a classroom setting, he is now working with administration and dealing with external organizations, which is a new audience.
If he shows up to the president’s office wearing all black, Hair jokes that people will ask who died. So his personal brand has had to change. “I no longer need to be seen as an exceptional teacher, which is hopefully
the image I’ve portrayed, but someone who is also an exceptional administrator and an exceptional team player at the institute level,” says Hair.
Naturally, a brand will grow with the incorporation of new technologies, and networking platforms, but an understanding of the value of new assets in both the personal and the online realms will lead to a more efficient evolution of the personal brand.
Before looking too far ahead, Hair highly suggests that students take advantage of one of the greatest resources that RIT has to offer: its faculty. Do not be reluctant to become part of a professor’s network or engage with him or her socially, since “in not befriending those faculty you are denying yourself access to a 5,000 strong network at RIT alone.”
According to Hair, networking is the unsung hero of RIT. It is crucial that students think long and hard about whom they befriend and be even more cautious about whom they defriend. “Sure everybody falls out every so often, but defriending people can be the kiss of death for your network because it can cause knock-on effects,” states Hair.
Once an individual is lost, they cannot be used as a helping or support mechanism again. While it may not seem like it at the time, those connections can be more important than the theoretical knowledge one gains at college.
“Ten years from now, you are not going to remember what you learned in your program here at RIT, I can almost guarantee it,” says Hair. “What will stay in permanency is the network of likeminded individuals that you went to college with that are fellow RITers that care about you, want to help you, and are very happy to assist you when you got problems in your day job.”
