Unveiling: New Branding
With some slight change of direction planned for my blog, I figured it was time to do a bit of rebranding. In line with my previous rumblings about personal brand awareness and About.me, I did a full ground-up rebranding including a complete theme refresh, navigation refresh, and re-categorization of every legacy post. I’ve also branded my Twitter and About.me profiles to match.
About.me: Next Gen. Digital Business Card
My account over at About.me was initially created just as an experiment to see what the platform was like. The more time I’ve spent customizing my profile, the more I’ve realized that About.me really has the potential to become the next generation digital business card.
Not only is the profile itself surprisingly customizable (check out the directory if you think I’m kidding), but the social network integration is among the cleanest I’ve seen in a while. When you add your various social networks to your profile you have the option of just making them links, or actually loading the content into About.me. I have noticed some quirks, Foursquare for example will not show how many checkins I’ve got no matter how many times I remove and relink it, and I can’t seem to figure out what permissions it’s using to Facebook (since I gave it full permission and it only found three photos of me). On the flipside, the integration to Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter seems spot on.
As the platform continues to develop, I expect it to get even more powerful; potentially to the point of being a central hub between networks. If you don’t have an account, head over to About.me and sign up (you’d hate to wait a year and not be able to get a cool URL).
(Personal) Brand Awareness
Successful brands have been balancing the line between print, web, and brick-and-mortar elements for decades. With the rapid adoption of social media, that trend has continued to the familiar social media tools we all use every day. The limitations of avatars, and sometimes little options for customization have forced us to be a little creative, but an uncompromising implementation of the brand is almost always possible.
Dell is one of those companies that has traversed the plethora of social media networks without compromising the integrity of the brand (which after-all, is the point). Support forums are easily recognizable with the Dell moniker, tweets carry the familiar Dell logo, the YouTube channel is heavily customized, and most importantly everything is consistent.
Now, you may be wondering why I put “Personal” in the title if we’re going to talk about Dell. The point here is that the same strategy of a major brand can also apply to your personal brand. There’s two schools of thought on personal brands: 1- branding is a big corporate term (so why should I care), and 2- there’s value in providing a consistent, recognizable, and professional image of yourself across multiple mediums. The first rule applies to those of you who are just casual users; you’re the people that use Facebook to just talk to family, Twitter to tell me that you and your BFF are going roller skating, and have no idea what LinkedIn is. For you, it doesn’t matter if your Facebook picture is a weekend snap of you drunk at a party, or your Twitter avatar is the default Twitter bird, because well, it just doesn’t matter. The second rule applies to anyone who uses a combination of these services in a professional capacity, such as selling a product, supporting a product, blogging, professional networking, or community involvement.