Alabama Football Launches ‘The Advantage’ Personal Branding Program For its Student-Athletes

Last month I wrote about how important it is to give your employees the skills they need to succeed. One of the examples I used to illustrate that point was how Alabama football gives both its coaches and players the tools and teaching they need to advance.

Alabama football has just launched another initiative in its effort to equip its players with the skills they need to succeed.  The program is called ‘The Advantage’ and it is being billed as a ‘personal brand’ development program. The Advantage will work with players to develop their communication skills, giving them instruction on how to handle interviews, and how to conduct themselves on social media channels. For those players who pursue a professional career in football, The Advantage will assist with financial literacy, marketing, and agent selection.

https://twitter.com/AlabamaFTBL/status/1389686640390639618
https://twitter.com/AlabamaFTBL/status/1389624085487964165

This is such a smart initiative on so many levels:

• It becomes yet another recruiting tool for Alabama, providing real benefits to recruits that they can instantly see the value in
• It helps players manage their social media accounts, which also helps the University with its image and branding as well
• By helping players with interview coaching, that provides another benefit to both the player, as well as the University, and it enhances the brand of both parties
• As players become more proficient in using social media, that just means more exposure for them, and for the Alabama football brand as well

I’m honestly surprised more universities haven’t done something similar, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot of schools copy this now that Alabama has unveiled The Advantage.

Think about how you could do something similar at your company or organization. And just as Alabama will use The Advantage as a recruiting tool, so can your company. Your company could offer a program that coaches your current employees on how to better leverage their social media accounts to promote their personal brand, as well as yours. Additionally, you could leverage such a program to help your internal subject matter experts become more comfortable creating content and sharing their expertise. Getting internal subject matter experts to share what they know is often a struggle for companies. So this would be a real benefit that your company could enjoy.

Once such a program is in place, then its existence becomes a recruiting tool for new employees. Your company would get better employees, more content from your subject matter experts, and the social media content created by your employees would be more on brand. A win-win!