Thinky post: personal branding*
*the making-a-name-for-yourself kind, not the stick-a-hot-poker-on-yourself kind
I’ve been reading tonight about personal branding: how you can create an online persona and ‘brand’ for yourself, be it through the kind of web content you offer, or the style of it. And I’ve come to the realisation that even those of us who don’t actively consider our personal brand, do have one, nonetheless.
How many of us are namesquatting on other blogging services? Got a GJ/JF/IJ/LJ/DJ/Blurty/Vox/Wordpress blog that you rarely update, but like to keep, just in case someone else ‘takes’ your name? Yes, if you have a less common internet name that’s less likely to happen, but we still do it, don’t we? But why do we do it? Mainly because we don’t want anyone else using ‘our’ name, because our name represents us online. It’s our personal brand.
Let’s expand that further. Which of these do you have an account at, and are they in ‘your’ main internet persona? – Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other online places where you use the same name, such as a forum etc?
These are all a part of your online persona, of your personal brand. And even though you think, “But I’m just ‘me’ online; there’s no branding!”, think again. You may very well be among those few, but take a step back and look at how you’re writing your next blog entry. Look at how I’m writing this entry. I’m perfectly aware that I’m writing for more than just myself here, that any random surfer might come along and read this or link to it. This isn’t just another, “Oh today I did this and that and blablabla” blog post; this is me writing for a reader, not for myself.
And I’m tailoring my ’style’ accordingly. I’m writing an article here. Rahalia, and Rahalia Cat are now my ‘brand’. They represent me online, and there are times and places where I don’t want to be recognised, or I don’t want the Rahalia brand associated with something else. For example, I wanted to check out MySpace several months back, purely because I knew that great new music could be found there. But I didn’t want all of the more negative aspects of MySpace to be dragged into my main online life. So I created an entirely new persona.
No, I’m not telling you who she is! But she’s out there, and she’s the ‘younger me’ – the punkier, edgy me that is kept well away from the more well-known Rahalia brand. And I’m glad I created her, because she’s my buffer against those weirdo friend requests who might seek me out elsewhere. She has a LiveJournal (as yet unused, but still customised), she blogs occasionally on MySpace, and she has a Gmail account. She’s me, and yet she’s not.
When we flutter in and out of fandoms and interests we sometimes change our names. I wonder sometimes, how many of us are still using the very first name that we gave ourselves when we got online? What was your primary interest when you ‘arrived’ at the internet (those of you that weren’t involved waaaaay back before if got as big as it is now)? For me, it was Formula One, and accordingly I took a name that was F1-related. I’d seen somewhere in a magazine an article about a blogger in Japan (IIRC) calling herself ’slantgirl’ and I liked the way it sounded, so the name that I took blended something F1-ish to the ‘-girl’ suffix.
Rahalia came about when I joined LiveJournal. My F1 name was unavailable, and I was beginning to realise it was unavailable in a lot of places. It was a common name. If I Google for it now I get pages and pages of results, including some that I perhaps wouldn’t want associated with me (one of them listing an interest as ‘mile high club’ – as if!) So at that point, I realised I needed a new name, a new brand. Something unusual. A fandom friend was writing an F1 AU story set in the Star Wars universe and needed a name for a spaceship, along the lines of Millennium Falcon. Since Bobby Rahal was running the Jaguar F1 team, and jaguars are cats, I suggested the Rahalia Cat. This happened shortly before I wanted the new net name, and when I made the decision to change my online ‘brand’ the name of Rahalia Cat was perfect. If you Google for Rahalia the only other results you’ll find that are non-’me’ will be for a place in Morocco of the same name, and a character in what looks like the Smallville or Superman fandoms, plus a couple of random one-off links.
It can be hard to create an entirely new persona online, especially if you’re crossing the streams with people who know the ‘old’ you. Writing style and blogging style are hard to disguise, but it’s possible to view it as a writing challenge, much akin to creating a new character in a novel. Unless you make each character distinctive, they’re going to blend into one seamless blob of grey gloop (and this, I think, might be where the likes of Belle de Jour come from: they’re writing challenges). Sometimes, though, a new personal brand is necessary, whether it’s for professional reasons or more personal ones.
Many of you reading this will have a ‘brand’, simply through what you blog about, through your interests. No matter what information I need, the blogosphere is like a never-ending reference shelf. Everyone has their ’speciality/ies’. You might not actively think about what your specialities are (they could even be as basic, yet necessary, as always posting a comforting hug in a comment when someone is down) but you do have them, and they are all a part of your personal brand. It’s not just a corporate or professional thing; it’s you, as you represent yourself online.
The 3 laws of online personal branding (Web Worker Daily)
Why you may need an online persona (Web Worker Daily)
How to build your personal brand online (Web Worker Daily)
Personal branding instant expert (Fast Company)