MBA Geek

I came across a post on a website or an Orange County tech support firm called Defining You, in which they talk about the importance of establishing your identity online. I think I want to take their article one step further though. They talk about the importance of getting a domain name that reflects who you are and your brand but nowadays that’s not enough.

The reason is the rise of social networks. It’s not just enough to get your domain name, but you also need to stake your claim on most of the well known social properties out there. Networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have thousands of people passing through every day and your name may ring a bell for them.

You also need to do this to avoid someone trying to take advantage of your name and leveraging your brand capital. Having a corproate account means you cannot take advantage of something like your driving license or social security disability details to prove who you are; your brand name says it all; and if someone has camped on it, it can be rather hard to pry them off.

So keep an eye on where people are hanging out and make sure you have a presence in those spaces. You never know when it may be important.

Some products are easier to sell online than others. Take books for example, Amazon is doing a magnificent job in cornering that market, and that is partly down to the nature of books. They are easy to store, easy to ship and most people who buy books will come back and buy some more. Other products are a bit harder. Try selling the diet pill Anoretix for example. First of all, selling pharmaceuticals is much harder than shipping books, the legislation can be a nightmare and maintaining credibility is critical to providing a steady stream of sales.

Take Stratavia for example, a company that provides a data center automation offering. Their website offers a cohesive message around what the company does and reinforces that by promoting different ideas to improve credibility; a list of awards they have achieved, different news and quotes from their customer. All this helps sustain the image they are trying to project and strengthens their online presence.

Came across an interesting service today that lets you verify if a VAT number someone has supplied to you is correct and valid. It’s called VIES and is managed by the European Commission‘s Taxation and Customs Union Directorate-General. It looks like this:

All you need to do is provide the member state the VAT number belongs to, the VAT number itself and the system returns the name and address the VAT number is registered to.

Useful thing to know isn’t it?

So, you’ve spent the last 3 years working on your MBA, done all your exams, got all your results and you’re due to graduate shortly. What comes after that? Well, in my case, I did my MBA while still holding a full-time job, so the question isn’t that hard. But for a number of other graduates there are just so many options available that it is easy to get bewildered and not know in which direction to head.

I was thinking about this while flicking through a Graduate Magazine on EuroGraduate. It’s a magazine and website that focuses on graduate careers and jobs listings but also has a whole boatload of advice around living abroad, working abroad and starting your career. The website itself is packed with information pertinent to most graduates, but I particularly enjoyed flicking through the magazine. You’ll notice I said flicking again, and that’s just what the website lets you do. It lets you read through the magazine, flick the pages, zoom into areas or interest and print of relevant articles. I was pretty impressed with how usable the interface was. As you would expect from a web-based medium, it also lets you click on anything and sends you directly to the website relating to that click. I found that pretty useful.

The website itself is divided into a number of sections but the main areas are a career database and an education database. The career database lets you search for jobs and opportunities all over Europe; jobs aimed at graduates of all kinds. The education database was particularly interesting to me, as it lets you search through a number of post graduate courses which are on offer around Europe.

Pretty cool website I thought. It does start to answer the question as to what to do once you do achieve your degree.