Online social networks have more to offer than access to pictures of last weekend’s party or 140 characters about what a friend ate for breakfast; a person can also use the Internet to create a “personal brand,” a picture of their identity that can be gleaned from their online activity.

But as the popularity of personal branding spreads in the workforce, the question is: how are students using it — and how should they?

According to Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center, “any information you have on the Internet shapes your personal brand, whether it’s on a blog, Facebook, MySpace, articles about you. It’s so easy for people to gather that information about you by doing a search.”

While the concept of personal branding has been around at least since Tom Peters’ 1997 essay “The Brand Called You,” the exponential growth of online social media within the last decade has dramatically increased the feasibility of managing one’s own brand. The change stems from the fact that now, “communication is cheap,” said Andreas Weigend, a professor of management science and engineering.

Weigend teaches a spring quarter class at Stanford called “The Social Data Revolution: Data Mining and Electronic Business,” which carries prerequisites including “intellectual curiosity” and a “willingness to implement in the real world.”

Whereas in the past, employers had a very limited ability to communicate with their potential employees, “the great thing about the Web is…we have more information about that other person,” Weigend said.

“That thing in the past that you put your resume somewhere, then some recruiters might come by, and based on that one page of black dots on paper, they decide to invite you in, and then based on one other day…they make you a job offer — what an absurd thing of the past! The game now is interactivity,” he added.

Weigend believes more online sharing is almost always a good thing. Even pictures of people at parties can make a favorable impression on employers, assuming the activity isn’t outright illegal, because the pictures reveal that their subjects “have a good life-work balance,” he said.

Choy was more wary about the negative impact that Facebook photos can have on students’ personal brands. He said he tells students to be very careful about their privacy settings.

“If their Facebook site is open…they really need to be careful about the image they are projecting there, so wild party shots, or sometimes the comments we make on our personal sites, are a little wilder than an employer would like to see in a potential employee.”

On the other hand, Choy acknowledged, there are distinct benefits for those students who understand how to create a personal brand.

One such student is David Brody ’11, a computer science major who has a personal website and a resume posted on Monster.com. He said his website “has changed over time because I want to make sure it shows my skill level and what I want to show. But it shows everything from the work that I’ve done before to my resume and stuff about me.”

Not all students are as tech-savvy.

“I don’t think there are a lot of students out there creating websites about who they are and shaping their personal brand. This is a fairly new concept, and not many people are doing things like that,” Choy said.

Brody said after he posted his resume online in high school, he would get “maybe two, three, four phone calls every few weeks with job offers.” But, he feels, putting a resume online might not make sense for everyone.

“It’s better to spend the 10 minutes sending an e-mail to a professor saying ‘I’m interested in this, I want to try this,’ than spending the 10 minutes posting your resume online because having that connection with that professor here is something that most people around the world would die to have,” he said.

Natalie Sudikoff ’12, by contrast, is one of the few Stanford students who does not have a Facebook profile.

“I prefer to interact with people not in cyberspace,” Sudikoff said. “Going to an interview and actually talking to somebody, I think that’s so much more telling than what kind of pictures and what kind of interests you can see on Facebook.”
Weigend, however, argues that online personal brands provide employers with access to potential employees’ reputations, what he calls “a shortcut for human decision making.”

“If you want to get a job in the Western world, I hear that you are well advised to wear some clothes when you show up at the interview,” he said. “And I think if you don’t, then it’s just the same thing as if you don’t have a Facebook profile.”