I have a few problems with “Personal Branding.” I’ve read a lot about the topic and the recommendations provided are all pretty good. Things like  creating a blog, signing up to services all over the web, tweeting, podcasting,  commenting, getting a yourname.com, checking-in, speaking at conferences, creating content, connecting on LinkedIn, name dropping, making fun of MySpace, etc.

I’ve done most of these things myself and they’ve all been helpful. I wouldn’t be a Social Media Manager if I hadn’t tried all of these. More importantly, doing them has been a fun and rewarding learning experience.

Still, I don’t like that ”personal branding” is sometimes sold as a roadmap to success. It’s sold as a way to make money and become a micro-celebrity. Celebrities are often associated with “personal branding,” as if the average person could ever be Oprah. I’m sorry but Oprah doesn’t need Twitter to be Oprah and if she wrote a book about success, I doubt she would start with “How To Tweet Your Way to Success.” The fact is Oprah happens to be a nice likeable lady that worked like crazy for many many years.

Another thing I don’t like when I read about “personal branding” is that they often fail to mention that actual branding at companies includes a heck of a lot more than just doing social media marketing. Sure, anyone can grab a marketing book and say “see, you can do all of these things, starting with the 4 P’s.” Again, just like with Oprah, McDonald’s did not become McDonald’s over night.

Please don’t get me wrong, I have huge respect for anyone that has ever written about the topic and I know their intentions are probably good (I myself try to share what I’ve learned about and in social media and would love to be able to even start writing a book some day).

My really big problem with “personal branding” is… the term itself. People don’t need to be more like brands. Brands need to be more like people.

 If you ever meet a brand with a soul, emotions, dreams in the middle of the night, fears, suffering, family members, aspirations, you tell me… because I’ve never met one. Without the people behind them (entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, marketers, accountants, architects, lawyers, executives, salespeople, customer service reps, subject matter experts, testers, consultants, etc.), brands would cease to exist.

If anything needs some “personal branding,” it is brands and companies.

I am not a brand. I don’t want to be a brand. I won’t ever be a brand.

And I think anyone who is really into social media needs to get past the idea of wanting to be a brand because trying a little too hard might actually end up making all of us a bunch of narcissistic people trying to get a bunch of retweets, views, and comments out of others. I have close friends who have told me that I share too much and that I blog too much and that they’d rather give me a call than sign up on Twitter.

So my question is: Do we really want to have a “personal brand?” Why?

Are we interested in marketing the hell out of ourselves to be micro-celebrities or do we just want to do use social media to learn, have fun, make some actual friends, and hopefully do some of that for a living? I think there is a difference.

Think about it.

Do you want to sell “you?”

Is “engaging” and social media really about success and selling ads and books and ideas and… people? Or is “engaging” and social media really just about… sharing life?

I hope it’s the latter.

Maybe it’s time to re-brand personal branding.

Or maybe it’s time to unbrand it altogether.

Sarah Austin was one of the first live streaming, life-casters popularized on Justin.TV and she is the founder of Pop17, “a collaborative blogging platform and web show that covers and tracks emerging web trends and tells the stories behind what’s going in social media.”

Sarah and I have a SXSWi 2011 Panel Proposal with Brandon Prebynski, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh. We’d really appreciate your votes and comments at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob by August 27th, 2010.

Listen to this entire 38th episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!” with Sarah Austin on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from your phone on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio. Some show highlights and quotes are below. Enjoy!

Brands on Social Media

 ”When brands become a part of the community, it really feels like the brand is like your friend. You really love them, like you would a real person. In social media, they take on attributes of people because there are personalitieis behind the brand making tweets, answering questions, customer service, and establishing relationships with people, connecting with people on their interests, and offering something back to the community.”

“Ford’s really great. I had such a time doing the Ford Fiesta Movement. I got to drive a car around and go on all these adventures. It was also a competition. I got to do interviews with Ford designers. It’s interesting to see them being really progressive. Ford used to not appeal to the Millenial demographic. Ford’s really changed and become hip.”

“Companies like Virgin America are doing a really good job. They appeal to a tech demographic and people in social media really like flying on Virgin America. I was able to meet with them and interview Richard Branson. They are really involved in social media and they value people in tech. They syndicate shows like “Wine Library TV” by Gary Vaynerchuck.”

Facebook and “The Social Network” Movie

“Facebook has taken over the world. They own everything but China and they have all the conversations and connections all over the world.”

“To some people, things aren’t official until it’s on Facebook.”

