As a proponent of personal branding, I was schooled this week on how it isn’t always a good thing. On the surface it makes sense that the more you’re known as an expert in your field, the better off you are.  My previous experiences had led me to believe that this was always the case.  It turns out that like all things, there are positive and negative consequences to personal branding.

During a #PR20Chat on Twitter this issue came up with the obvious example of Frank Eliason’s departure from Comcast.  During his time creating online customer service through Twitter for Comcast, Frank became a legend.  He was a man doing the right thing at the right time and he unwittingly became a celebrity in social media marketing circles for his accomplishments.  As Twitter and social media gained more and more press in publications like the New York Times and  Businessweek, Frank received more and more invitations to deliver keynote presentations on how corporations could best use social media tools to deliver better customer service.

As the person who built one Twitter account into a highly successful online customer service department that made a tarnished company image shine brightly, Frank deserved the notoriety.  His star rising meant that Comcast was simultaneously being heralded as one of the few Fortune 500 companies who were ‘getting’ social media’s value.  A win/win scenario unfolded.

Frank left Comcast for a similar position with Citi and now you don’t hear quite as much about either of them.  As arguably the most famous customer service rep of all time, Frank will forever be known as “formerly from @comcastcares”.

During the #PR20Chat I mentioned two friends, George Smith and Jessica Berlin.  This alerted them to the conversation and they shared a little of their experiences.  George was the Social Media Specialist at Crocs and is now the Manager, Social Execution and Strategy at PepsiCo.  Jessica was the Social Media Manager at Cirque Du Soliel and is now the Social Media Manager at American Eagle Outfitters.  Both of them surprised me by sharing downsides for them and the companies they left when they moved on.

One point was that personal relationships don’t scale. This is a an important point.  People connect to people, not to companies.  A Social Media Manager with a strong personal brand enhances the company they work for while they are there, but when they leave, their following goes with them.  Hopefully their work for their companies created legacy systems that will maintain and grow what they’ve built.  But even then, there will be some natural disintegration when they leave.

Another point was that a personal brand gets tied to the company brand.  It takes time for that association to dwindle.  As I mentioned, no matter how much Frank Eliason does for Citi, he will be associated with Comcast for the rest of his life because he was a rock star at a time when his name and Comcast’s brand were rising stars in customer service together.

It’s a catch 22 because improving your personal brand will always help you and improving a company brand will always help a company.  It just seems that the reality is that there will always be some downsides with that.  Still, the upsides far outweigh having a weak personal brand or a weak company brand.

This article was originally posted at Oxstein Labs.

This article was originally published at Oxstein Labs.

It’s a new day in America. With economic cutbacks mixing with technology advancing at light speed, most people are wondering how to keep up.  Throw in an exodus of jobs and people only working at companies for 2 to 3 years instead of 20 and we see a totally different job market than ever before in history.  Like it or not, everyone is a marketer now, even kids.

In the first three weeks of this school year my house was presented with fundraisers from schools and PTA’s for coupon books, a jog-a-thon and selling mattresses.  That’s not a joke, the high school had a mattress selling fundraiser which included pimping out kids to go door to door with flyers and post yard signs announcing “Up to 60% off” of mattresses.  This is how far our country has fallen.

I spoke with teachers about this and they hate it, but said “what can we do?”  Remember when teachers taught school?  Now they are forced to be sales managers directing kids from Kindergarten up to 12th grade to sell crap in order to buy school supplies.  Your kid is forced to do this after you’ve already spent money buying your own kids school supplies and paying taxes that were initially allocated for education.  Teachers and kids are now marketers and salespeople who have quotas to strive for, though they aren’t held accountable for missing them.

Do you remember when the police were mostly fighting crime?  You know, protecting and serving?  Have you noticed that your town feels more like you’re under surveillance than ever before?  Many cities have seen cutbacks lead to  laying off police officers.  The result has been that cops have increased ticket quotas to hit like sales goals.  They are threatened with losing their jobs because of cutbacks in their departments if they don’t make their quotas. These days you are a potential revenue source, a customer, before you are a citizen.

Though I don’t know how to help police officers and school teachers out of their delimma without reallocating federal funds from the defense budget to education and police departments, I know what workers can do. Employees need to realize that even when you don’t own a business, you are now an entrepreneur who must market her services.

