Who Are You?

Believe it or not, that was a rhetorical question.

Personal branding has always been around. During the last decade, we have experienced the birth and rise of technology that will change personal branding. This technology is social media. Social media has completely changed the games of branding, marketing, and networking.

Everyone should examine this shift and figure out how it affects them. Everyone needs to develop a plan and a new set of goals built around the utilization of social media for personal branding, marketing, and networking.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Today I watched a video of Gary Vaynerchuk giving a talk at Strategic Profits Live 08 on personal branding and what he calls a Gold Rush. “You can hit big. You can be a maven in your field.” In the wine world, Gary is a celebrity, thanks to the success of his web site Wine Library TV. Who would have thought a web site about wine would land its host on network talk shows? If Gary can do this within the wine industry, what’s to keep you from doing it in your own industry?

Douglas Welch

In December, I had lunch in Pasadena with Douglas Welch, who I met at PodCamp AZ the month before. We had a long talk about the subject of personal branding, and he uses an excellent phrase to describe the movement, “2008: The Year of Visibility“. You want and need to be seen. This involves creating a brand for yourself and marketing it (yourself).

For social media to go mainstream, a small number of sites had to become extremely successful (e.g. Myspace, Facebook). During the next few years, we will continue to see diversification of the social media space. What does that mean? That means there will be many smaller sites instead of few large sites. It means sites will focus on a niche and become popular for certain groups of people.

In addition to his success in personal branding, Gary Vaynerchuk has a clear view of this shift in the social media space because it is happening today around him. Look at Cork’d. It is a social network focused on wine. Even if you have never heard of Cork’d, you can probably answer the following question correctly: “Who, at the time of this writing, has 1,100 friends on Cork’d?”

Yes. Gary Vaynerchuk.

5 Replies to “Who Are You?”

  1. My academic research is on the topic of what happens when you don’t pay attention to the way you represent yourself online, the benefits and/or the pitfalls of poor construction.

    It is a topic we really should be regarding with more care.

  2. Jim:

    I don’t know exactly what the deal is with that, but I do know that Wine Library is a sponsor of Cork’d. Looking at WL’s HTML, the CSS is pulled from the corkd.com domain. I wouldn’t accuse them of piracy. They probably have some sort of arrangement/agreement.

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