Personal branding

A quick trawl round the ‘net has confirmed for me that you’re nothing without a personal brand nowadays. I was just trying to create a compact letter head, but that’s getting very difficult, what with the number of outlets which we now have to express ourselves publicly, and which we might therefore want to make public. Once you’ve fitted addresses for a blog, website, Facebook page, MySpace page, Bibo and Skype as well as more pedestrian information like email, or even (do people still have these?) a landline number, there’s not much space for a letter anyway. And then comes the branding issue. Does co-ordinating the look and feel of your opinion-sharing (the blog), your social networking (Facebook, Bibo) and your online credentials (website) make you a digital pioneer, keen to present yourself as a coherent and effective online personality? Or does it make you a drone; a human Big Mac so desperate for a smooth, standardised feel and appearance that you lose any semblance of the personality you’re striving so hard to create? Or does it just mean you spend way too much time online, and have probably forgotten the old-school methods of developing an interesting and effective personal brand (i.e. by being and interesting and effective personal person)? I’ve got to admit that my first impulse was to start co-ordinating everything to fit with PeriodOne’s style, but I’m now thinking that the last point does have some validity, and that large portions of the population would simply shake their heads sadly at the thought of someone devoting so much time to their virtual personality and look. And, at the back of my mind, there’s the another thought gestating and slowly becoming a monster: is it me, or is it the kind of people who, try as they might, are not able to shape their actual lives to the form that they desire who flee to the more easily adjustable parameters of the online world? Once upon a time, before they took over the world, they used to called ‘geeks’ …