Category: Technology

How to Build a Personal Brand Online

If you’re looking for a way to stand out from the crowd and showcase your skills, passions and personality, building a personal brand online is a great option. A personal brand is essentially how you present yourself to the world through your online presence. It’s what people think of when they hear your name or see your content.

But how do you build a personal brand online? What are the steps and best practices to follow? In this blog post, I’ll share some tips and insights from my own experience of creating and growing my personal brand online.

Define your niche and target audience
The first step to building a personal brand online is to decide what you want to be known for and who you want to reach. What are your unique strengths, skills, interests, and values? What problems can you solve or value can you provide for others? Who are the people that would benefit from your content or services? Having a clear niche and target audience will help you craft your message and tailor your content accordingly.

Create a website and social media profiles
The next step is to create a website and social media profiles that showcase your personal brand. Your website is your home base on the internet where you can share your portfolio, blog posts, testimonials, contact information, and more. Your social media profiles are where you can connect with your audience, share valuable content, and build relationships. Make sure that your website and social media profiles have a consistent look and feel that reflects your personal brand identity.

Produce high-quality content regularly
Content is the key to building trust, authority, and visibility online. You need to produce high-quality content that showcases your expertise, provides value for your audience, and aligns with your niche and goals. You can create different types of content such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, ebooks, newsletters, infographics, etc., depending on what suits your style and platform best. The most important thing is to be consistent in producing content regularly so that you can grow your audience and establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Engage with your audience and network with others in your industry
Building a personal brand online is not only about creating content but also about engaging with your audience and networking with others in your industry. You need to interact with your followers by responding to their comments or messages, asking for feedback or opinions, sharing their content and thanking them for their support. You also need to network with other influencers or experts in your niche by following them, commenting on their posts, sharing their content, collaborating with them on projects, or reaching out for advice or opportunities. By engaging with your audience and networking with others in your industry, you can build relationships, increase your reach, and boost your credibility.

Keep learning and improving
The last step to building a personal brand online is to keep learning and improving yourself. The online world is constantly changing and evolving, so you need to stay updated on the latest trends, tools and best practices in your niche. You also need to keep honing your skills, expanding your knowledge and exploring new opportunities to grow your personal brand. You can learn and improve yourself by reading books or blogs, taking courses or workshops, attending events or webinars, or hiring coaches or mentors.

Building a personal brand online is not an easy task but it’s definitely worth it if you want to achieve success in today’s digital world. By following these steps above, you can create an authentic, memorable and impactful personal brand that will help you reach more people, create more opportunities and make more money.

In the style of alexseward.com, write a blog post on a new topic.
Bing AI chat, 22/03/23

Augmented Intelligence

We’re pretty complicated, and that’s what makes us special.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fantastic at making binary decisions through processing data. If you can break down a task into data, AI will be able to learn it. However, despite being the current zeitgeisty technology, it is not good at all at improvising or ‘thinking’ abstractly. Artificial Intelligence algorithms are literally trained to be a Jack of none, master of one.

Unlike the binary logic of an algorithm, our decision making systems are multi-dimensional. Humans can feel, imagine and dream. They are emotionally driven, and will flow between rational and irrational states. They’re imperfect, but everyone is unique and can create things that no one else can.

My extremely unscientific visual of Human (left) and AI (right) decision making

With current computing logic, human intelligence and artificial intelligence should not be compared and seen as competitive. In fact, they are fundamentally different and should be seen as complimentary. I love the term Augmented Intelligence, as this shows the compute power being used as a tool to support and empower people, rather than a human redundancy mechanism. There is no denying there will be disruption to the roles and tasks that we do, but with the ‘right’ ethical code and change management, this should be seen as a positive evolution for us all. Of course, the ‘right’ approach here is very much up for debate.

The future of this technology is uncertain as it is progressing at such an incredible pace, but I am hoping for a future with more tools to augment our intelligence, and outsourcing our data processing tasks to focus on what makes us unique. AI should be the axe or saw, and not the lumberjack or carpenter.

Cultural change in music consumption

I recently saw a post about Audius (https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/08/audius/) and it got me thinking. I like the idea but I think this video explains the current landscape of the music industry well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQT6UfvyGP8.

In 2017, music artists received only 12% of the $43 billion generated in music industry revenue in the United States… and the top 10% of most streamed tracks account for 99% of all streams. The business model barely works for the most famous artists, and often fails the independent artists without record label capital.

A technology solution such as blockchain may help in providing a platform for speeding up the royalties process, but as suggested in the Pitchfork video, there is a cultural change needed to support the lesser known independent artists Audius is aiming to help. A shift to purchasing and streaming this music and merchandise through platforms such as Bandcamp, and buying tickets to see them live, is the only we can start to turn the tables to support these artists.

Reimagined: TicketWeb

Inspired by the following tweet (with expletives removed) from popular electronic music artist Deadmau5, my next Reimagined post will be focused on TicketWeb. However, this is equally relevant for any of the multitude of ticketing platforms available. Even my beloved Liverpool FC have recently been working with private investigators who specialise in ticket touting to tackle these issues, and this is something I believe can be alleviated greatly by a digital solution.

One of the biggest issues as a regular attendee to sports and music events is ensuring you are getting a genuine ticket at a reasonable price. Waiting eagerly before repeatedly refreshing your browser across multiple devices; only to find you have been pipped to the post by a bot. You then must turn to a resale site, and often pay significantly above the retail price. This then transpires to be a fake ticket, which you only find as you get to the event. You receive a refund from the resale site, but you have missed the event.

