Building your Brand and More

I have been doing more reflecting on the great Women of Isenberg Conference that took place this past Saturday and, as promised, am writing this blogpost to capture some of the messages in the session, Building Your Brand I that I was a panelist on,  and also the followon one, Building your Brand II.

Our great panel moderator was Caroline Malloy, Isenberg School '15, who is a Management major.

Joining me on the panel were: Natty Hoffman, Denise Durgin, and Linda Ronan - all of whom are Isenberg alums. A brief summary of our backgrounds can be found here.

Caroline had earlier sent us the questions that we would be asked, which are below, so that we could prepare.

Building your Brand

1. How have you cultivated your brand? Discuss what you believe are the critical components to building your brand and differentiating yourself in the workplace.

2. Have you leveraged social media to establish yourself? What limitations, if any, did you encounter or words of caution you might have?

3. The term "building your brand" to me is synonymous with creating your "story." What is your advice to college students as we begin to create our "story" for today's job marketplace?

4. What are the steps students can take today to begin building their brand that will differentiate themselves as they prepare for life after graduation?

The moderator first had us introduce ourselves and then asked each of us the same question and we answered in round robin fashion. It was great to see so many students in the audience - undergrads, MBA students, and even my PhD student, plus quite a few faculty and staff, and alums. Even one of my male undergrads came to the panel.Plus, the daughter of one of our panelists, Linda Ronan, who is a student at Isenberg, was also in the audience - very cool!

My doctoral student, Sara Saberi, took the photo of our panel below

and produced this very short video clip.  

Below, I provide some of the "answers" to the above questions, interweaving also what I had prepared as notes. The themes that continued to resonate both in the afternoon and other sessions that I managed to attend I will further emphasize.

Some answers to Question 1:

You have to be excellent in your work and do it with energy and passion and support you organization.

Find your passion and work will be a pleasure. 

You have to be visible - this means different things at different stages of your career. Take on challenging tasks and be a true contributor . Make sure that the right people know of your contributions and successes. Write Letters to the Editor and OpEd pieces.

Always be positive (several students throughout the day told me how much they appreciated this comment, so thanks). Positive energy  is uplifting to you and those around you. There is too much negativity in the world.

Build a good team of supporters both below and above you.

As you move up, be sure to help others and to mentor others.

Some answers to Question 2:

Keep your personal and professional social media separate. The importance of this was emphasized by many in the morning and afternoon. Some are not even on Facebook to make sure that only a professional image is projected.

Keep in mind that what is said in social media may become public. Don't say anything that you may regret later and may be held accountable for.

Use social media to give pats on the back, and to celebrate the accomplishments of others - this will be very much appreciated and is something that I try to do regularly, both on this blog and through Twitter. At times, I also follow up with personal notes.  Congratulate students, faculty, and other co-workers on their achievements.

As a blogger, I receive many thank you's for the posts that I write from professionals and students alike. This is a time-consuming task but it is important to get the news out, to recognize and celebrate achievements, and to offer advice and commentary and also to share advances in research and teaching. Due to blogging, I have been interviewed by journalists and have had quite a few speaking engagements both in NYC and internationally.  I have received many messages stating appreciation for people that  I have acknowledged that even their organizations or universities had not. Plus, students have thanked me for advice on jobs and interviews and some of my posts have even been referenced in doctoral dissertations and talks at conferences. 

Some answers to Question 3:

Professionalism is very important. Spend the time to creating a standout Linkedin page. This theme was emphasized throughout the day. Sometimes it may be your outside activities on the page that create interest and may help you professionally as Victoria Vega noted in the afternoon Building your Brand panel. She was interviewed by a national magazine because she had put as one of her hobbies being (sic) fancy cars on her Linkedin page. Update it periodically and show your leadership positions. Elizabeth Morgan, a panelist in the Building your Brand II panel in the afternoon, who works for IBM said that, since her first job, she has not had to ever apply for another one and that has been due to excellent networking (which clearly Linkedin, if used engagingly, can provide opportunities for).

I also emphasized the importance of serendipitous meetings that have evolved into great professional opportunities - such as a seatmate on a plane from Logan to Europe who then hired me to teach in Executive Education at Harvard because we had such great conversations on what could have been a tough flight since I had a middle seat. 

Be open-minded, friendly, and get out of your comfort zone.

If you see that there is something missing or needs to be done, be entrepreneurial - that is why I founded the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, for example, and applied for grants, which were awarded and helped to establish it.

Do give back and do good. The importance of volunteerism and community service and  the associated personal rewards were note.

Natty Hoffman gave some great advice. She had worked for years for a big company (IBM) and now was working for a startup in the Boston area. She spoke about how enjoyable and rewarding working for a startup could be and that each student should figure out what kind of organization would be ideal. Some are better suited for a large corporation and others not.  I worked for two high tech consulting companies in gorgeous Newport, Rhode Island, while I was pursuing my Master's at Brown University (yes, the companies were paying my tuition). These companies were fairly small but had outstanding benefits and because of my work I got to speak at a conference in Monterrey, California where many Admirals were present. The work involved software development for submarines and later even research on networks, always my passion!

Some answers to Question 4:

Don't just join clubs, but be a leader, and even establish new clubs.

Always have integrity and never compromise it. 

Develop as many skills as possible, from quantitative and IT ones, to more qualitative ones, such as communication skills, both verbal and written.

Take the time to write Thank You notes - the personal kind and not just email versions. This I had mentioned on our panel and then the second keynote speaker, Kelly O'Kane, also emphasized this. Great manners can differentiate you.  Kelly even said that,  after an interview, when she got the job, she saw that those who had interviewed her had posted her Thank You notes in their cubicles. One said that this was the first such note he had received in 2 years!

