A Personal Brand Revolution Is At Hand

Yesterday in a phone call with the amazing Leslie Bradshaw I asked a question: “What did people do to brand themselves before the internet?” Her response wasn’t what’s important (although all of her words are always words of wisdom so follow her on Twitter). What was significant is the fact that we have just witnessed a transformation in the ability to brand yourself.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the epitome of personal branding and if you watch his daily insights you will be handsomely rewarded. The main point is that the new technologies have enabled us to reach a large number of people that we were never able to reach previously without promotions via fliers, radio ads, personal publicists and a number of other methods. The bottom line is that we now have the capability to reach exponentially more people than ever before.

My good friend Rachelle Lacroix says that “it’s no longer branding my consumption, it’s branding my creation.” This means you create the content and promote it to others rather than let people judge you based on the purchases you make (you probably didn’t need that explanation though). Last night I finally the realized the significance of the revolution taking place. You can instantly set up your brand via a blog, cross promote it on social networks and suddenly you have distributed brand you to the masses.

There are millions of job opportunities that surround this new market. You don’t need to be the center of the brand that you are promoting but you should still promote brand you no matter what you are doing. Even your publicist should be known for being the most amazing publicist around. How do they do that? Set up a blog and start writing about publicity on a daily basis! The social web is furthering this transformation and it is our job to embrace it.

Do you agree? Do you think personal brands are extremely important? What are you doing to further your brand? When is self-promotion crossing the line?

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.