Long ago, I read Tom Peter’s article, “The Brand Called You.” This was published in 1997, but was prescient. (I love words like prescient, words that are exactly right but uncommon enough that when you see them, you pay attention. Prescient (adj): having or showing knowledge of events before they take place.). The Internet had just been born, and Tom Peters saw just how important “personal branding” would become in the fragmented, ‘World is Flat,’ New economy.
Almost all of us – individual writers, bloggers, marketers, CEO’s, anyone who wants to ‘stand out’ or be a ‘thought leader’ has to think about the ‘brand called you.’
Enter Social Media Marketing
Now, when Tom Peter’s wrote this prescient article, there were just websites and the tiny beginnings of blogging. Today, we have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest… the Googling of potential employees before a hire, the Internet-never-forgets phenomenon and on and on and on. People go first to Google for information, and if they read your blog post, and see you as the expert… POW you get the job interview, the consulting gig, the link from the New York Times or whatever.
Being the BEST brand called you is one of the newest and most important personal marketing challenges.
Negative SEO and Negative Personal Branding
There’s a dark side (isn’t there always a ‘dark side?’). Negative SEO – the use of Internet publicity to damage someone’s personal brand – is out there, too. I’ve consulting with people who were being extorted by bloggers, with marketing folk whose CEO had affairs with interns (all over the Internet), and wanted to suppress that information. So on both a positive and a negative light, we need to ‘manage’ the brand called you.
If you are in or near the San Francisco Bay Area, I invite you to my Stanford Course, The Brand Called You: Personal Branding and Online Reputation Management, November 8-9 (Saturday / Sunday) at Stanford. Anyone interested in social media marketing, and especially those interested in reputation management and personal branding, will find it a lively, fun, and practical workshop on personal branding.
