The Personal Brand is real

Some have heard me babbling on about the idea of “the personal brand”, specifically how the web and the idea of product personalization will make personal branding a reality. The more I work online, with social networks especially, the idea of the personal brand takes shape and becomes a conversation about what’s happening now, rather than what will happen in the future. Take Myspace and Facebook and the idea that you now have the ability to create an “image” of who you are, or more likely, who you WANT to be online for the world to see. Myspace and Facebook offer oodles of options for personalization, as do pretty much all social networks these days. In fact, the social network you join says something about you as well. For example, Virb is like Myspace for creatives.

When you consider how easy CSS has made customizing the web, and how the web has made customizing your clothes easy, and how Apple and Adobe have made design easier (not everyone is a good designer, but it’s easy for them to try,) it seems as though many of us are already creating our personal brands. I see this the strongest in two areas - social/new media types, and artists. Modern pop artists have been doing this for years, as people like Jeremy Fish and Shepard Fairey become widely known (at least visually) their visual identity becomes synonymous with their name and define them as artists.

With social/new media types, the idea seems all the more transparent. They create profiles with their actual names on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Bebo, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Brightkite, and many others, and they use these methods to create their identity, often blending their personal and professional into one identity. It’s less about transparency and more about broadcasting. For those that gain enough followers or readers or friends, it becomes important to manage output like a business AND like a brand, carefully crafting the message and content. It’s fascinating to watch this come to life, and see the way different segments use different media online to develop what is becoming their own personal brand.

It certainly hasn’t reached critical mass yet, and we may be at least a decade away from the most extreme edge of the personal brand movement (such as carrying around our own logo files to have printed when we go buy a new shirt, for example.) For those folks who make their living online, however, personal brand is happening now and is very real. In fact, I think I’m going to create a “personal brand standards” document to help me manage my own personal brand. I’ll post it here soon!