Personal Brand

’10ways to unlock your personal brand’ would guarantee hits, but the problem is that I can’t bring myself to write it. That’s what the post is about.

The title is because the post is related to me, and the raison d’être of the blog. To give you a quick update, I have been considering various employment options in the last couple of months – not just ‘the next job’, but even at a ‘consultancy vs job’ level. Given the options, I believe I’ll be able to put that to rest next week, at least for the medium term. Since the blog’s existence played its part in providing me these options, I thought it deserved a ‘take stock’ post.

I had always intended this to be a resting space for my ideas and perspectives. But I have realised that the blog is at best, a strategy, and not an objective. The objective is to tell the world that I have perspectives on the areas I specialise in – brand and social. Notwithstanding my interest in these areas, it has been driven a lot by the same blogging discipline that has kept the personal blog alive for more than 8 years now.

However, the autopilot discipline, in cahoots with my general nature, has kept me writing more for myself than an audience, which completely goes against the objective. It not only affects the content generated, but the brand/communication strategy as well. I have followed a ‘build and they will come if they are interested’ approach, something that I advise brands and publishers not to do in an era of abundance. Also, I rarely publicise posts beyond a single tweet/ LinkedIn status, and refrain from baiting. (brand or individual) In fact, I very reluctantly started sharing my own posts on GReader only a few weeks back. Bad strategy in the era of aggressive personal brands.

This thought had been gnawing at me for a while, but hit me when the afaqs guest post happened, and the reactions started coming in. This is a good time to mention that left to myself, the article wouldn’t have happened. It took consistent ‘do it’ pushes from the ever kind and wise Vijay Sankaran for the article to see the light of day. It took just a little more time than the average post to be written, but the amount of people who sat up and took notice was many multiples more than anything this blog had seen. It has also led me to the question of identity and a single web location (unifying the blogs), but that’s for later.

Considering that time is going to be my most valuable resource going forward, I will need to prioritise.  I experimented with tumblr and paper.li to see if i could produce more content in lesser time (to be used here) and leave ‘heavier’ writing for platforms with more reach. But I realised I would just be adding to the noise, and not being original at all. I like what I do here, and won’t stop. What I might have to do is skip a week once in a while so that I can also meet the objectives I had initially set for myself. Interestingly, the immediate trigger for this post was that while I was writing the original post for this week, i realised it could make a decent article elsewhere. 🙂

In case you have reached here, I have a question. If you could change something about the posts here, what would it be? Shorter? Better scope for debate? More personal/topical examples? Let me know.

until next time, happy I-Day 🙂