Other points that resonated with me:

• The importance not only of relationships but the strength of relationships - nurture them;
• Have your Board of Directors - you are the CEO of your brand, and you need people that you trust and that you can count on;
• There are  differences between a mentor that you feel completely comfortable with and can reveal a variety of emotions with and an "executive sponsor," who is your advocate;
• Your life can take different paths and directions but your brand stays with you.

Thanks to the Women in Business at the Isenberg School of Management for organizing such a successful and thought-provoking conference and congratulations!

Facebook Data to the Rescue of Metcalfe's Law

The December 2013 issue of IEEE"s Computer magazine has as its theme: Computing Laws Revisited. Our hardcopy issue (my husband is a subscriber) arrived yesterday, on New Year's Eve, and, today, New Year's Day, I sat down to read the article, "Metcalfe's Law after 40 Years of Ethernet," written by none other than Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet's inventor, himself. The Ethernet is the physical transport level of today's Internet. On May 22, 2013, Ethernet industry leaders gathered at the Computer History Museum in California to celebrate its 40th birthday and to catch up on what has become a $100 billion industry (do I now have your attention?).

I have been interested in Metcalfe's Law since, as an Associate Editor of over a dozen journals, and a frequent reviewer of journal articles, as well as a Co-PI on a Future Internet Architecture NSF grant: Network Innovation Through Choice (which I most recently spoke on at the Network Frontiers Workshop at Northwestern University), I not only encounter related controversies but also write and review papers that touch upon this law.

I guess that Metcalfe must have been reading over my shoulder!

Now, back to a controversy: In 2006, Briscoe, Odlyzko (I do like some of his math models a lot), and Tilly published an article, "Metcalfe's Law is Wrong" in the IEEE Spectrum, which you can read online without a subscription. These authors described Metcalfe's Law as both "wrong" and "dangerous."

So, what is Metcalfe's law, you may be asking (for those not so much into hardware). As explained by Metcalfe himself in his very clear and erudite December Computer magazine article: The "law" bearing his name states that the value of a network grows as the square number of users: V= NxN. The law started as a high-concept Ethernet sales tool in the early 1980s and entered into the public discourse in the new millennium when Gilder "championed" Metcalfe's law in his book, "Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance," published in 2000.

During  a presentation to the 3Com sales force (Metcalfe cofounded this company in 1979), Metcalfe showed the figure below (thanks to his article in Computer magazine) to argue that if  a network is too small its cost exceeds its value, but if a network gets large enough to reach a critical mass, then the sky is the limit.

Valuation of Internet-based companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and others is clearly important and detractors have said that Metcalfe's law may be overvaluing such firms.

The main critique of Metcalfe's law, noted by Metcalfe, himself, was that Briscoe, Odlyzko, and Tilly countered that not all network connections are of equal value and that the growth in the value of a network is approximately Nxln(N) and not NxN as Metcalfe had stated.

Moreover, neither "law" had been validated empirically until Metcalfe did recently and reported the results in his article in the December issue of the IEEE Computer magazine.

And he used 10 years of real data from Facebook and fitted the data looking at N as a function of time. To estimate the growth of users and individual groups of friends, he first applied a sigmoid function (S-shaped adoption function). He then generalized it to what he calls a "netoid" function using the Python programming language. (It looks as though Metcalfe also thinks in code, which is cool.) He plotted Facebook annual revenue (as the value V) for the last 10 years and used a Python slider to the Metcalfe's function to "get a pretty good visual fit to this data" as he displayed in the figure below reported in Computer magazine.

Metcalfe also notes that a more elaborate model of network growth and value would involve using "nesting netoids." Fascinatingly, he observed that Facebook groups seem to be netoiding (a new verb) towards Dunbar's number, which is due to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar who theorized that humans have a cognitive limit on the number of people with whom they can maintain stable social relationships with this figure being about 150. And, since Facebook has about 1.06 billion users and 150 billion friend connections this implies  an average of 141 friends per user.

So, as we begin to celebrate the New 2014 Year, it is quite interesting that we are also marking technological advances that challenge and intrigue us in both theory and practice and that are still very much with us such as the Ethernet, which is now 40 years old!

There is also a great interview with Bob Metcalfe, thanks to Charles Severance of Computer magazine, which can be viewed below.

Social Networking through Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Beyond

The INFORMS Annual Meeting begins soon in Austin, Texas and I am so looking forward to reconnecting with former students and seeing colleagues from around the globe! I am also very much looking forward to giving presentations, listening to the latest research, taking part in several business meetings and award ceremonies, and to simply enjoying the various social and special professional events.

The conference will begin, for me, next Sunday morning when I take part in a panel on Social Networking and Operations Research that was organized by my fellow blogger and very dynamic colleague, Professor Laura McLay of the Virginia Commonwealth University, as part of a cluster of panels organized by the super-blogger and promoter of Operations Research, Professor Mike Trick of Carnegie Mellon University! Joining me on the panel will be Professor Wayne Winston of Indiana University and Professor Aurelie Thiele of Lehigh University.

We will share our experiences with social networking tools from blogs to Facebook and Twitter with Q&A from the audience, led by Professor McLay. I am certain that the discussions will be very interesting and illuminating, so join us, if you can!

Professor Trick has promised to cover the panel discussions on his blog and to tweet about them as well

Hope to see many of you at INFORMS in Texas next week where the weather is much milder than in Amherst, Massachusetts!