February 2011 Archives

I've been up to my eyeballs in social media lately, as I try my hand at wrangling Facebook pages and groups, juggling Twitter accounts for several events and talking to students about using social networks in their job search. Hopefully when you think of social media, you think of connecting with people in your community or organization. It's a powerful method of flattening an hierarchical organization and engaging with people from all corners of the world. My go-to social tools are, as most of you know, Twitter and Facebook. Recently, Linkedin created a "Year-In-Review" tool that reconnects me to updates in my professional community in a very personal way.

Personal branding is a tricky thing. You really need to understand your strengths. In my case, I like using humor, authenticity and a dash of quirkiness in my vision of personal branding. Still, despite best efforts, sometimes it's just too tough to come up with new and innovative ways to describe what you bring to the table--especially when you're trying to define that certain je ne sais quoi, those intangible characteristics that make you... well, you. 

Last week I wrote about my friend Todd Sanders (better know as @tsand) competing in the world's first "twitter fueled race" to the Super Bowl. If you've been under a rock (or unfollowed me because the #MBteamS hashtag was driving you batty) then here's the race in a nutshell: 

My friend Todd Sanders (@tsand on Twitter) is crazy, unpredictable, and always pushing the envelope--waaaay more than me. He's a web nerd at University of Wisconsin, a video fanatic and, possibly the worst of his sins the week before a Steeler's Super Bowl, a diehard Green Bay Packers fan. He's currently getting ready to in the middle of driving a Mercedes Benz with his friend and co-driver John Pederson (@ijohnpederson on Twitter) in "the world's first Twitter-fueled race." You can visit their team website, join their Facebook page, or even follow the race here (update: the link to the live tweet/fuel/race progress does not play nice in Chrome, apparently, so you will want to use another browser to watch the progress across the map and see how much fuel they have at any point). In a nutshell, Todd and John are driving an S-Class Mercedes Benz from LA to Dallas while their celebrity coach, Pete Wentz (@petewentz on Twitter, bass player and lyricist of Fall Out Boy) calls the plays.