Ticket platforms need to provide a service which directly tackles the use of bots, guarantees the authenticity of the ticket, and provides the user with a sense of trust. An important component of this is in digitising the tickets, ensuring there can only be one version of each ticket, where ownership can only be transferred via the digital service for the original retail price. This ensures all tickets are genuine and will be owned and only accessible to the person who will be attending the event. One of the great advantages of this initiative will be ownership of the customer record for the ticketing platform, which today is not possible, where often one person will buy a few tickets for their group of friends. This will also ward off bots being used as there is no profit to be made in resale.

The current resale sites are often owned by the original ticketing platform, and so they see a percentage of the resale for facilitating the transaction. This can still be offered as a service for allowing the transfer of the digital ticket between two users, and so is unlikely to reduce revenue significantly, outside of the sales which go to bots and then are not resold. However, by guaranteeing that all tickets are with a real person, and this person will use it at the point of entry to the event, there is the additional potential to gather great user data to improve the service based on actual attendance to events. This can be used to build smarter recommendation engines to provide more personalised recommendations for future events, and possible integration with relevant services such as Spotify.

Reimagined: Mothercare

I often find myself thinking about and discussing opportunities for business model transformation, and so thought it might be interesting to document these in a series I am calling ‘Reimagined’.

For the first edition, I will look at Mothercare. Facing significant slowdown in customer traffic to its high street stores, alongside a recent growth in online sales, Mothercare is actively engaged in a store rationalisation programme. To compliment this, I have suggestions for a complete change in how Mothercare’s customers engage with the brand.

Aiming to be the ‘number one specialist for parents’, Mothercare has a unique opportunity to advise and provide all the good and services that parents will need from pre-birth to the child becoming a toddler. Parents will have a limited time with which they interact with Mothercare, and especially for new parents, will look to them for ‘expert’ advice. A move from transactional one-off purchases, to a monthly subscription or perhaps a 3/4 year agreement, would allow Mothercare to proactively advise and provide all of the required products that a parent will need for their child. This will likely take away significant stress in identifying and finding these products, and allow the parent to focus on themselves and their child. This can also be accompanied by digital services which provide the parents with relevant information they require at the different stages of the child’s journey, allowing Mothercare to provide this ‘expert’ level of advice to its customers.

In order to make this experience more personalised, this new offering could come as an extension of the My Mothercare reward club, building on top of the insight Mothercare has into its customers. Also, due to the time-bound usage of these products, there is the opportunity for Mothercare to create a community and marketplace around recycling and reuse of products, where this is appropriate. This is a market which already exists on generic marketplace sites, and so Mothercare can add value by facilitating the connection between its customers and creating this focused community, and benefit financially via platform administration charges.

Mothercare as a service? Providing all of the goods and services the parent needs during their limited-time interaction with the brand, whilst creating a second-hand marketplace and community of its customers to enable longer term brand interaction and value. Creating more predictable revenue from online sales, as well as enabling a shift of the remaining brick & mortar stores to become click and collect fulfilment centres, advisory clinics and community centres for subscription members.

Brb…

“Be right back” “Got to go” “What have you been up to?”… although shortened to their text versions, these were common phrases I used with my friends daily on MSN Messenger in the mid to late 2000’s. We had instant communication, but we were not always connected. Now with the integration of smartphones into our lives, and applications being available across all platforms, these conversations and updates on people’s life activities are almost constant. We went from instant messaging to always on, and with that, the concept of leaving… left.

I’m not going to argue whether this change is better or worse, but it was fascinating to me that the use of these phrases in online communication came and went so quickly. The pace of change in technology and the impact this has on our language and communication styles is undeniable.

Anyway gtg, speak soon!

The Asylum

Whilst moving to a new iPhone, the photos app decided to go a bit crazy with my iCloud albums and download random pictures from the last 7 years. One of them was this; taken in my friend Jon’s university bedroom, at 3:25am on 23rd October 2011.


Jon, our friend Sam, and I had a common love for electronic music and wanted to create a platform to share this with the world. We spent all night working on the concept for the brand, and the website that would be the hub of this. Over the next couple of years, we went onto create a semi-successful YouTube channel, with supporting Facebook and Twitter accounts. We connected with many similar people, built relationships with producers and record labels, and even had a short lived run on our University radio.

However, what I now realise is this process allowed me to develop some digital marketing and web design knowledge, improve my networking skills, as well as learning how to produce a radio show. These experiences have both intrinsically helped in developing these skills, but also in creating stories to tell at interviews and in my current role. It also taught me a very valuable lesson… you are not bigger than copyright law!

 

Real-Time Decision Making

I was engaged in a recent conversation about the true value of real-time data in enabling business decision making and enhancing the customer experience. To understand this, you must first look at yourself in your day to day to life.

One of the best examples I can see for myself is the use of maps and GPS. When my dad first got a Sat Nav for the car, it was amazing that you could type in the postcode of somewhere you’ve not been before, and barring any diversions down waterlogged roads or any new road layouts that have yet to be updated, you would make it to your destination. However, fast forward to today and the way I use this technology, and it has fundamentally changed. The internet connection alongside the GPS has enabled the experience to become a lot more intelligent, by providing real-time traffic data. I will now use maps software on the majority of journeys I do, including routes I know very well like my commute to the office. This is because the service will allow me to make better decisions and take diversions along the route to avoid unnecessary traffic.

This data-driven experience and instant real-time decision making will resonate with you in some way I’m sure, and so now we expect at least parity in our interactions with businesses. For me, the only way you can stay ahead, or even keep up with these customers is to play at their speed. Is it still ok for your Facebook site to state ‘Typically replies within a day’ when your competitors have helpful chatbots enabling their page to state ‘Typically replies instantly’?