If you go to a job interview with the same exact skills as another candidate who has online profiles and content showing off her expertise and you don’t, who do you think is going to get hired?  The other person will land the job simply because they are showing their value in the industry 24/7 online for any recruiter or HR person to review while you are only telling a job history on a resume.

The good news is that there are more ways than ever to build your personal brand to market yourself.  Here are the top three personal branding techniques that every person needs to use:

1. Have an optimized LinkedIn profile.  Just because you’re on LinkedIn doesn’t mean you’re in good shape.  Is your bio full of searchable keywords for recruiters?  Do you have a video?  Do you have recommendations?  Have you recommended others?  Do you have a Twitter feed adding real time content tpo your profile page? Are you answering questions in the Q&A area?  Are you participating in conversations happening in the Groups aligned with your industry?  If you need help with this look no further than Mike O’Neill and Lori Ruff‘s book, “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.”

2.  Start a blog. Blogs are where people share their interests, their passions and their expertise.  If you like to write, then use WordPress.  If you prefer short snippets of writing, photos and videos, you can blog on Posterous or Tumblr easier than you can dial a phone.

3.  Comment on the blogs that are the most popular in your industry.  Search AllTop or BlogSearch.Google.com with keywords used in your industry to find the best blogs.  Leave comments on articles where you have something of value to add to the conversation.  This can help you to build a relationship with experts in your field and it leaves a permanent comment that is like a sales person working 24/7 to share the fact that you have valuable skills with the world.

The 21st century is a time when you will lose ground in your career if you do not create a personal brand and market yourself.  Like it or not, it’s time to be the best marketer of you that you can imagine.

If you are still worried about your information being on the web, get over it.  Google your phone number and you’ll see your name and address with a link to Google Maps.

That information has been online for at least a couple of years.  Has it hurt you? I doubt it.  You’d be better served to set up a Google profile so that people will read information about you that you would like them to see.

Currently 74.2% of the American population is online.  That leaves about 80 million people who are still not using the interwebs, but their information is most likely on the interwebs even though they’re late adopters.

The opportunities of being ubiquitous online are so far beyond the risks that it’s hard not to laugh when people express fear of baddies on the internets.  Do they exist? Yes.  Just like you’ll find a sex offender in your neighborhood if you search for them.  Have they shown up at your door lately? Probably not.

Yes they’re a threat, but the perceived threat is huge compared to the actual chance of a real threat.  Trying to be invisible online is about as effective as moving to a remote cave to be protected from a sex offender since they’re in every metropolitan neighborhood.  Studies since 2005 have repeatedly shown that identity theft, the largest privacy concern for most people, happens less often, is less harmful and is less costly online rather than offline.

Evidence continually points to the fact that being online, being able to be found and building your personal brand are incredibly beneficial and those who are ignoring this are doing so at their own peril.  The web is evolving into being the social web and those who embrace connecting to Influencers and becoming Influencers will be the ones to enjoy the most personal and professional benefits from this shift.

As Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, recently said at the Crunchies conference, “Public is the new social norm.”

Photo source: Bilal Al-badry’s blog

The main conversations around social media are misguided by debating the usefulness of the tools based on people with limited knowledge misusing them.  Like all human communication, some of what people use the tools for will be nonsense and some will be valuable.

How people individually use social networking tools is the issue, but the focus is usually on whether the tools are worthwhile.  Don’t blame revolutionary tools for how dumb people misuse them.

The quality of the questions you ask and the quality of the conversations you participate in will dramatically affect the quality of your life. That said, the main questions around social media are the wrong ones.  Here are some examples:

“Why should I care about someone posting that they went to the bathroom on Twitter?”

“How can anything meaningful be written in 140 characters?”

“Who has time for that social media stuff?  I”m too busy for that.”

Our old filters of perception and lack of understanding about the bigger picture of what’s happening is misleading a lot of people.  Beyond that, I’ve found that if you aren’t educated on how social media tools and niche communities help your life, you probably won’t ‘get it’ when you experiment with it.

After not ‘getting’ Twitter for almost a year, I asked a friend who was building her business with it to show me the value because I knew I was missing something.  Just having someone tell me about Tweetdeck, hashtags, retweets, direct messages and explain how she used the tool made me ‘get it’ when I started to use it.

