My Personal Brand: Nerdiness to a New Level

This morning I read a blog post advocating that young professionals take care to present a consistent personal brand throughout all of their social media accounts. Despite my numerous faults in life I can say that this is something that I do a decent job at. I take pride in making sure that I utilize all of my personal social media channels to give my audience different content through each one while still promoting my brand and blog.

But I don’t stop pushing my consistent personal brand at a social media level. Rather I like to take it to a different, much nerdier level. I won’t sit here and lie by saying that I don’t try to acquaint people with my brand through promotional items. Before today I had premium stationary and a clothing line (okay, one t-shirt) dedicated to my blog and social media channels. Those items helped me reach an audience that doesn’t check Twitter 24/7 or own an iPhone but it wasn’t nearly enough. With my cargo that came in today via UPS I stepped everything up a notch.

Self-promotion at a totally shameful level.

Self-promotion at a totally shameful level.

Just a quick backstory before I get right to my newest item: A quirk about me that others like to make fun of is that I always carry pens with me in my pocket. Since about the age of 13 if you ever needed a writing utensil and you happened to be around me you didn’t need to scramble. You just asked me. To this day I am constantly whipping out pens for friends, co-workers, and random people to use. But I pack them more for me than for the convenience of others. I am a compulsive writer. Even though I mentioned last night that I use my iPhone notepad a lot I also jot down ideas and notes the old traditional way as well. Also, as I am a huge journaler I use ballpoint pens to write long passages every single day. Do you get it?…I use pens a lot.

When in discussion with our promotional provider rep at Grizzly Athletics, Pete, I noticed he had an interesting proposition on his e-mail signature. Advertising the special of the month it presented a very intriguing deal. For just $94.95 a customer could receive 250 custom made pens. Of course a light bulb immediately went off in my head that screamed Personal Brand + Practical Use Item + Great Deal = No Brainer. I immediately told Pete that I wanted to work with him as an individual customer for once as opposed to purchasing on behalf of my work. Within a short window of probably just 12 hours I had provided Pete with my color scheme and art work and he submitted the order.

Look how nice these turned out!

Look how nice these turned out!

Fast forward to today and I was grinning from ear to ear when I picked up a cardboard box full of my newest personal marketing item. With 262 total pens (yep, the manufacturer threw in a few extra) I knew I had to start spreading the wealth. Upon getting back to the office I distributed the blue trimmed writing utensils to my co-workers throughout the athletic department. That managed to clean me out of about 5% of my stash. With still a plethora of high quality, personal branded pens left that would take me 15 lifetimes to draw all the ink out of I know I need to find another way to get these in the hands of more people.

Read below and I will tell you how you can get one of these pens I am holding.

Read below and I will tell you how you can get one of these pens I am holding.

With that said, I would love to give my loyal readers a Don’t Blink pen. To make the request process legitimate and to protect against randos spamming this blog in island countries you must text me if you want a pen. If you don’t know my number and are not a spammer, reach out to me over social media and I will hook you up by mailing a pen off to you.

These pens work great!

These pens work great!

Thank you to Exact Image and Pete Aklestad for doing an awesome job on my order and providing me with a great product. You won’t believe how beautiful these things write. Don’t Blink.

The $1,000 Stunt

As I watched the news this morning, I heard about the most spectacular display of self-promotion at a bang for your buck level that I never had before imagined. As I heard the main details that made the stunt so great mixed in with the “human element” B.S. that likely never happened, all I could say to myself was well played.

On Black Friday, a man went to the top level of the Mall of America and proceeded to throw 1,000 dollar bills over the railing and onto the shoppers and performers on the main level of the gigantic shopping center. Fittingly enough, the performers I mentioned made up a holiday choir that just happened to be singing “Let It Snow”. As he threw the cash over the railing he made his way to an escalator where he started to descend down while tossing the remaining bills overboard. Confused shoppers looked on in disbelief, smart shoppers started scooping up the money.

The man’s name is Serge Vorobyov. He just lost his car hauling business and is currently going through a divorce. Early reports tried to paint Serge as a courageous and down on his luck guy who wanted to perform a selfless and desperate act to win back his wife. Word also spread that he used the last $1,000 to his name to fund the stunt.

Well, once the guy started talking to more cameras it became evident that he really had no intention of winning back his wife. In fact, she knew about his plans. Also, by no means did he throw his last few remaining dollars away to strangers. His main line right now about the whole deal is that he wanted to do “some sort of pay it forward kind of thing.” Ummm…sure.

I question his stated motive because people who like to do, as he calls it, “pay it forward kind of thing(s)” usually do it anonymously (like this occurence that happened in Missoula this summer). Anonymously in that they don’t sit down for interviews, don’t splash the event across their Facebook wall, and definitely don’t stamp their YouTube address on every single dollar bill they throw over a railing. Yes, all one thousand of those bills directed the recipient to visit his YouTube page.

So while I call the media’s claim that he did it for love as pathetic and while I find his claim that he did it out of goodwill as shameful, I find the act in and of itself as genius.

In my mind, Serge pulled off one of the greatest and most successful guerrilla marketing stunts in modern history and he did it with himself as the sole benefactor! Sure $1,000 might seem like a lot to some people but in the world of online, print, and television ads it is peanuts. He took that cash and not only stretched it so that hundreds of people in a shopping mall could experience it and become exposed to his message but by catching the eye of the national media he also exposed the entire country to it. What a fun, creative, and most importantly, profitable way to market yourself.

Many of us work hard to establish our own personal brand. The cool/scary reality is that we are all capable of pulling off a stunt like Serge and receiving national acclaim. I mean if I wanted to I could rent a hot air balloon, take out all the money I have in the bank, float over a densely populated area, and start dropping $20 bills that had my blog URL written on it. I would probably get arrested but many would argue that the media attention, the huge spike in my blog readership, and the place in infamy that I would receive for the stunt would far outweigh the legal problems and the financial issues that I would incur. But it is definitely a risk; a type of risk that Serge was willing to take but that I am not.

 

The most daring I have gotten with promoting myself is making stationery!

The most daring I have gotten with promoting myself is making stationery!

 

And that is what separates Mr. Vorobyov from me and most of everyone else in this world. He had the guts to do something pretty crazy. Because of his willingness to take a big chance and because of the creative way in which he did it, I salute him. I just wish he didn’t lie about the reason for doing it. Don’t Blink.