Personal Brand is Dead. Long Live Personal Brand.

Confusing headline, we admit, but it illustrates a point.  “Developing your personal brand” is one of those phrases you hear a lot about, and it keeps young professionals up at night.  Four hundred people crowded into Toronto’s Berkeley Event Hall, eager to clear their misconceptions about the term, and the first thing they hear is “RIP Personal Brand”?  Author and public speaker, Mitch Joel is often referred to as “Canada’s Seth Godin”, and is touted as a leader in contemporary marketing wisdom.  He is also the man that compared the crowd to a spent tube of toothpaste trying to reinvent itself.  If that confuses you, you’re in good company.

Let’s begin.  A powerpoint slide appears showing a man with a giant Harley tattoo on his shaved scalp.   The owner’s deodorant-free sleeves and this insane/indelible act of defiance is all part of Harley’s brand essence.  Same way you grimace at a svelt jogger decked out in Nike gear, or snicker at a person of large-stature walking into McDonalds.  People make instant visual associations between a company and the people who occasion them because the brand is so strongly set.

“But I don’t want potential friends, lovers, employers or clients snickering at the thought of me” (read: my personal brand is keeping me up at night).

What associations do people conjure when they hear your name?  A not-so-simple exercise is to write down your professional/personal story and have family, friends and/or co-workers critique it.  Is there a gulf between your self-image and what you actually project?  Prepare to be disheartened.   Personal brand in its simplest form simply means how you present yourself.  Your online presence on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn shouldn’t be an infomercial.  Your online persona can’t be a bullhorn.  It’s an ongoing conversation.  The two most important parts of a conversation are story-telling and listening.  We’ve talked about this before.  “We’re given two ears and one mouth, but do we use them proportionately?  The answer was no.  Joel, like Oscar Wilde or Chuck Palahniuk and great story-tellers. The common thread is that the stories they tell are their experiences, not themselves.

The reason people fall prey to artificial impression maintenance is because they think they’re nobody.  How am I going to stand out?  To put it simply, Joel quotes Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”.  If you’re a celebrity, the world will fall upon your apron to hear your every thought.  If you’re one of 15,000 graduating PR students hoping to be heard in a sea of competitive online voices, have faith.

We believe Personal Brand is a merit-based leap of faith.  It’s an Inner Beauty contest.  It can’t be rigged or cheated, it just happens. “It’s authenticity that is determining factor for success of a brand”.  Obviously there are social media best practices, and Joel is quick to point out that your reputation shouldn’t be manipulated the way a marketer would.  We believe that instead of thinking about your efforts as the key to a positive online image, think of your efforts as a defense from driving it into a tree.  Your glowing personality will guide you to a positive online image.

So if that explains what Joel means when he says it doesn’t matter what you say about yourself, it only matters what google says about you, then we’ll sleep soundly at night.