Why You Can't Just Ignore Personal Branding--Even if You Really Want to.

Summary: Nobody loves personal branding. It can be time consuming, tedious, and, at it’s worst, disingenuous. Noah Bertlatsky's recent article about the dark side of personal branding raised some very accurate, and interesting points about taking personal branding to the extreme. However, it's dangerous to advise professionals to completely ignore personal branding. Whether we like it or not, how we look online has a major impact on our career, and there a few things professionals can do to manage their brand without taking it to the extreme. In this article I discuss

• How Personal Branding can be taken to the extreme
• How Personal Branding isn’t all or nothing. It is essential if you want to maximize career opportunities
• Personal Branding as Career Insurance
• Personal Branding as your Resume
• Personal Branding by the numbers: You will be looked up
• Implementing Personal Branding wisely

Personal Branding Can be Taken to the Extreme

Last month, Noah Berlatsky wrote a great article about the deceiving allure of personal branding. Personal branding is often touted by inspirational speakers and self-help gurus as a magic solution: by positioning yourself as a "brand" or "mini-business," they urge, you too can land the job of your dreams. In this context, branding is framed as a sort of currency -- as if you can trade in a personalized logo and website for a gift-wrapped career, or the American dream.

This is obviously an overly simplistic depiction of both branding and the nature of today’s job market. Noah points out a few major flaws of personal branding as he sees it, arguing that the trend is less likely to land you a dream job, and more likely to dehumanize the work force as a whole.

He makes some great points. Extreme personal branding can do more harm than good: by blurring or erasing the line between professional and personal, you enter dangerous territory that will penalize you for acting like a regular human online, or straying “off-brand” with as little as one misguided tweet. However, while I agree with much of what he says, advising professionals to completely ignore personal branding is dangerous. Further, he ignores the reality of the modern job market, stating the issues without offering a viable solution.

Personal branding may have it’s flaws, but there are even more flaws in suggesting that it’s a waste of time. Here’s why.

Personal Branding isn't all-or-nothing. It is essential if you want to maximize your career opportunities.

Noah’s first misstep is in assuming that personal branding is an all-or-nothing strategy — or that it’s something you can take or leave. While some people take it to the extreme, personal brands can be as elaborate or as minimal as you want.

More importantly, the truth is, like it or not, you already have a brand: and that brand is simply how you come across online. Whether you think it’s “hooey” or not, how we look online does matter — a lot — in our careers today. What Noah gets wrong about personal branding is that it isn’t about commodifying yourself. It’s about taking control of the existing narrative and shaping it to your advantage.

In fact, that's why we created BrandYourself. When my co-founder was applying for internships, employers that Googled him were directed to the results of a criminal with the same name. In this case, Pete’s “brand” was hijacked by another Pete, and it hurt his job prospects.

The point I’m making, here, is that your online brand will materialize with or without you. Foregoing it entirely is a dangerous chance to take, especially considering anyone can say anything about you online with no recourse, whether it’s true or not. This can ruin your personal life or career, and there’s little you can do about it.

Personal Branding as Insurance: A negative post online can happen to anyone, and it can ruin your career:

Think about it. If you upset anyone — an ex, a fired employee, someone you were promoted over — they can go virtually anywhere online and trash you. It happens all the time and there is very little protecting you. In fact, more laws protect the publishers in these situations.

Secondly, with every action we take online, we’re already branding ourselves. Everything we post on Facebook or Twitter and every item we search for, website we visit, online transaction we make and conversation we have through text or messenger exists somewhere. Because of this, a Facebook status update you made year ago may eventually get you fired. Even more worrisome, a private email or message you sent to a friend — even if you deleted it — could come back to bite you. We’ve seen hackers invade the privacy of everyone from celebrities on snapchat to major politicians running for president. And it isn’t just hackers you need to worry about. Outdated laws that have not kept up with Technology — like the ECPA — make it easier than ever for people to access information you thought was private.

In light of these issues, personal branding acts as a form of insurance that can protect you in case something does go wrong. With a web presence controlled by you first and foremost, damaging content can be suppressed, and your image is yours alone. Choosing not to brand yourself is like letting someone else pick out your outfit — and we all know about the importance of first impressions.

Personal Branding as your resume and maximizing opportunities:

When you look for a job, you do everything you can to put your best foot forward. You polish your resume, you practice interview questions, you narrate your experience to fit the job at hand, you even prep your references so they know what to highlight about you. This is personal branding and there are two realities that make it more important than ever.

• Professionals are now constantly on the job market: Years ago, once you got a job you stayed there until you retired. You rarely had to polish your resume, or figure out how to position your experience to a new company and culture.  Today, the average person changes jobs 10-15 times in their career with successful people changing even more (Forbes 2016). It’s more important than ever to have a strong personal brand that reinforces your qualifications.
• You will be looked up online: Which brings us to our next section:

By the Numbers: Employers and recruiters are definitely looking you up.

Noah is also plain wrong when it comes to personal branding’s correlation to the job market. Though the book he cites, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work Today, concludes that personal branding is “largely boondoggle” that “doesn’t help people get jobs,” real statistics argue the opposite is true.

It’s a fact that employers, customers and even dates increasingly screen you online for negative information, so you can imagine how this may seriously affect you. Here’s just a few salient stats:

• 75% of HR departments are required to research a candidate online before making a hire.  (Source: Study by Microsoft and Cross Tab Marketing)
• 70% of employers have rejected candidates based on information they found online, and 85% say positive information has influenced them to make a hire. (Source: Study by Microsoft and Cross Tab Marketing)
• 90% of executive recruiters Google candidates before making a hire. (Source: 2012 Execunet study)
• 60% of employers screen candidates via social media. (Source: Careerbuilder)

If your brand is how you appear online, it would be a ridiculous to presume such a thing doesn’t matter. On the contrary, these figures prove that more likely than not, your brand will inform the recruiter’s impression of you, and will likely play a factor in their hiring decisions.

In an increasingly competitive economy, more and more companies, schools and customers are looking for positive information about you on the web. This is just a fact. However, most people don’t know what they can do to increase the positive footprint they can have on the web. So they leave their brands up to the whim of the web.

As my colleague Ryan Erskine outlined on Forbes, online reputation management for businesses leads to quantifiable gains, even when considering the cost of a firm. It’s true that people aren’t businesses, but similar principles apply. Branding is not a waste of time. It’s an investment, insurance, and basic common sense in the digital era.

Personal Branding can, and should, be implemented wisely

Professionals can and should be branding themselves; I’d go as far as saying they have no choice by virtue of being human beings on the internet. There is no need to take things to the extreme, or let our brand define us, especially if we choose to view personal branding as a form of insurance rather than a commodification.  

Noah argues that branding makes complicit in some of the modern workforce’s most dangerous pitfalls. “Tweeting a controversial opinion can get you in trouble if said opinion is antithetical to your personal brand,” he says, and he’s right — this is problematic. But branding isn’t the problem; the problem is technology.

Saying that branding erodes at worker solidarity is also nothing more than a red herring; brands compete, sure, but they cooperate too. That’s the entire idea of social networks, after all: forming connections to mutual benefit.

At the end of the day, the truth is simple: when you put time, thought, and even money into your online brand, you mitigate both personal and professional risks and get to choose your outfit, so to speak.

Personal branding won’t guarantee you a dream job, but it could lose you one. So instead of blaming branding for a crappy workforce, I suggest professionals use it for a leg up, because the alternative could be a nightmare.