Most people over 25 don’t realize how personal branding, social web technology, smart phone technology and niche communities are evolving personal & business communications – which is how you build, manage and operate your personal and business lives.  We are fundamentally changing how we connect, communicate and collaborate.

The impact of this change is like the original impact of radio and TV when they were invented.  The level of usefulness of Twitter & Facebook is the wrong conversation.  That’s the micro conversation and it confuses people who aren’t educated on how these platforms can add value to them personally.

This is like trying to explain the value of personal computing to people in 1980 when they said, “but my typewriter has always worked fine.” (Can those people imagine life without a personal computer or the internet today?) Or explaining what a car could do to people in 1910 who said, “but I have a horse.”  It isn’t easy to understand for non-users until well after the technology moves from early adopters to the mainstream.

A lot of your friends probably don’t use Twitter today. They also probably didn’t use email in 1994, but they do every day now.  …and they might not in 5 or 10 years as it becomes antiquated technology. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking technology will be fused into an entire socialized internet along with many other technologies people do and don’t use yet.

The bigger conversation is the one to be having.  The one that acknowledges that tribes, niche trust communities, technologies like Google Wave and Google Sidewiki, old business systems failing, how Generation Y (which will be the dominant U.S. population as of 2010) operates & much more are the leading indicators that tell us what’s coming next.

What you now do on Facebook you’ll be doing on every website & it will all connect in ways you can’t fathom.  If no one has explained this & you don’t use the power of Twitter & Twitter search in your current relationships you can’t understand this.  In five to ten years everyone will get it because, like people under 25 today, it will be the water we all swim in.

The following photos are from QuickSprout.

Ironically as I help companies and professionals to build and manage their brands I’m undergoing a personal re-branding.  Later in the post I’ll go into why you need to pay attention to your personal branding. Now I’ll fill you in on how this post came to be.

A few days ago I began the process of being called “Brett” instead of “Sopan.”  Fifteen years ago I went through the same process but in reverse with the names.  I legally added “Sopan” as my first name thinking it suited more of who I was and who I wanted to be.

As I am increasingly working with very high level professionals it seems more fitting to have a name that’s easier for people to pronounce.  It’s also nice to not have to spell and re-pronounce my name every time I introduce myself.

Sopan is a unique name and therefore a good memorable brand.  But judging by the same confused look I get every time people hear it for the first time, and the high frequency of times it’s mispronounced, it has drawbacks also.

When I was a radio DJ I was told that “Brett Greene” sounded strong and sexy like “James Bond.”  Whether that’s true or not, hearing it from a beautiful girl gives the memory weight in going back to that name.  Strong and sexy are good characteristics for any personal or professional brand.

The best comments to this change so far have been:

“Puff Daddy went through it too. From Puff Daddy to P Diddy to Sean Combs and back to Puff Daddy!  No big deal!”

“Don’t worry about the name thing.  Prince went through this too and everyone liked it better.”

“What – no more ‘You don’t mess with the Sopan?”

“It doesn’t matter what you’re called.  What matters is what you answer to.”

So why does this matter to you?  Because it’s the 21st century and your personal brand will help you to sink or swim professionally.

If I have two candidates for a position and one of them has an interesting blog, insightful tweets on a Twitter account and a strong LinkedIn profile (which few know how to create) then I’m hiring that person.

A resume and good interview skills aren’t enough to get a great job these days.

The same goes for people I’m going to hire.  I’ll hire the person who is powerfully presenting themselves as an expert over the person who doesn’t even have a basic website.  This isn’t just me, this is reality now.

We live in a time of radical transparency which I love because it makes bullshit a lot harder to hide.

When you fly your flag you’ll attract your tribe and connect with more and more people internationally that will contribute to your personal and professional lives.  It’s a great time to be alive and the best time ever to be in communication online.

People live online and often get to know about new friends and business associates through social networking and new media.  If you’re not swimming in this pool, which means being in the conversation, not just putting up a profile, then you’re not in the game.

Like it or not you are a brand.  If you don’t get this then I invite you to read this Fast Company aritcle on “The Brand Called You” and Dan Shawbel’s Personal Branding Blog to get up to speed.

What is your personal brand?  Who do you want people to think you are when they Google you or when they say or hear your name?

Are your unique gifts, talents and expertise on display where people can learn about them? What are you doing today to build and manage both your personal and professional brands?

Asking these questions today will affect the results in your life for many tomorrows to come.