The Use of Geomarketing to Promote Personal Branding: Make Your Mark as a Teacher in the Territory of Internet

Introduction

The Internet has revolutionized our lives; all aspects of our daily lives have been incorporated into this information and communication space. Education is one of the most sensitive sectors to these changes: on the one hand for the possibilities offered to teachers on an educational level and on the other hand because students are continuously connected and have access to information like never before. Teachers no longer issue unidirectional information and their dominant position in the classroom must involve teaching the students to search for information and to use critical judgement to select that which is relevant, thus finding themselves closer to the students, working bidirectionally, in a collaborative, accompanying position.

On the other hand, the territory has transcended borders and is no longer merely physical, but unites the physical and the online in one through the SoLoMo concept: we live in a world connected by social networks, we communicate from a specific place thanks to our mobile devices. Geo-positioning is of vital importance, since it indicates the location from where we communicate and unites this physical space with online space, becoming a communication tool between both. Therefore, geo-positioning will help us to use localized data as a key strategic variable to work with large volumes of data, which has become known as “big data”.

Finally, the possibilities each individual has to develop actions and communicate on the internet has led to the development of “Personal Branding”; a step beyond the Curriculum Vitae, where each person’s work leaves a mark which serves to show their skills, both dynamically and in real time, as if it were a living, breathing résumé. To quote Risto Mejide “Any proper name is a brand. The products are your works. And what you say, your campaigns” (Mejide, 2014).

Therefore this document aims to show how teachers can make their mark in the territory through appropriate use of their personal brand and geomarketing techniques, with the example of the author himself, through a six-step approach and diverse online geolocalization tools, in addition to indicators which allow us to measure the results.

For them it works on two levels linked to technology and where the teacher’s geopositioning becomes the nexus of union between them both, generating information in the territory and communicating it through various social geopositioning tools such as Facebook Places, Google My Business, Foursquare and Yelp: New Technologies of Information and Communication (TICs), people, who thanks to social networks generate conversations on the internet and creative collaborative projects and New Technologies of Geographical Information (TIGs), space, which generate geopositioned information on the internet.

The text does not make reference to academic websites such as Academia.edu, Research Gate or Mendeley, since it is understood that they are part of “classic” university communication, transferred to a digital environment, and are therefore complementary tools but different to those analysed here.

In the example, the author's own activity transcends the offices of the University to leave their mark or their personal brand on other areas: whether giving a lecture, a course or going on a field trip outing and recording it through check-ins or posting it implies that they are making all the territory their communication space and their workspace, making their mark, generating a subjective map of their activity which allows them to be interrelated both on a physical and digital level with the surrounding environment and to pass on their knowledge in various settings.

We must bear in mind that information distribution nowadays is part of the “long tail” (Anderson, 2008) and therefore communication tools cater to segmented groups of demand: the use of each tool is aimed at a very specific group of users. The same event, such as a conference, reported in various tools (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc) has a huge scope but is highly targeted, so efficiency is optimal. All this, while taking into account that there must be a specific strategy which defines targets, customer segments, communication tools and measurement indicators.

Therefore, this article talks about a new education in a new liquid environment, to use the words of Z.Bauman (2003), where teachers have an obligation to be at the forefront, to communicate with future professionals learning with us, in this global classroom which is the interconnected world of the Internet.