Fol­low­ing Ed Vielmetti’s sound advice, I’m mak­ing a loop and pin­ning a cou­ple of “best of” posts to the top of the blog for a lit­tle while as an exper­i­ment. Given the recent log sum­maries of why peo­ple arrive here, they seem salient.

Quite a few Per­sonal Brand­ing spe­cial­ists and Social Media Gurus have been fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter lately. Maybe if you’re one of those peo­ple, you should con­sider an alter­na­tive story of what “Per­sonal Brand” actu­ally means to real peo­ple in the real world.

[If you want to com­ment, do so in the orig­i­nal post.]

“Brand and brand! What is ‘brand’!?”

We design our per­sonae, our cul­tural affec­ta­tions and sig­ni­fy­ing traits, as a mat­ter of almost-​​conscious choice. We pick stereo­types to adopt, or eschew, and set our­selves up con­ve­nient abbre­vi­a­tions of impli­ca­tion. You’re a Geek, you know about com­put­ers; you’re an Aca­d­e­mic, you work long hours on things nobody else really cares about; you’re a Suit, you know all about pub­lic speak­ing and you like golf or swim­ming; you’re a Con­sul­tant, you’re bad with exe­cu­tion details but rather insight­ful with a 30000-​​Foot View; you’re Gay, maybe you dress a bit bet­ter; you’re an Entre­pre­neur, you’re work­ing 30-​​hour days and always ready to make a cun­ning strate­gic leap; you’re a Temp, you’re run­ning out the door at 4:45 every day; you’re a Cur­mud­geon, you get to swear on the Internet.

You’re not any one of those things, and you’re never obliged to suf­fer from any one of those traits. But it helps, some­times, to let peo­ple know kindof where you are. Sig­nals. Signs. Mes­sages. Sum­maries. That’s what cul­ture is: lit­tle mod­ules of sig­nif­i­cance that help us men­tally (and socially) model one another. And even our­selves; we model our­selves, too.

Per­sonae are expeditious.

We use these per­sonae as com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­duits, as chan­nels through which salient infor­ma­tion can be fil­tered. Inte­grat­ing our­selves into the flow of con­ver­sa­tion, to aid our inter­ac­tions by gloss­ing and mask­ing our intrin­sic unique­ness. And for block­ing what we don’t nec­es­sar­ily want peo­ple to see. And if we’re cun­ning, for derail­ing assump­tions so we can take advan­tage of our peers’ cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance (noth­ing I love more than walk­ing into cer­tain meet­ings in my Gen­eral Suit, for instance).

You should have a per­sona. You should strive, dili­gently, to use your per­sonae as tools in your life. Because life’s eas­ier for human beings when they don’t need to explain every­thing every time. We’re made to model one another’s minds; per­sonae make that mod­el­ing easier.

Sure, things get out of hand or we slip up or we do a bad job pick­ing or we get into the wrong con­text, and all of a sud­den we’re suf­fer­ing from the neg­a­tive con­se­quences of that “sim­pli­fi­ca­tion”. Up to and includ­ing get­tin’ killed daid by some ass­hole thinks he’s bet­ter than you.

That’s arguably a big­gish risk, get­tin’ killed daid by ass­holes. There are plenty of ass­holes in the world, more than enough to go around. You’d think the ten­dency would have been bred out of us by now. But regard­less of the costs, the ben­e­fits mean we really all do it, all the time. And we do it because we’re con­stantly deal­ing with one another in indi­vid­ual social sit­u­a­tions, and for the most part we can adapt to those situations.

Pick some rules, fol­low ‘em as long as it makes sense… but we all know only a big­oted idiot assumes she knows every­thing about a per­son just because she rec­og­nizes a stereo­typic trait or two. That big foot­ball geek may be a D&D nut; that old man may love World of War­craft; that C-​​level exec may actu­ally be a use­ful programmer.

That’s how peo­ple work. You find those details out, you dis­close those things or hide them, when you talk with people—when you actu­ally inter­act with one another.

Face to face.

Now. In the “new world” of Social Media (which is typ­i­cally read to mean “media you don’t have to ask some­body else to make for you”), we’re “all” “empow­ered” to “build” our own “per­sonal brand”.

Fact: Brands are not personae.

Brands are immutable. They’re rigid, they’re committee-​​designed, and those com­mit­tees cre­ate them for use in fuck­ing broad­cast media, peo­ple. For com­mer­cials. For news­pa­pers. For signs.

You design your brand; you label your brand; you defend your brand. But you can never, ever adapt it con­tin­gently as the sit­u­a­tion demands.

Brand­ing is not for peo­ple. Brand­ing is for cat­tle. Brand­ing is for slaves. Do you imag­ine it’s a coin­ci­dence that brand­ing is for prop­erty?

Brand­ing is for immuta­bles. Brand­ing is what you do to shit you plan to sell in a bot­tle, when you don’t want to give away the recipe but do want to assure cus­tomers that it will con­sis­tently be the same shit no mat­ter which branded bot­tle they open. A brand is a promise of eter­nal consistency.

You. Do. Not. Want. A. “Per­sonal”. Brand. You do not want to even start to think of an indi­vid­ual per­son as hav­ing a brand. In fact, real life will not let you have a brand, you can­not “be” one, and are a fuck­ing idiot if you approach your online (or real) life that way. I don’t care if you’re in busi­ness, or you’re some kind of maven, or you’re just an ran­dom schmoe who believes new words equal use­ful ideas.

Sorry: This is not a mere mat­ter of seman­tics, or of usage. Not a mat­ter of mis­in­ter­pret­ing what peo­ple “mean” by the phrase.

No mat­ter how much you want to deny it, you’re an indi­vid­ual. A com­plex human being. I don’t care whether you want to sell some­thing, includ­ing your­self: It’s your god­damned respon­si­bil­ity to pay atten­tion to the peo­ple you’re talk­ing with, inter­act­ing with, hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with.

And adapt to them. Not “adapt your mes­sage”. Adapt your self.

And I don’t mean “that’s a good strat­egy for your suc­cess!” I mean it’s your respon­si­bil­ity as a human being. Oth­er­wise? You’re not lis­ten­ing. And if you’re not lis­ten­ing, not par­tic­i­pat­ing? You’re of no use.

And that, right there, that’s what your “brand” has bought you: a clear impli­ca­tion of your use­less­ness, your immutabil­ity, your mind­less con­sis­tency. You’re the same crap in a branded bot­tle, no mat­ter which bot­tle we open.

I bet you think you want a “brand” because brands are “rec­og­nized”. Brands are famous, right?

You will always be the same branded shit in any bot­tle we open. You might be the best shit in any bot­tle in the whole wide world… but you’re the same brand, no mat­ter what. That con­sis­tency right there is the price of fame. Ask any­body who regrets their fame, any suc­cess­ful author or per­former, any star, any lumi­nary. “Do that thing you always do! No, not that new one—like you used to in the old days.”

Mind­less­ness, use­less­ness, inhu­man­ity: those are the price of fame. And you know what? Fame can be worth those costs, if you really want it strongly enough, if you reap rewards com­men­su­rate with the costs.

But only a fool would think hav­ing a brand—being a brand—is the path to fame.

[If you want to com­ment, do so in the orig­i­nal post.]