Accounting Student Creates Awesome RPG Using Excel

I read a very interesting article by Caitlyn Coverly at the Financial Post last week on two of my favourite topics: personal branding, and Microsoft Excel. I teach both subjects, and have a special place in my heart for the detail-oriented world of spreadsheets. As such, that heart leapt at the news that a particularly curious Canadian MBA student created a game, Arena.Xlsm, using an Excel Workbook. The personal branding came into play when this student, Cary Walkin, took a class on brand narrative and marketing yourself. He posted the game to his website, and it took off from there. He’s now about to graduate, and has had articles published about him and his game at BBC News, Mashable, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Post (where I came across it), and Boing Boing, among others. That means great name recognition right off the bat, as well as some truly cool Google results.

Google Doodle Celebrates Canadarm!

Google knows how to create buzz, and it certainly does this through their Doodles. One of their most recent ones gratified my Canadian pride. How can I use Bing! when Google does things like this? An example of wonderful branding.

See the Toronto Star coverage here: Canadarm celebrated in Google doodle.

Personal Branding and the New Graduate

It can be difficult to build your personal brand; especially when you feel like you don’t have a lot of work experience.

Having a personal brand helps you do many things: it provides you with some much needed focus when searching and applying for jobs, it helps to “sell” your skills to potential employers, and finally it helps to build your professional reputation once you are employed. This excellent article from The Guardian contains some great ideas on how to send your message.

Sometimes the hardest part is getting started. Self-Assessment and personality quizzes like the Myers-Briggs test will help; use your results as a springboard. What kind of personality type are you? What are your abilities? What are your work values? Let those findings guide you in how you create your personal brand and in how you convey that brand through your profile here.