TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

Social Media Marketing

Why I hate the use of ‘personal brands’

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I’ve recently experienced the benefits of banning myself from using the word ‘brand’ in a business context after joining an experiment by Mark Earls.

As a result, I’ve been a lot more specific about what I really mean – awareness, reputation, tradition, logos, content, tone of voice etc. But at least in a business context, I can see it’s excusable to use the term sometimes, rather than listing out everything it could mean.

But ‘personal brand’ – that’s just silly.

Because at the end of the day, a ‘personal brand’ surely means just three things? (Although I’m open to disagreements/suggestions for additions).

Awareness: Have people heard of you?

Reputation: Do people think you deliver?

Revenue: Are you able to make money from your awareness and reputation?

And I’d suspect much of the rise in ‘personal brands’ comes from people really wanting to build ‘personal revenues’ as a main source of income, or as security in case of redundancy.

But does an individual person really come up with explicit rules for their tone of voice in all communications? And is that ever sustainable? Do you really aspire to becoming Me Inc, rather than real person?

Personally, I don’t see Scobleizer or Louis Gray as brands. I see them as people who simply have particular personalities that might mean they absorb and share information at a high rate, or that might lend them to networking more, etc. They’ve built awareness and their reputations, but unless they’ve been branded like cattle, I struggle to see why we need to label them with a term that should really be retired with traditional media.

And the new breed of people chasing a personal brand appear to be missing part of the point.

Geoff Livingston has a great post which sums up a lot of the pitfalls of concentrating totally on building a personal brand.

But at the same time, I totally agree with much of what Chris Brogan recommends in Personal Branding.

Paradoxical?

  • There’s nothing wrong with building awareness and reputation by marketing yourself. But trying to build a ‘personal brand’ isn’t necessarily the right thing to do if you want to be successful in a large company. It’s better to be part of success, and then reference it.
  • Claiming a ‘personal brand’ could make you believe that you don’t need to work as hard on your latest project, because your ‘personal brand’ will save you – when you’re only as good as your latest project.
  • Personal branding actually contradicts Chris when he talks about being more than just one thing – after all successful branding normally relies on a core message.

And most importantly, the second you start thinking about yourself as a ‘personal brand’, you run a huge risk of sounding like a tool:

Promote yourself. Use the same avatar everywhere. Build a strong reputation based on great work. Interact everywhere you can. Choose Life. Just don’t call it a ‘personal brand’ unless you’ve tattooed your personal logo on your personal forehead!

Offline example of social media marketing by the local Chinese takeaway

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Back in November 2007, I wrote about a new Chinese takeaway restaurant in Peterborough which was doing a great job of making an impression by engaging with it’s consumers.

Kung Fu Kitchen explained its belief in a letter sent out with vouchers and other goodies, and then followed up meal deliveries to check everything was OK – and funnily enough, we’re still ordering regularly from them 12 months later.

Which is how we spotted something new:

kungfukitchen

(Excuse my crap photography – I was full of the Salt and Pepper chicken wings and Roast Duck curry).

It’s exactly the sort of thing being recommended by marketing experts like Chris Brogan, for example.

And the brilliant thing was that it wasn’t just a big sales pitch – the biggest spaces were given to details of Chinese New Year, the martial arts grading of the owner’s daughter, and a plea for help due to problems with the owner’s Sky system.

The details of some sales vouchers and a spicier curry after consumer feedback was approximately 1/8th of the total newsletter.

It’s no wonder they seem to be getting more and more popular – and yet they still seem to deliver great food incredibly quickly. The only strange thing is that they have an email address to contact them, but haven’t put a website up on their domain yet.

I wonder if I should offer for some free food!

Some real proof of social media transactional revenue

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Respected Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson often talks about the action taking place in the comments of his blog.

So I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up and reposted his comment from a post at the end of January.

fredwilsontransaction

If it’s a bit too small – Fred is revealing Twitter is the 3rd biggest referrer of transactional visits to handmade marketplace Etsy, with Flickr at number 2, and Facebook at number 4.

And Etsy is generating over $1 million a month in revenue, with $100 million worth of goods sold in 2008.

Now this might not convince everyone – after all, Etsy sales are by a large number of individual and small retailers who will be promoting their items individuals through Flickr, Twitter and Facebook – and the scale is the aggregate of those referrals – the ‘Long Tail‘, if you will!

So essentially there are 100s, if not 1000s of people handling social media marketing and customer service for their products, which doesn’t tackle the scale issue of large companies changing the way they do business, and utlising social media.

But there were 300,000 people in the California Gold Rush, and noone continued to deny there was gold in those hills.

Great marketing can be quick enough to beat the news

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Now here’s an example of a great use of marketing to respond quickly and effectively to things as they happen.

I hadn’t heard anything about Virgin Trains trying to cut down on people kissing and hugging at the passenger drop-off point at Warrington Bank Quay station. Apparently a sign banning kissing was put up in a light-hearted manner to ease congestion and suggest people should go to the short-stay car park (and pay!) if they want to hug and kiss someone leaving on a trip.

Instead, the first things I saw were:

Mills and Boon respond to Virgin
Mills and Boon respond to Virgin

It was apparently done by St Lukes, who handle advertising for Mills & Boon, and it’s timely, considering news about the sign only appeared two days ago.

It’s also relatively low cost – there’s a Facebook group, a Twitter account, and a Flickr group.  And people are being encouraged to interact and upload images of themselves kissing etc.

It’s already had a bit of coverage via Brand Republic and The School of Life.

But most importantly, it’s effective because it was done quickly, enthusiastically, and allows people to get involved.

As a result, if it becomes a huge runaway success, then it’s great. But if it only achieves minor success, then nothing has been lost except a bit of time.

And it ties in brilliantly with Mills & Boon promoting romance, rather than books about romance.

I’d guess it didn’t take much negotiation around permission and planning, which is a benefit of having clear beliefs and trust.

And suddenly a brand which I’d associate with my grandmother now seems lighthearted and fun enough to check out the next time I want to buy a romantic present.

About the community, by the community

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Here’s a good example of changing the way we do things, by the always interesting Neil Perkin at Only Dead Fish, from an idea by the also always interesting Herdmeister. And like most good ideas, it’s blindingly obvious when you see someone else do it!

Basically Neil was due to present at a conference on the subject of community. So he crowd-sourced it. And ended up with 30 slides submitted by a range of people (including myself). And a rather good presentation.

You can see his thoughts on crowdsourcing a presentation, and then presenting it, plus his words which accompanied it.

Due to my choice of blog template, you might need to click through to slideshare to be able to read the text well. It’s worth doing to subscribe to Neil’s presentations, like the one I previously recommended.

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