On personal vs corporate branding

I was at BlogPotomac last week, and as you'd expect in a room full of bloggers, there were some great roundup posts. The speakers included Shel Holtz, Shireen Mitchell, Scott Monty, Liz Strauss, Shashi Bellamkonda and more.

Read this one in particular by Mahdi Gharavi, which gives a perfect, pretty straight recap of the speakers' main points. Each had some good nuggets to share.

And here's a more irreverent but fun recap by Elizabeth Engel that I loved.

The session I've been percolating, though, is the one on personal branding which was a debate of sorts (though they both seemed to agree on everything) between Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) and Amber Naslund (@Ambercadabra). I'm going to put in some quotes below recorded by PR Mom on her blog, which are a pretty good snapshot of how confusing this was. Aaron also posted a follow-up blog post which summarizes his view on the issue of personal branding.



Basically, both Aaron and Amber were of the opinion that personal brand should not trump corporate brand, if you work for a company. I disagree, perhaps just on the semantics of it all, and will explain why, as I did not have a chance to make a comment during the session.

First, I thought they did not adequately define what they meant by "personal brand", which seemed to be a reference to the Robert Scobles (and Scott Montys) of the world. Here are some excerpts by PR Mom:

Amber: It is the idea that personal brands have become a shortcut for building a real relationship that is not cared for. You are listing these bullet points about yourself and then others are just suppose to buy it. Your personal brand is not your own, it is not what you say it is, it is what the community says it is.

Aaron – the fundamental flaw is the concept of a personal brand, a personal brand is more about ego. A brand should be bigger than an individual person. Where do you position yourself, are you positioning yourself for yourself, or are you positing yourself for your company. Never allow your personal brand to eclipse the greater initiative, the greater goal of your company.

Amber: you cannot separate a personal brand with your professional personality, it’s about knowing who you are and representing it across everything you do. Your company is paying you to do your job, your reputations are tied together because it is for both of your benefit, it’s not about you, its about the company, can it enhance that, if you can- that means that you are being a good employee.

Aaron - It is okay to have a personal brand, but does not like the word personal brand because there is a cockiness about it that says it’s all about me vs. all about us. Your brand is controlled by your customers.

Amber – You can’t control what is put out there about you. Doesn’t matter what information you put out abut yourself, it matters what others say. We have a personal responsibility to know what is being said about us, should be doing vanity searches on Google to see what is being said about you.



So on the one hand, I was bemused because to me you can't NOT have a personal brand when we're talking about operating socially and professionally online. (And remember the context here is a room full of 150 bloggers, who by their very nature as bloggers, are all about having an online persona which is both personal and professional). Everything you do on the social web leaves a permanent mark, and the collective of all those traces of you become your personal brand, whether you want them to (or manipulate them to) or not. (I talked about this from the organizational point of view in this post on the paradoxes of identity in a digital age.) Your personal brand is actually your digital identity and everyone has one.



So obviously I agreed with what both said about, on the one hand, your brand being created by how others see you, and on the other, how "you cannot separate a personal brand with your professional personality". But those statements and the circularity of the conversation seemed to me contradict the overall point that both were making, which is that your personal brand shouldn't trump your being a "team player" and part of a company's brand. If your digital identity, or brand, is created by how others see you, then you have no choice in the matter. Sticking with corporate examples, Tony Hsieh IS Zappo's. Gary Vaynerchuck IS Wine Library - and Scott Monty is Ford (and the best thing about Ford, IMHO). Whether they are CEO's or PR dudes, they put a face to the brand and I think that is a good thing for the brand.

But those are extreme examples. What about the rest of us?

As bloggers, we have a vested interest in making sure our digital identity/personal brand is as authentic as possible, whether we represent ourselves, our own companies, several of our own companies, or someone else's company or organization - we're bloggers because we want to write stuff from our own personal point of view, regardless of who we work for, and we want to engage our readers, learn from them, converse with them, debate with them as individual voices.



If we work for a company or organization, whether we're bloggers or not, we collectively make that organization what it is, and this is more and more true in the digital age (although for smaller companies it's always been true). Companies are made up of individuals, and in the social web you can actually find out quite easily who those individuals are and -whoa - talk to them directly. Brands are created by the collective voice of those individuals, as well as customers, members, stakeholders, and anyone who cares. And yes, a huge Scoble-like personality inside an organization could hypothetically eclipse a corporate brand, but how often does that really happen? Each employee brings certain skills to the table, for a certain time, and then they go off and do something similar (or better) for some other organization. It's extremely rare that any one individual controls the corporate brand.

In my opinion, the corporate brand is becoming irrelevant, at least in terms of anyone blasting marketing messages out about it and hoping the public at large believes the hype. Don't believe me? Check Brand Tags and look up Ford. (Let's just say, despite Scott Monty's efforts, things don't look good.) So what do you do about that? Well...

As an individual, you can only be truly responsible for your own words and actions, and collectively, with others who care about the same things, whether they are products or services, you help build communities that gather around brands - and those are the brands that will last. But you don't need to have LESS of a personal brand to do that - in fact you need to have MORE of one, to tend it more carefully, to live it more honestly, to be an evangelist for the company you work for but only if you're real about it. (And if you can't evangelize your company, maybe it's time to find one that you can rave about - which means tending your personal brand even more in this economy!)





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