Showing posts with label personal branding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal branding. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Making My Hobby Site Work For Me


Just over a year ago, I started jettlandicho.com with the intention of it being my professional presence on the Internet. I planned to create content that I would be proud to show advertising industry professionals, advertising students, my mom or anyone that happened to Google my name. In an era where every employer will use the Internet to know everything there is to know about prospective hires, I wanted to make everything they found awesome. Outside of that joke Amazon.com review written in my name (thanks, Ahmed), I think I have done a decent job of taking control of the 'Jett Landicho brand'.

A few months after jettlandicho.com launched, I started another site. It's origin story was completely different. It was created as an outlet to express my thoughts and feelings in regards to a life-long hobby of mine. I intentionally didn't tell anyone I knew about the site for a number of reasons:

1) Employers probably don't care about my hobby
2) My friends don't care about my hobby like I do
3) I wanted to see how my 'anonymous' Internet effort would perform without my name attached to it

While I think points one and two still stand, I think there are some positives to be had from claiming this other site as mine. Should you be interested in my personal project and the rationale for 'outing' it, read the rest of this post.



About the Site

In Third Person is a video game blog. I may not have the credentials of IGN, Gamespot or Ice-T, but it's the only place to get video game thoughts and opinions from yours truly. I try and write everything as personable and relatable as possible so that I can provide you with a compelling third person perspective on everything relating to video games. If you value what I have to say about games, awesome. If you don't, you're more than welcome to disagree with me in the comments.

Why In Third Person Matters to Me

I love video games. I've been actively playing games for over 20 years. I've been actively following the scene and the culture since the early days of Electronic Gaming Monthly. There are a lot of thoughts and experiences I've always wanted to share but never had the outlet to express myself. This may sound cheesy, but I think having this outlet has been good for my soul. This project was birthed out of my love for video games and I hope it comes through in my work.

Why It Might Matter to You

Most of the jettlandicho.com traffic comes from potential employers looking for background information on me and from advertising students who know me through Seneca College's Creative Advertising program. Odds are, if you're in the first audience, you probably don't care about video games. I understand that.

What might be relevant to you is that In Third Person is another example of my ability to work with blogs and, in particular, the Wordpress platform. I'm still fine-tuning the blog to get the right template and plug-ins, but I know how to use it and I use this all the time. Feel free to judge me based on my ability express thoughts and ideas through interactive and social technologies.

I am also putting this out there as another means for someone to learn more about me as a person. jettlandicho.com was partially made to compensate for my lack of interactive advertising experience and my lack of a professional presence on the web. A year later, I'm fortunate to have a number of interactive and social media projects under my belt. When the time comes, I can always speak to that experience and to this blog.

Throughout this past year of working in advertising, I've also learned about the value in personality. Opportunities can be made or lost based my personality and how I would mesh with others. While who I am is framed mainly within the context of video games, I think a lot about who I am as a person shines through.

In Conclusion

In Third Person is my gaming blog that is independent of the work I do on jettlandicho.com. I'm just as proud of the content on In Third Person as I am of the content here. If you enjoy video games or just want to learn a bit more about me, head over there right now.


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Sunday, May 10, 2009

You're Gonna Love My Nuts



2 weeks ago, YouTube user djsteveporter posted this hilarious creation on YouTube. His remixing of the Slap Chop infomercial has been viewed over 1.5 million times, spawned almost 400 blog posts and 8,000 comments since release. Using a classic-era break beat and Auto-Tune, he makes an entire song and music video with the Slap Chop infomercial, starring Vince Shlomi, better known as the Sham Wow guy.

Digging into it a bit further, I discovered that the original Slap Chop infomercial has been remixed over 100 times, most of which are crude edits focused around the line, "You're gonna love my nuts!".

If you're the makers of Slap Chop, how do you feel? How do you react? Besides the fact that the star of the infomercial is in hot water for beating a prostitute, your brand is getting some serious online word-of-mouth that you may or may not want to associate your brand with. Do you get offended that people are "violating" the brand? Or are happy that people are getting some enjoyment out of it that might translate into sales, even if isn't how you originally planned?

In the age of new media, you can't really control this remixing of your brand, but if the community remembers you more for the song than someone editing your video so that your spokesperson says, "You're gonna love my nuts!" over and over, maybe it wouldn't hurt to ride this one out.


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Friday, May 1, 2009

Tips to Control Your Personal Brand

The idea of personal branding is extremely important to me. I started this blog as one way to control my personal brand, so that there were other things to find out about me besides a fake Amazon review under my name. I also started Leaders of the New as a way for other future advertisers to control their personal brand.

Yesterday, Mashable (which is quickly becoming one of my favourite blogs) posted an article about 5 ways to control your personal brand right now. If you have any sort of interest in controlling your personal brand, it's a must-read.

Thanks to the article, I signed up for a Google Profile, which will help bring up direct information about you when people try and search for you. For current and potential Leaders of the New, it wouldn't be a bad idea to post the link to your interview on your Google Profile.

I'm not going to run through all 5 tips, because the article explains it a lot better than I could. The one other thing I wanted to mention is that the E-elevator pitch is real, and happening right now.



There is a service called twtjobs, that allows users to create and distribute a resume through Twitter in 140 characters or less. When I first came up with the e-elevator pitch, I half meant it as a joke. Now it's real. Should I brush up my current pitch?



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