Authentic Personal Branding is a journey towards a happier and more successful life. Your Personal Brand should therefore emerge from your search for your identity and meaning in life, and it is about getting very clear on what you want, fixing it in your mind, giving it all your positive energy, doing what you love and develop yourself continuously. Your Personal Brand should always reflect your true character, and should be built on your values, strengths, uniqueness, and genius. If you are branded in this organic, authentic and holistic way your Personal Brand will be strong, clear, complete, and valuable to others. You will also create a life that is fulfilling and you will automatically attract the people and opportunities that are a perfect fit for you. If you are not branded in this unique way, if you don’t deliver according to your brand promise, and if you focus mainly on selling and promoting yourself, you will be perceived egocentric, selfish and a unique jerk, and branding will be cosmetic and a dirty business…..read more
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Personal branding is a nonsense to me, I’m interested in someone’s character – not their outward image/brand. Character comes through such things as quality work and keeping commitments to me and others, not in maintaining an online social network.

Reading the interview it seems that Dan has read What Colour is your Parachute, re-hashed it and included mention of some recent online social networking tools.

I’ve noticed that more and more of my Facebook and Twitter friends have been posting nothing more than statements that boil down to “Here’s my awesome blog post!” or “Visit my site!” That just clutters up MY life, especially if I already subscribe to your blog’s RSS.

Promote some of your own work, by all means, but also remember that most social media are best used for conversation–that’s how you make real connections. If you use these tools merely as billboards, you’re probably building a different reputation than you think.

My wife even made a comment as she left for work that I should get up earlier to prepare for my day with the kids.

I also realized that my strengths, passions and area of expertise intertwine with what I am trying to achieve as far a building my brand.

Dan’s response to not being an expert, but a spokesperson, really helped me to get clarity as well, while I work to develop my brand.

Great work!

Personal branding is also about aligning your passion with your expertise, while developing a support system. This means that it gives people the confidence to make money doing what they love. To me, that matters more than anything.

First of all, “personal branding” is not new. It’s called “building a good reputation” and it has been around for ages. Look it up.

By the way, the term “personal branding” is in my opinion utterly braindead: while the word “branding” can be applied to commercial products and cattle (a more archaic form of a product, if you will), you don’t use this word on people, since they don’t get searing hot metal stamps pushed against their asses. People create a name for themselves, a reputation, not a brand.

But I digress.

Think about the people, who actually make decisions in companies and consider how many of them use social networks like mentioned above. I must note, however, that I live and work in Europe, so it may be different in the U.S. and I can only speak from an european perspective. But nevertheless, at some point a personal brander will come to an inevetible and horrible conclusion, that social networks are full of other personal branders such him- or herself, but no real decision makers. Face it, if we are not talking about small companies and the tech industry, you won’t find any execs or decision makers on social networks, who are active. It’s like a rocking party of dorks and the girls didn’t show up.

My point is, that networking is critical for a career, but it is based on trust. And trust comes from consistent results, integrity and a strong work ethic. You cannot substitute that with a high follower count.

If you want to promote that trust through the Internet and social media, you have to give your audience content that is worth something. And face it, your opinion is seldomly a valuable and practical contribution (I am aware of the irony of that statement, but there is no URL with this comment).

And nothing against Mr. Schawbel, but looking at his example, I see a person, who got a personal brand, by promoting personal branding. Kind of like people who got rich quickly by selling “How to get rich quickly” books. When the means are the cause, than I am afraid credibilty suffers.