 ”Movies are starting to document a real movement, a social media revolution, and it’s really hitting the mainstream.”

Foursquare

 ”I use Foursquare and have been using it for a while. I have a lot of friends there. If I want to know where my friends are right now, I’ll get on Foursquare. Facebook Places hasn’t quite reached that with me yet. I’m still on Foursquare and plug that in to Facebook.

” It will be interesting to see how developers use Facebook Places and do something cool with it. I don’t think this means Foursquare is over. I think they have to create more relationships with businesses, maybe small local business, so they can provide value on Facebook and stay on there.”

Live Streaming Platforms and Privacy

“Each of the platform has its advantages. There’s just a lot going on. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out when YouTube starts to get into the picture.”

“These sites are going in different directions so what will make them stand out for the long-run will be withstanding all the legal issues that they’ll have to go through, and making the sites safe and guarding by age, demographics, and region. The content and making these sites as secure as possible will be some of their most valuable developments.”

“I use Justin.TV  and I have a lot of information on there. I’ve had 10 million video views and 27,000 followers there. These are people that have a lot  access and have know me about 5 years. I dont really know the informationa bout the people watching me. Having more peripherals set up and have security on my broadcasts. Privacy is a big issue and whichever of these companies can tackle that will have a huge advantage over the competition.”

Word of Mouth

“Word of mouth is one of the most powerful communication tools because people believe that more than anything else. That is the most convincing element.”

Sarah the Geek

“I’m a geeky filmmaker. That’s what I’ve been doing for 13 years. Anything about film making I love to geek out on.”

Interviewing Others

“I think the secret to a good interview depends on whether you’re trying to get a person’s story or trying to get a story out of them. There’s a web of six degrees of separation… everyone is very accessible and the more people that become accessible it opens a lot of doors. What I really wanted to do is capture a positive angle of growth and success, not only contributing to one personal success but also to what they are doing for their communities.”

“I feel like everybody in social media has something to give back to the community and my way of giving back is providing media, documenting and doing interviews.”

Acting

“I took a theater class once. I did act in an indie film that was about a video blogger, it was a horror film. I dabbled in it a little bit, but nothing serious.”

Alternative Careers

“If I had to do something else, it would be something sporty. I’d like to do something where I’m physically active. This might sound silly, but the career before I was thinking about before before was being a park ranger. I hike a lot. It’s beautiful here.”

Our SXSW 2011 Panel Proposal

“We’ll provide a lot of information about how to get a job using social media and how to leverage social media for your career.” http://bit.ly/votesxsw2011

Brandon Prebynski is an Emerging / Social Media Strategist at FKQ Advertising and Marketing and the host of a live USTREAM show called Web Trends. Brandon is one of the first people I “met” on Twitter; you can follow him @Prebynski.

Brandon and I have a panel proposal with Sarah Austin, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh for SXSW 2011 so please vote for us at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob before August 27th, 2010!

Listen to this entire episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!” with Brandon Prebynski on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from your phone on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

Brandon recently joined FKQ so I asked him about his new role as a strategist. “It’s been great because within a set of guidelines I’ve been able to shape what the position is,” Brandon told me. He is helping clients create long-term strategies around marketing, customer service and product development.

He’s also been working on tracking, analysis and metrics. “We have this big myth out there that it’s really difficult to measure social media and there are many who say you can’t measure the results especially when it comes back to revenue, and that you can only look at trends over time, but frankly with the correct tools implemented correctly, you can sometimes measure it directly.”

Brandon and I agree that the best place to start is with the business’ goals and objectives in mind. If you’re already measuring simple things like the number of followers and Facebook ‘likes’ and comments, “you need to see how it helps you meet your objectives.”

While measuring the size of your community and the level of engagement within it is good, “if you don’t determine what your objectives and make your roadmap according to it, you’re going to be measuring engagement without knowing what engagement means.”

“Companies right now have to define what engagement is. Avinash (Kaushik) has said this many times: ‘the word engagement is an excuse.’  So what is engagement? It has to come back to your objectives as well. If you have lead generations as your objective and you have 500 leads generated over 3 weeks as your goal, then you could say that a user submitting their email address is engagement.  If you produce an online video and all you want is brand awareness, then a view can be engagement.

The word engagement overlaps a lot of times with conversion. We had x amount of conversions and that can be revenue, but isn’t always creating revenue; it could be someone submitting their email, loading a page, or making a purchase.”

