Personal Narcissism, I mean, Branding
Personal branding sounds narcissistic, and really, it is, but it is an adaptive measure needed to be taken to set you apart from the rest. To escape mediocrity, we must differentiate ourselves from others especially if they compete within our niche. Today’s niche is the job market, of which there are few suppliers and plenty of demand. One available position, a stack of two hundred resumes, any excuse means that you are cut from the stack. Impossible odds, sure, but you can use the laws of probability in your favor. How so? Differentiate!
How am I differentiating myself with this blog, which rests upon a blogpile numbering in the millions?
(sidenote, I checked if blogpile.com exists and indeed it does, drat!)
I built a tool. My programming knowledge is not deep but it is fairly expansive. I’ve been tinkering away like a doozer with computers since I was ten years old. To keep things in perspective, my first computer that I wrote a program on was a TRS-80. Remember those? Mine was actually portable.
Anyway, I used this janky web of knowledge to weave together code that can help me gain a competitive advantage with this blog. So, like I said, I built a tool.
What this tool does is aggregate tweeter feeds. It streams all of the feeds into one table in the database. Every three minutes. 24 hours a day. The tool then displays the feeds, seventy tweets at a time. In real time. I can search for tweets based on keyword. What is very important about this tool is that I hand pick tweets and put them on my blog. I simply select “keep”, “don’t keep” or “think about it” and select the blog category. In rapid fashion I can parse through 200 tweets or more per hour. Since there are 8 categories and I need about ten tweets per category per day, that’s about 25 minutes of work.
25 minutes of work rests upon a theory. The theory is that hand-picked tweets add content to each category of your blog AND will eventually allow for better Google rankings. I hacked and slashed wordpress (god, it felt so good doing it) and added my own tweet streams wherever I wanted. Within my own domain I controlled flows of information.
Ah yes, personal branding.
Proving with actions and with results that you can innovate contributes to your personal brand.
Innovation == differentiation. See that double ==? That’s programming talk. Isn’t it cute?
I am a somewhat slow programmer, it did take a few days to get back into the game and get this right.