Comments on: Why geeks don’t like “personal branding”

By: Alan Levin

Alan Levin — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:40:57 +0000

I struggled with the Jail4bail reference, but I finally get it. Well written post, you’re unique Neil, thanks!

By: Andy Hadfield

Andy Hadfield — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:05:22 +0000

Nice points Neil - but I think there are plenty, plenty geeks in South Africa that have more than hopped aboard the personal branding express.

It’s easy to see through though. Any business worth their salt, has a couple of face-to-face’s before employing the skills or people hanging their flag out the window.

In a face-to-face, it’s bloody easy to tell the good from the bad.

For instance, when I was recruiting for “Social Media Managers”… One quick 5 question email culled 60% of entrants. And you can IMAGINE how many people responded to such a “in” job.

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By: Jonathan Hitchcock

Jonathan Hitchcock — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:16:36 +0000

While I agree that “personal branding” as preached and applied by most people is a shallow, fake attempt to make people believe you are what you are not, there is definitely room for some guidelines in the way people present themselves.

For example: don’t send your CV as a 10 meg MS Word document, from a hotmail account. This is a good rule to follow, but the reason geeks don’t think of personal branding as a valid exercise is that rules like this should be obvious. None of us would dream of doing that, because it’s unprofessional, and it’s doing things wrong anyway. In other words, all of personal branding just boils down to “be awesome” (just like all of SEO just boils down to “have an awesome site”).

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By: Neil Blakey-Milner

Neil Blakey-Milner — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:04:23 +0000

Jonathan,

I’d change TechLeader to use full posts in RSS feeds if I had the option. It’ll be a full feed when I repost this on my web log, though.

Neil

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By: Jonathan Carter

Jonathan Carter — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:34:49 +0000

I used to think that promoting your personal brand was completely superfluous, but I accidentally got into it when I signed started a blog and signed up for things like Amatomu, where you can track your blog’s performance with other local blogs.

To be perfectly honest, I have a slight problem with your personal branding. You only pass a snippet of your post on your RSS feed. People often do this to increase the traffic to their site, but it is a big annoyance for people who read the blog, since they have to open an entire web browser just to read your plain text post.

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By: Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:46:20 +0000

Image management is when you appear different to please others, while personal branding is taking what is natural and factual inside of you and letting it shine through.

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By: jerith

jerith — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:11:08 +0000

Hear hear! Speaking of which, I really should get around to rebranding my website…

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