Michael Phelps' recent stumble simply serves to underscore the critical requirement to actively build and protect one's 'personal' brand – especially online where a poorly lit photo from a lousy angle can become a sensation and tear down one of America's heretofore greatest athletes – not to mention the personal financial cost to Phelps in endorsements - as Kelloggs has already abandoned their multi-million dollar endorsement deal with Phelps.
Marketers have long recognized that with the growth of the Web 2.0, the term 'brand management' has proven oxymoronic, as the control over the perception of a brand is now more than ever before in the hands of the consuming public. Yet what of the impact on our personal brand? Those of us experienced enough to understand the importance of our personal brand (or 'reputation' to use an old-school term) are now leveraging social media to enhance it. And while readily evident to my generation, our youth appear not to understand or worse, not to care, that the consequences of their actions will appear today on more than their dreaded 'permanent record' –a manila folder in the principal's office – but rather, a new permanent record - another regret posted on a MySpace or Facebook page.
As recently as only a few years ago, an outlet for narcissism this dangerous was limited to the realm of celebrities and reality television. Yet today the explosive growth of social media (one of every twenty web hits is now directed at a social media website) has essentially created a world where we are all stars in our own reality show.
In a line I wish I had written, Lakshmi Chaudhry, writing in The Nation last January, derided the YouTube generation with this pithy line: “When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight."
In fact, I'm predicting that in the not-too-distant future we'll witness the advent of video capability on headsets so that we can stream our lives directly onto our own websites and Facebook pages. (Ironically I've determined that for some social media addicts, this will amount to a nearly 24/7 feed of them viewing their own pages.) SEE UPDATE
“Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking,” observed author H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Absolutely true, but in a world where everyone is looking at everyone else, all the time, where is the room for such contemplation? When there are no dark spaces left for self-reflection, self-control or self-consciousness, is the movement toward this ever-increasing comfort in exposing our thoughts, our desires, and our backsides lowering the bar on what is considered ethical and moral, or just lowering the curtain on what we all knew was there all along?
In spite of recent growth in adoption of social media for the over-35 crowd, I'm still on the upper end of the age demographic for the technology, so my age may account for my views on the subject. Yet even forgiving for a moment my parental angst over what might simply amount to a generational gap in the way we view technology, the need for young people to be taught the basics of branding – particularly personal branding – is more urgent than ever before.
I had an email exchange about a year ago with an old friend whom I've known from high school, and a large part of the on-going discussion was non-specific regret over things said, fights fought, and hearts broken when we were 17. Nothing we did was ever beyond the pale for a typical American teenager, but the minor mistakes we made in high school never really impacted the men we became. It has always been that way. Except today, when seventeen year olds are codifying their spontaneous thoughts and actions in such a way that it will soon impact their lives and defining – essentially restricting – the person they will become.
As I use Facebook Facebookand LinkedIn to get connected and reconnected with colleagues from my early corporate roles here in Dallas, advertising years in New York, friends from high school and even junior high school (!), it is the branding wonk in me that is grateful that as an adolescent extrovert I was spared the consequences of access to social media. Yet regarding today's generation, I pause to consider the impact of a future web search that might bring up an intelligent byline they've written – alongside a photo of the otherwise respected author passed out at a 'kegger' years earlier.
Personal branding is as critical a skill to future generations as reading, 'ritin, and 'rithmetic. Yet unlike trigonometry, a working knowledge of social media's impact on personal branding will be relied upon again and again in their future. Adolescents today make choices that are under greater scrutiny and a harsher light than ever before, therefore discussion of ethical and moral choices needs to be highlighted at school and at home – along with the new visibility of these choices and their online 'permanent record'.
UPDATE, Aug 2010: www.looxcie.com 'Nuff said.
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