A while ago, I started to see ads like the one at right showing up in my Facebook profile and on one site I visit regularly — National Newswatch — for a website called DeanTester.com.

I wanted to find out more about the site, so I did that rarest of things with online ads — I clicked. And that took me to the site, where I found out that Tester is a journalism student at Carleton University here in Ottawa.

He’s decided this is one way he can differentiate himself from the pack of aspiring journalists who will enter the job market with him (By the way, he mentioned that only a handful of the Carleton j-school‘s roughly 100 graduates of last year are actually working in journalism. That’s sad.)

The site is a fairly standard WordPress site, with a blog page and an “about” page, where you can find out that in addition to his studies at Carleton, Dean has worked for Canwest and for Maclean’s magazine’s Oncampus blog.

But I was intrigued by the use of social media advertising and online advertising to promote it, so I thought I’d chat with him about it. Here’s our 13-minute conversation.

So what do I think of it? I think, as someone else put it to me, “good on him for the idea… failure on overall execution.” The biggest weakness of Tester’s site is the relative lack of content. As I write this on February 2, the last post of seven is dated January 24. IT might hvae been better to build up a more substantial body of work before unveiling. It also might have helped to create pages for politics and sports, which are Tester’s stated interests.

But the content is up to him, and more up my alley is the attempt at self-branding that this represents (as do his participation in Twitter and LinkedIn.)

In general, I think the use of FB and Google ads is smart, especially given the targeting that Tester (and anyone else who chooses to) can do, and given the fact that he’s not had to spend a lot of money. Have I seen any other Carleton student journalists’ blogs? Nope. Am I likely to? Nope. And in the current environment for journalists and journalism, any way that a student can demonstrate they’re smarter, better, more eager, or more ambitious than the rest will likely do him or her good in the job hunt.

However, I would be adding a lot more content to the site, including his student work at sites like Capital News Online. Don’t make me search for it!

This is something that’s trending right now in academia. A program called Whyhire.me did a pilot project at my former employer, Algonquin College. Whyhire.me describes its process as:

• Dig Deep – focus on career coaching elements including personal values, personality types, strengths, passions, achievements and weaknesses.
• Declare Your Brand – dive into the world of branding and converting your personal assessment into the key messages of your personal brand
• Display Yourself – start building the pieces of their personal brand with all the elements and tools that are available to us (text, photos, video, blogging, WordPress, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Google)
• Deploy Your Brand – launch yourself into the online world by making connections with industry and developing a proactive plan to continue to develop your personal brand

The next big challenge will be — if everyone gets a personal online brand established, how do you differentiate yourself then? Of course, for Tester, that’s likely not an issue — he seems to be ahead of his cohorts by a step or two.

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