In the last few years, the concept of the personal brand has taken root through the widespread use of social networking tools and Web 2.0. Career consultants, self-proclaimed “gurus” and “experts” tell us we can and should create a strategic online presence - but when employers Google potential hires, do they really want to find "Brand You"?
While the manipulation of social media has its benefits, there’s something unsettling about looking at ourselves as brands; something insincere and creepily PR about the whole concept. Ashton Kutcher or Paris Hilton or that girl from the Hills are people who are arguably branding made flesh. But regular Jane Job Seeker isn’t. Companies and less-than-talented Hollywood types create brands; that’s their job. Individuals serious about their work create and belong to a community of like-minded people. It’s here that you’ll gain industry knowledge, and collaborate on projects and ideas.
Being a brand, and nothing but, is like wrapping a gift box really, really beautifully but forgetting to put anything in it. Any company worth its stock will want more than the packaging, more than “Brand You” – they want what’s inside.
Melanie McBride, a Toronto-based educator and consultant specializing in digital literacies and emergent curriculum, remembers when personal online branding began. “It started with the marketing and PR world’s discovery and acceptance of social media in 2004 or thereabouts,” she writes to me over email. “…They applied their models – corporate, commercial models – to social tools and spaces that had previously been defined by publics and individuals for a great many purposes, from activism and cultural commentary to personal self expression.”
According to McBride, PR companies have been working overtime to sell the idea of personal branding. “It’s certainly a handy term to describe the act of identity management,” she writes, “but it is not the only one. And it’s certainly not the one I accept because I actively reject the use of the word ‘brand’ in relation to social identity because it is defined along commercial, corporate and consumer values.” She prefers, instead, the term “open social.” To McBride, it’s a term that “brings all of this social media stuff back to its real origins in social theory and the self actualization movements that inspired the early virtual communities, focuses on the idea of individuals sharing and building upon each other’s knowledge bases. In this we are publics, contributors, collaborators – not performers with audiences.”
She points to corporate social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as entities that reinforce the notion of people as performers. Twitter, she notes, uses the term “followers” instead of “community”. “…There is a big difference between relating oneself to a ‘public’ – a network of equals – versus an ‘audience’, a group of fans, supporters or observers defined by their participation in a performance,” McBride explains. And she’s not wrong; many young people avoid Twitter as they “don’t want to be marketed to” according to Tim Paul, a University of Toronto student in City Studies.
The PR notion of individuals as performers, says McBride, is about who can manage and manipulate others. “A public,” she says, “participates in power, an audience merely consumes. If social media has taught us anything it has taught us that identity is now a negotiation, not a given.” Branding implies that those with money and power can control a message, but “we need only to scan the headlines or read a few blogs about any celebrity or political figure to know that this may have been possible 50 years ago but it is not possible in the Internet age.”
In other words, if you start becoming involved in online communities and are only there to promote yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll be called on it. The rules for making friends online aren’t that much different than they are in the real world: be sincere, be yourself, and help out. “One of the [ways] you gain a following,” says Melissa Martin, an Ottawa based career coach, “is [when you] help other people. In other words, you spend a minimal amount of time focusing your energy on yourself and instead on what others are doing in the field. Employers will see this too and that’s communicating your personality… because it shows that you aren’t narcissistic.” It’s good advice for not only how to behave online, but also in the real world (or “meat space”, as some virtual people refer to it). If you are helping people and contributing online, chances are you’ll be doing the same at your workplace.
So why are some individuals and companies that are clearly insincere successful online? If “branding” and all the strategizing and manipulation that goes along with it works for certain people and companies, can’t it work for me? For McBride, the success of these “brands” is due to “the inability of most ‘consumers’ of social performance to spot insincerity,” as well as the social intelligence needed to spot manipulation over sincerity. “Because for every 50-100 people in that network that don’t buy it,” she writes, “there are half a dozen who are vulnerable enough to think it’s a sincere gesture. And that’s the really ugly side of all of this social branding.”
“I think employers are less interested in your personal ‘brand,’” McBride summarizes, “than what kinds of contributions you’re making to your field, to others, to the world. What do you bring to an organization besides your carefully constructed self?”
There is no question that the internet and social networking tools have changed the way we search for jobs and present our resumes, and the reasons we get fired. At the minimum, serious job seekers should manage their identity just as they would in any public setting, and yes, take advantage of the network that can be created. Employment opportunities aren’t the only benefits of these honest connections. You’ll also develop professionally by actively participating in discussions about your field, and engaging with peers and colleagues. jp