Mitch Blum

One of the big marketing trends this year has been “personal branding.” It’s all over the social media wank-o-sphere and it looks like it’s going to get even bigger in 2010. There are personal branding coaches, blogs, books and how-to guides. The implication seems to be that if you’re not building your personal brand, you’re selling yourself short.

And who wants to sell yourself short when you can just sell out?

Look, I get it. The advent of technology has blurred the line between work life and personal life. The evolution of the workplace has turned us all into free agents. We need to carefully manage how we present ourselves online, offline, at the office and in our communities. A certain amount of self-censorship is obviously required.

But there’s a fine line between consciously presenting yourself in a certain way and creating an entirely fictitious persona based on what you perceive others to want you to be.

The most important thing that a brand can be in this day and age is authentic. Authenticity requires transparency and honesty.

Are highly managed personal brands authentic, transparent and honest?

People are complicated and full of contradictions. They have an incredible capacity for good and evil, love and hate, cleverness and stupidity.

For a personal brand to be truly authentic it would need to represent the entire person – the good AND the bad.

I suspect that most personal brands aren’t authentic at all. They’re the equivalent of a PR flack spitting out flattering press releases.

I speak from direct experience here. For many years I was afraid to present my true self online. I compartmentalized my world into distinct buckets, allowing different people to experience a different set of truths.

It’s a liberating feeling to drop the façade and just be true to your self. Sure, there are risks. You may offend people. You may alienate potential clients or employers. But sometimes you’ve got to go for it on 4th and 2 from your own 29 – even if you’re afraid of failure.

Whenever I’m interviewing someone I always pick out their most dominant personality traits – good and bad – and magnify them, knowing that in 6 months, when they’re comfortable and they let their guards down, that’s who they’re really going to be. I’ve never been wrong.

So, don’t worry about creating a personal brand or commoditization your life. Just be true to yourself, focus on the things that you’re good at and have a passion for, and things will work out. And even if they don’t, you’ll still have your integrity.

(That said, you might want to lay off the dick jokes until after you get the job offer.)

###