Personal Brand? Bah. Just be yourself.
Today I spent the morning hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and then walking through Gatlinburg, TN. This afternoon was made for resting and I decided to randomly surf the web/blogosphere with no intentions. This is something I rarely do as I always have a purpose when I’m online. The results were very disappointing.
I love how bloggers and “social media gurus” talk about building “personal brand” by one of two ways. They either lay out a list of how-to items to make your super special personal brand stronger or they say the basic line: Just be yourself! Either way it seems that people don’t listen or have meltdowns trying to carry out the advice. Everyone out there copies the original bloggers and no one says anything new. Everyone wants to build a personal brand for themselves but is afraid to do anything different or unique.
There are very few original voices and ideas online. Everything else is just a less exciting copy of that original version. It is quite disappointing.
I understand how it happens. When you want to blog but have no ideas about what to write or who you are or what your super special personal brand should be, it just seems easier to search the fanciest blogs and then do what they are doing. Clearly their ideas are working. People like them and read what they say. If you just do the same thing you will get the same results. Right? Right? That must be what people think.
Matt Cheuvront, one of the few good bloggers I recently found out there, wrote a guest post about personal branding and questioned whether we (20 somethings) are too young to worry about it. His best point: “There is NO right or wrong in the personal branding world. Your personal brand is YOU – whatever that means, for better or worse, you are who you are and once you embrace that and run with it, everything else will fall into place.”
Ah. Be YOU. Be who YOU really are. Run with it. Don’t try to build a personal brand around what you think you should be or someone you think you should act like. That doesn’t just go for young people but for anyone.
Why spend your time being fake hoping someone will notice and like the fake version of yourself? Seems like a fruitless endeavor to me.
First, stop trying to be someone you aren’t. Second, don’t take other people’s advice on how to be authentic. If you need someone to tell you how to be yourself then YOU AREN’T BEING YOURSELF. Being authentic and real comes from inside. It’s just who you are. No matter what the subject I’d rather read about it from someone who is being themself rather than trying to be something or someone they are not.
Perhaps it is just me, but I don’t understand why we all seem to need someone to tell us how to be who we are. Unless we are all trying to be the same? Oh, is that the goal? I sure hope it isn’t.
this is a fantastic post, Mary! i’ve heard two things like this before: “the real YOU is better than the fake ‘somebody else’” and “why are we all trying to wear the same suit?” i agree completely.
it is extremely serendipitous that i found this post – thanks for visiting helpyourself. the reason? i’ve been wondering WHO i want to be out there in cyberspace. i’ve been wondering what I have to offer. i was unclear, so i started looking at different blogs, trying to figure out how to create something that would be successful. the reality is that being ME is better than being “successful.” being ME is better than being a fake somebody else with someone elses pants on. i’d rather wear my own.
thanks for it!
tiffany
Hi Mary, sometimes I feel like the older people have an edge over us that were born in 1986, but I realized through many months of blogging that you don’t have to “be” somebody else or “be” a certain way in order to succeed. People prefer to see that there is another human being behind the blog, not the same person that everybody is or someone who’s trying to hide. That’s one of the reasons I use my real name now. Thanks for showing how important being authentic is.
Hi Mary,
After completing a nine-part personal branding series, thanks to the sound knowledge of Exile Lifestyle’s ebook, I learned loads about how I want to be seen in the public eye.
I agree that it is a pointless exercise to use other bloggers as a source for specific example of what we should do for our own brand, however, what they do offer is some brilliant case studies that highlight the industry (Social Media) standard and that’s important.
We are now living in the era of memory, that is, Google’s and we must be very careful how we portray ourselves online. Absolutely everyone lies online, and I’m not talking hurtful lies, I’m talking the kind that makes us all look good. And this is a good thing. The key to personal branding, both online & off, is not how to be ourselves but how to be our BEST selves.
Keep up the great work!
Caron.
THANK YOU for this! I hate the “personal branding” crap as well as branding crap in general. I say, just be who you are, and your brand will follow. :)
You asked on the other blog entry and I think this is one of the main reasons people read your blog, it’s because you’re yourself. I think that the online merri is often merri lite, because I’m probably a little nicer online, and don’t talk about any of the actual bad things on there…but in general I’m mostly me, all weird and ditzy and with no capitalization when I write unless the computer changes it lol. I like to write as I talk. I def agree people should not copy others, just be themselves and see what happens.