First, start a blog. Your marketing blog is your resume. You can start one here at Notre Dame at http://blogs.nd.edu or you can use wordpress. Here you will talk about ideas on marketing and whatever industry you would like to be a part of and what is currently successful right now in real time.
Fill your blog with your successes as well and good thorough About Me page. People will read it. Be clever, fun and creative. Use good photography. It’s important. Very important.
Next, make sure your linkedin profile is up to date. Link up with everyone you can in marketing that you respect. Most people don’t have problems with linking up there. Tell them you want to learn from them or that you follow their careers and you want to do what they do. People love that. Take all your Facebook friends and make the links on linkedin. If your friends aren’t on linkedin, encourage them to get out there. Link up with groups in marketing and be active on them. Do the same for your alumni linkedin groups.
Facebook (while it’s nice to have a good profile) it’s better if you are running pages especially successful ones. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Talk about that on your blog. Reference your pages on your blog.
Twitter – you can be active here but use it mostly to follow the professionals in your field that are cutting edge and successful at marketing. You’ll learn lots here. Help them by retweeting what they are doing and saying. They will take notice after a while.
Use your blog to highlight these other professionals occasionally. They google themselves and have alerts on their names. Some may even comment on your stuff. Here’s a tip that I’ve heard worked for a guy. Buy Google adwords for people that could possibly hire you – it’s cheap and people google themselves all the time. You’ll show up as an ad. Link it to a page just for them on your blog. It worked for this guy.
One thing you should know is that social media marketing is hard to do successfully. It is also better if you are well-rounded individual in marketing knowledge not just social media. Social media is a shiny object right now and it may get your noticed but probably not a job. A good marketer will have event experience, email marketing, copy and graphics knowledge with a track record of successful campaigns to talk about will probably get the job. So keep track of all those successful campaigns (on your blog) and reference them a lot when interviewing. Experience will win (especially experience with traditional marketing integrated with new media) over knowledge.
Oh yes, buy your name (like donschindler.com) and point it to your blog (I use wordpress for blogging, it’s great). Make sure you facebook has the vanity username like facebook.com/donschindler and your twitter.
For offline personal branding, make sure you attend as many events that you can around marketing and the industry you want to be in. Join your ND club, go to the events, make friends and connections. Always be prepared to be interviewed. You never know who you might run into that will get you a job.
Good luck. Let me know if there are any tactics that you’ve used as well.
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