By: Megan Clark
This past weekend, American University’s chapter of PRSSA hosted their Regional Conference, “When Two Worlds Collide: Bridging Online and Offline Communication”. Students from many different schools got the chance to network, attend panels and workshops, and listen to many great speakers. In the Two World’s Regional Conference session on Personal Branding and Landing, speakers Ashley Wolos, Jess Noonan, and Melanie Batenchuk shared the importance of social media in representing your personal brand. Topics in the session included the role of social media in the professional world, networking on and offline, maintaining our personal brand, discussing a media outreach plan, and the importance of that balance that exists between the social and professional aspects of social media. A lot of great discussions developed about identifying our passions and using our personality to build up our personal brand. The speakers spoke a bit about their own experiences through college and life after graduation, which was very relatable and made for great discussion. They each shared valuable and interesting information, which contributed to the overall discussion of personal branding and made this session a huge success.
Here are some of the tips that I learned from this session of the conference that I believe are important in the communications field:
• Be consistent across all of your social media outlets. Social media is your “online footprint” and by representing yourself similarly across the different outlets you are better presenting your personal brand.
• Identify your passion and use social media to connect with others who have that similar passion.
• Keep your eyes and your ears open for opportunities. Take on opportunities that you believe will highlight your skills and help further your career. Sometimes work opportunities are more of a diagonal side step then a direct climb up the ladder, but those kinds of opportunities are still important to pursue.
• Google yourself. How will you come across to any future employees?
• Keep your followers interested. A post is useless unless it is something that other people can connect and relate to.
• You are never locking yourself into one career for the rest of your life! Keep pursuing things that interest you and don’t be afraid to take on different positions.