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Why I Don’t Get Personal Branding Sometimes

I dislike the term “personal branding,” because it’s so mooshy. Imprecise. Especially the way it’s overused today. Conflated with notions of Internet fame and microcelebrity. Or the way it implies that how you market yourself outweighs what you actually accomplish. Don’t like that at all.

(Why am I writing like this? Short, choppy sentence fragments? Because I just re-read the Tom Peters article about personal branding.)

Anyway, back before we started counting strangers, random acquaintances, and search engine hits as friends and followers, we had a term that more or less covered personal branding: “reputation.”  (This term has also been co-opted by marketing types.)

Back then, reputation meant how you were seen by your peers (as well as other people you dealt with, but your reputation among your peers was key). If you were an average low- to mid-level corporate drone (like me), reputation was all about if you knew what you were talking about, and if you knew how to get stuff done. And unless you made it into the news (either for good or bad accomplishments), reputation propagated pretty slowly, and pretty locally.

Enter the Search Engine

Of course, the Web changed all that, because we started posting more stuff publicly — at first, usually under an online persona or handle. Then, we made things globally accessible. And then we made them easier to find, and then even easier to tie to our true life identities, and then started posting stuff resembling actual work. All of which has pretty much nuked the idea of separate online personas, and paved the way for the concept of a ubiquitous personal brand.

Handles, Nicks and Brands as Shortcuts

Now, this entry started out as simply a followup to my earlier entry about the ubiquity of Twitter handles. For many of us who came up in Web 1.0, our online identities started as handles picked for reasons clever or mundane, which were naturally used for vanity domains, and then were just as naturally used for usernames in the second explosion of online presence.

If you were lucky enough or had enough forethought, you could use the same identity across all these locations (though not the same password, right?). Plus, if you had a relatively common name, or one dominated by someone truly famous, it was a way to route people around to you.

Actually, I still think that handles and nicknames have a value in helping direct people to different aspects of our expertise and ourselves. Hell, that’s what company names are for, right? They’re not meant to obscure identity, but to enhance it. Or at least focus it to particular areas. Depending on your OS, handles are aliases, shortcuts, or symbolic links to your identity.

Now that I think of it, there’s one last downside to personal branding that’s tied to your name, to borrow an example from the security experts. One of the problems with biometrics is that if your information gets compromised, you’re kind of stuck — you can’t get new fingerprints or a new retina (though I guess they’re working on cancelable biometrics now — keep in mind that this is just a metaphor.) If your name is your brand, I suppose you’d just better not screw up. Though I guess it’s easier to change your name than your fingerprint (less painful, too). But still.

Anyway, did any of this make sense? I’m not sure myself. Perhaps I am hurting my personal brand by posting it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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