Party Animal, Rockstar, Businessman? Who ARE you and what is YOUR brand?

The blogosphere has been abuzz recently with commentary on personal branding. The concept of Personal Branding (creating and building a brand around yourself) isn’t new – it used to be called reputation or image management and focused on how you presented yourself.

If you wanted to be seen as a serious business-type you wore suits, were clean-cut and spoke intelligently. If you wanted to be seen as the “cool design type” you wore jeans or trendy clothes to business meetings, had messy hair and maybe some dark rimmed glasses. This was creating a brand for yourself by managing people’s interactions with you to drive them towards a certain impression.

The premise of personal branding hasn’t changed online, we still want to manage how we are perceived by others’, and basic branding principles can be employed to achieve success.

There are 2 things that have changed dramatically.

First, in an online world there are more and more interactions to manage – Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Blog, etc.

Second, the boundaries between “personal” and “professional” are dropping. In the old world you could wear a suit to work and be taken as a serious business professional and party like a rockstar on the weekend with your friends. The groups were distinct, and your image/reputation/brand with each of these groups was separate.

Now employers look you up on Facebook, your blog is read by personal and business contacts and your Flickr (or Photrade) photos are publicly viewable. The wall that many worked so hard to maintain between personal and professional is crumbling in an online world. Your boss can see the same things as
your friends.

What this means to personal branding is the need to be consistent is greater. In the increasingly transparent online world it is difficult if not impossible to manage one reputation for work, one for friends and one for family.

Your personal brand needs to be reflective of who you REALLY are. You can’t be one person for your clients and another for your friends because they find you, track you and interact with you in the same places.

When I first got online I ran into this problem. I had only used the internet socially – a search for me turned up “party pictures” with my friends and some random myspace blog posts – generally about events involving crazy behavior.

Now, I have made a more conscious effort to “brand myself” or manage my image/reputation online. I still have fun social content posted, however it is balanced with content that is more reflective of other sides of my personality (like this post).

Don’t abandon who you are – balance it – to promote the right brand/image/reputation for yourself.

If someone you have never met looked you up online, who would they think you are?