My Accidental Personal Brand

[Collin Li]

http://collinli.com/2009/09/24/my-accidental-personal-brand/

Thanks VCENotes:

Although I didn’t notice it at the time, I’ve built up a valuable personal brand over the past two and a half years.

Consider the time my friend Fran randomly pasted a snippet of our MSN conversation to her friend. Her friend immediately recognised the name “coblin” (the online alias I used to commonly go by) — “isn’t he that tutor guy on that VCE forum?”

As a tutor, the demand for my services has always been more than adequate. Yet, I’ve never spent a single cent on advertising. How?

The key was through guerrilla Web 2.0 marketing. Unintentionally, my contributions to various online VCE forums created great reputation and online branding for my alias “coblin”, which then led me to become widely known amongst the online VCE community.

The advertising boards on these forums were saturated. They were free, and they had no meaning. Instead, I accidentally stumbled upon great marketing habits by linking my tutoring advertisement in my signature, so that while each forum post was generating more reputation, trust and exposure, my services were gaining more interest.

It was my personal brand that was attracting all my customers.

Since then, I’ve only recently begun to understand the fundamental principles behind my success. And I’m amazed at how well I did without these guiding principles. Additionally, I’m humbled from the entire experience of uncovering this hidden gem from the past — just when I thought I was going to leave everything all behind and tread a new path of self-driven entrepreneurship and initiative in personal discovery and development.

For me, the most natural way to leverage my established personal branding and intuitive community management and marketing talent would be through Merspi right now.

I will be responsible for developing the Merspi brand, by building on the trust that I already own with the VCE community to develop word-of-mouth marketing and to manage relationships with VCE students and tutors, as well as our entrepreneurial fan base.