Mike Abasov

So here we are. You already know that, in order to become really successful, you need to step up your game, which we will, from now on, call personal branding.

Sure, personal branding is not yet a must for becoming successful but only in cases where success is directly related to your achievements.

If being successful means to you being the best at doing what you love, then dive into the activities described below and start building your brand now!

Warning

I should warn you that taking these steps will make you forget 2 words from your vocabulary: boredom and free time.

Boredom. You will never be bored, if you are actively working on achieving success by doing something you like. You will be excited, full of passion, tired but fulfilled. Bored — never. 

Free time. You won’t have any free time, because you won’t need it. Don’t worry, you will still party and have fun, and date. But those days when you didn’t know how to entertain yourself are forever over. You can now find entertainment in work, and this is your first step to happiness.

Action Plan

Here are 5 simple activities that will help you start branding yourself.

1. Join student clubs.
Check out any student clubs you find interesting and get into a few! You’re not making any commitments, so don’t worry about joining too many — you can drop them along the way.

For every club you’ve joined, participate in their events. Try them out!

You will meet new people, and people = opportunities. Every job I had, I had got because of the people I knew. Networking is extremely important.

You will also figure out what you like, develop your palette of interests.

2. Become active online.
Yes, it’s time you get on Twitter. Start tweeting about the stuff you like, the books you read, the things you do to become successful. Tweet about this article, after all!

Putting yourself out there will help you show everyone who you are and what you do, leading to conclusions about why you are better than your competition, why you should be hired.

I don’t advise you get into blogging right away, but if you feel like it, go ahead!

3. Learn. More.
Curriculum is good. Extra-curriculum is extra-good. Start reading blogs and books about your profession, watching documentaries and going to conferences. Absorb avery bit of information and be hungry for more.

Then share your knowledge with your new friends from student clubs and followers on Twitter.

4. Increase productivity.
You might not feel this pain yet, but as you become more and more active with your life, you’ll understand how scarce the time is as a resource. So start early! Here’s a list to consider: speed reading, time management, life-hacking, utilizing commute time.

The more efficiently you can use time, the more you will be able to achieve before graduation.

5. Read this blog.
And subscribe to the “Awesome Sunday” newsletter, for god’s sake! :)

Summing up

Every point mentioned here, I will be discussing on the pages of this blog in detail. There is a lot more to learn about personal branding and other aspects of improving your college life. But these few tips will get you started.

Are you doing any of these already? What exactly? How is it working out for you?

This is not a hardcore tip but, for many people, not an obvious one either. Of course, you can go search for tags like “marketing” or “ubc,” or else, if you like. But the following idea I got from Twitter. Remember when you checked whom your followers follow to see if there were any cool folks out there? This is just like that.

So, what I do is I go to a tumblr post like, say, the latest video from Gary Vaynerchuk. Then I look for notes on the page. Here they are:

All these people use tumblr and like stuff that you like. Now go and check out their blogs! This way I’ve found many interesting people like, for example, Derek Jensen.

On another note, I’m collecting blogs of my readers/followers to read them and connect better. So leave a link to your blog in the comment section below!

Continuing the “Twitter Monitoring Series.” Check out the other posts for the basic things implemented in the following advices.

You can learn a lot from your competitors. Businesses should monitor what is happening in the market, so here are a few things that make monitoring easy:

1. List your competitors. Create a private list of your competition and a stream for it. See what they tweet about, how they act and how you can use that to your advantage.
2. Search for brand names. Set up a search using the previous tips and examples to monitor what people are saying about your competition. Sometimes, they’ll be looking for alternatives or complaining about bad service, and this is a great opportunity for your company to turn these people into your customers.

Here is an awesome search stream that Toyota could use to monitor people talking about Honda (see an opportunity in the first tweets?):

This post ends the series. If there is anything else you’d like to know, tell me, and I might write about it too. Also, take a look at my super-engaging-tip.

Continuing the “Twitter Monitoring Series.”

Search for people talking about your topic (e.g. free website builders) and you will find many potential customers that you can approach. You will also be on top of all trends and know what’s happening in the industry. Let’s use the HootSuite keywords tool to set up a stream for “website builder,” “free cms,” “create website.”

The problem with this search is that people tweet A LOT about this, and it becomes impossible to follow. There are 3 things you can do to make your search awesome:

1. Divide. Instead of using one combined search query, try using 3 separate. Here is the stream for “website builder.”
   
2. Use question marks. Add a question mark to the query, and you will only see people asking questions.
   
3. Cut the links. This move will save you from most of the spam, blog posts and other irrelevant tweets. Add “-filter:links” to cut off any messages with links. You can also write “-http” to save space.
   
4. Use Klout. You can filter your stream by Klout Score to see tweets from influential people. This can help to find high-profile customers or potential clients.
   
   Note: not all of your customers are going to have a high Klout Score. The relationship looks like this: the average Klout Score of the customers is as high as geeky the brand/topic is.

This is all for today. Please share your tips in the comments below or/and share this article with your friends, if you like it! Tomorrow I’ll talk about monitoring your competition.

This post is a part of the “Twitter Monitoring Series.”

There is no brand that people don’t talk about on Twitter. You might not know it yet, but it is most probable that there are at least few tweets that mention your company or products, and you can you these tweets to get profit (not only in terms of money but also relationships and exposure).

There are 3 good techniques that can help you set up super-effective streams in HootSuite:

1. Search for your brand name. Search for your company’s name, your products’ names and your public people’s names. Use Twitter Search Operators like “OR” to combine different variations of the names in one stream.
2. Search for common misspellings. Sometimes people will misspell your name, but it doesn’t mean you have to loose those tweets. Search for common misspellings to get much more results and combine them in one stream to save space. For example, here are 2 different ways to search for Starbucks and 2 different results that you get:
   
   Note: Usually, it is not the best idea to correct misspellings of the people you don’t know, so I don’t advise you to tell every single person how to spell your brand name correctly. 
3. Search for you domain name. This wouldn’t work for everyone, but sometimes it is good to search for your domain name. Sometimes, people won’t write your name but will give a link to your website, and if your domain name is different from your company’s name, you can search for it too. On the image below, I’ve highlighted 2 tweets that would not have showed up in a regular “hootsuite” search stream: 
    
4. Specify language. Sometimes you might want to see only tweets in English. In this case, add “a” or “the” to the query which are distinctive elements of the language. 
5. Monitor the customers. Create a list of your customers and a tab with their tweets. See what they are interested in and get into discussions.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about monitoring your topic, so don’t forget to come by!

Twitter monitoring is definitely one of the most powerful social media tactics out there. This is the best way to easily get feedback, find customers, research competition and start effectively reaching out, engaging and building a community. And there is no doubt that HootSuite is the best tool you can use for Twitter monitoring.

To monitor effectively, HootSuite allows you to save your search queries as streams. Moreover, as you might have many and many different queries, you can use tabs to combine and divide everything into groups. This allows you to keep track of everything without any mess.

For example, you can create tabs for the mentions of your company, about your topic and/or about your competitors. Let’s see what we can find in each case.

So this week, I decided to talk about awesome Twitter monitoring techniques, and here is the list of the posts that I’ve written so far:

• How to Monitor Your Brand on Twitter?
• How to Monitor Your Topic on Twitter?
• How to Monitor Your Competition on Twitter?