In some cultures, building a personal brand is considered an anathema. Something that is really frowned upon. But the Generation Z does not really think that ways. A recent survey highlighted that Instagram is the new favorite of this generation; much over Facebook. Narcissism is on the rise! In such an environment, it is important to at least have the tools to create a personal brand.

In the context of admission applications, especially where students need to project their story and build a narrative around few key pivots, they are necessarily following a process very similar to creating and projecting a personal brand. How well they communicate their own personal brand would determine whether they would make it or not.

Reading through Gary Vaynerchuk’sCrushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence – And How You Can, Too, it becomes obvious that the first step is to build a personal brand. And in the modern boundary-less social media world, this becomes even more important. From our perspective, the admissions office staff of any good university usually does a look-around of your digital footprint looking for additional endorsement of your application claims, and therefore it is imperative that you learn how to manage your online presence well.

Gary has a simple 8 factor model for building your personal brand:

• Intent
• Authenticity
• Passion
• Patience
• Speed
• Work
• Attention
• Eighth essential - Content

When we unpack each of these factors, it goes back to basic human behavior – good intent and authenticity builds trust, passion is the driving force, but patience is the key to overcome speed breakers on the path to success. Displaying speed and hard work while paying attention to details gives you the edge over others. But the most essential factor is the eighth one – creating authentic content and sharing it extensively across all kinds of platforms. Specially focus on pieces that speak to the generation that your audience belongs to – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn are usual ones that most admission officers are likely to glance through at least. Newer media platforms like Musical.ly and SnapChat are also getting popular and can be used smartly to backup your claims.

Actually, you can look at all of these mediums as liberators that allow you to tell your story to the world, and therefore can work wonders in helping your business or admission purposes. We have had students whose claim to authenticity was solely based on the number of YouTube followers or the number of times their code was forked on Github.

But it would help if you start early and slowly build it up, rather than doing it all at once just to meet a specific target. Remember the first two points – intent and authenticity!

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