Personal Branding has become the topic du jour on the social web. Everywhere you look you will find a blog, an article, an opinion piece or an advice column on Personal Branding and what it means for the world. It is, without doubt, an important concept, especially for business development and the job search and there is plenty of mileage in the idea of creating a ‘consumer shortcut’ to what you have to offer, to an audience that has neither the time nor inclination to process you in any other way.
There is, however, a tension between the two key themes that prop up the concept – Consistency and Authenticity – and I want to explore how they interact in this post. Let’s unpack them and have a look.
Consistency
It would appear irrefutably the case that being consistent is essential to a successful personal brand. Indeed, it’s difficult to image a brand if were not consistent. You go to McDonald’s because you know what a Big Mac tastes like, or you buy Apple because you know the product will have cool design and great UI, or you go to Weatherspoons on a Friday night because you know you’ll get your cheap beer and type of night that comes with it. No controversy so far.
Authenticity appears less essential to the concept of a brand, but hugely important to the success of it. Successful brands need to live and breathe the values that they articulate. The message from the guru’s of Personal Branding would appear to be this: you have to believe in what you say and what you are. Again, intuitively this seems true enough.
Tension
The problem we have is that while Personal Branding tells you to be ‘consistent’, ‘authentic’ human beings are anything but. We have good days. We have bad days. We have every kind of day in between. The strain of keeping a ‘consistent’ face to the online world in order to maintain your ‘Personal Brand’, is little different to the pressures of have-a-nice-day staffer of the aforementioned McDonald’s, who’s sprayed on smile and whimsical homily’s are anything but ‘authentic’.
How We Have Dealt With It
Option 1: Just Press On
Focus on the content, suppress everything else whilst preaching the need to be authentic. In fact, what they mean is the need to be ‘consistent’ over and above the authentic. Indeed, the only authentic part of this approach is the consistency of the motive – usually sales orientated – behind their actions.
Option 2: Let Life In
You’re a human being, so try and be human, whilst remembering that your fans or followers expect value. So you provide value along with a few personal anecdotes to let the world know that you have a heart. It’s debatable how much of strategy some of this stuff is – some of it strikes me as pretty authentic; others seem to be active in the creation of an ‘authentic’ personal image (I’m looking at you Penelope Trunk), but perhaps, in the end, this doesn’t matter too much.
Option 3: Split Your Personality
You know that your audience is looking for a certain type of material, so you give that to them. You know equally well that this audience is not going to be too interested in what you had for breakfast, or whether you’ve just had an enema after said breakfast. So you curate your own content and divide it in two or however many accounts you can manage. This seems like a lot of work, and not a great compromise. It’s exactly what I’ve done. Compare @Wise_Man_Say with @hunglee on twitter and you will see a difference in terms of content, and perhaps even style.
This Can’t Continue
The tension within Personal Branding and it’s two central tenets is can only damage the validity of the concept. Each of the solutions we’ve come up with are flawed in some way, perhaps because the concept contains a major flaw in itself – that between the ‘Person’ and the ‘Brand’. We aren’t products where consistency can be manufactured through factory excellence, but multi-faceted human beings with a wide variety of interests, qualities & moods. It is difficult to abbreviate us in brand terms because inconsistency is core human characteristic. Can we truly be summarised into a catch phrase or a mission statement? And yet this is precisely what our followers want – in an age of information overload and ever shortening attention spans, we have gone past the point where we want or are even able to process the full person. And so far, it is been up to us, the Person-who-is-the-Personal-Brand to curate for the audience, compromising in turn on consistency, authenticity or personal integrity (literally).
Will Personal Branding collapse under the strain of this contradiction or is there is way out? Perhaps we are closer to a solution than we know. What we have really needed is a method of following content, rather than content producers and this is precisely the direction social and information networks are heading. Read this on Facebook Groups – it’s impact on Personal Branding will be significant, and may perhaps lead to the evolution of the concept that might allow for us to also be human beings
Great read! I agree, consistency is super important.
[...] http://wisemansay.co.uk/2010/10/personal-branding-challenge-authenticity/ [...]
[...] I’ve written before about the tension that exists between the twin tenets of Personal Branding – Authenticity and Consistency. To summarise that argument, it is essentially inauthentic to be consistent. Are you, my fellow humans, consistent? Almost certainly not. You have good days, bad days, every other kind of day in between; this is self evidently normal. However, the concept of Personal Branding doesn’t capture this dynamic; instead, it rails against it, preferring the static position of ‘always on’. Perhaps because the idea is borrowed from FMCG – where products were pretty much unchanging objects – Personal Branding struggles, and fails, to resolve the tension that exists between promoting a brand and being yourself. For Gen Y, this binary opposition feels like what it is – a false choice that is incompatible with a life that is as yet largely free of compromise. [...]