Engagement is important when building community. iI you’re starting to build an audience that didn’t exist, then you can consider engagement the number of times that people communicate with you and each other within the community.”

The size of a community and the engagement within it build on each other, and they often demand a deep understanding of the context in which such connections and conversations occur in order to really understand what is happening and where people are coming from. The fact is that a lot of the tools available today can get expensive despite the fact that they often provide vague information like 90% neutral sentiment on a sentiment analysis and they often can’t even provide information (such as Twitter ReTweets). So we talked about context.

Brandon told me “thinking of context… if I’m driving down the road and I see a billboard that has a political message and I repeat that or if I even think about it in my head, i could compare it to a ReTweet.  Does that mean that I agree with that message? Do we even have the tools to crack that anywhere outside of social media right now? It’s a huge issue that requires a lot of work.”

Brandon and I talked about several other topics including the end of Google Wave, the rumors about Google Me, and his live show Web Trends (which is coming back to USTREAM soon!) so listen to The Social Nerdia Show! for much more.

I’ve often said that if I could live in “SXSW Land,” I would.
I’m only joking when I say that, but where else in the world can you find such a cool gathering of people creating and changing the future of music, film, and all things interactive?

That’s why I’ve put together two SXSW Interactive panel proposals for 2011 that I believe people will find interesting and valuable:

1. Samsung’s Social Media Journey Towards Customer-Centricity  with Cosmin Ghiurau @cosguru

2. How To Get A Job Using Social Media with Sarah Austin @pop17, Brandon Prebynski @Prebynski, Chris Kahle @chriskahle, Joel Cheeseman @cheezehead, myself @socialnerdia @samsungesteban, and moderator Ryan Paugh @paughginney 

It would be great if you created a SXSW PanelPicker account to vote for and comment on both of them. Your votes make up 30% of the decision. SXSW has already told me that they like both topics so your votes are extremely valuable.

To help us spread the word, click here to retweet on Twitter and click here to share on Facebook.

While I created this blog as a creative exploration of the convergence of tech, marketing, and social media, I also had two secondary goals in mind: To speak at SXSW Interactive in 2010 and to work full-time in social media within one year. Speaking at SXSW Interactive earlier this year was a great experience and Social Nerdia was definitely the platform that enabled me to join Samsung USA as Social Media Manager. I’ m very grateful for the many opportunities that have come from this tiny spec of Internet data called Social Nerdia. Thanks, as always, for reading. I hope to see you at South By next year.

Sometimes, to gain perspective about how big the world is, and how small I am in it, I take my glasses off.. just to realize how blind I really am.

Let me back up a bit. I can’t see 20/20. When I take my glasses off, everything goes awfully blurry and it makes me feel lost and confused. The sensation of not being in control, of not being being able to do simple things like reading a sign that’s only a few feet away, can be really frustrating and intimidating.

When I was about 16 years old I started sitting in the front of the classroom to “see better.” Eventually a teacher told me to just get some glasses already (as if it was obvious to everyone but me). After going to the optometrist and actually getting my first pair of glasses, I realized that I had been needing them for a very long time. I just thought that everyone saw things the way I did, blurry and cloudy and dull. I remember wearing glasses late at night, and the billboards looking so much brighter, so much more colorful and alive than ever. For the first time, I was seeing the way I was supposed to.

Taking my glasses off today really made me think about a lot of the things that are happenning in the social web. Two things in particular concern me, especially because we bypass them with all the excitement about “social this” and “social that.”

The first is that people are becoming more and more self-centered. While we talk about a cultural shift towards sharing, openness, authenticity, and transparency, the shift sometimes has more to do with our egos. This shift should worry us a bit because if we keep calling “social” what is often anything but, we might end up with a bunch of anti-social narcissistic human beings who crave micro-celebritism and their own utopian so-called personal brands.

My second concern kind of ties in with the whole ego thing. For those of us working in online marketing and social media, the ego dillema translates into a mindset of “no one else gets it” and “we are ahead of the curve,” as if we had discovered America or something.

The fact is that we haven’t discovered America, and for the most part, most of us weren’t even involved in actually developing the tools and technologies that make the social web possible. Social media are fantastic and I am very passionate about their incredible potential, but it’s important to remember that this, whatever “this” is right here and right now, is only temporary. The excitement over social networking will one day wear off as it did for many other novel concepts and innovations. One day, probably not too far from now, the social web will just be the web, and Social Media Managers will just be Managers.

So instead of trying to separate those that “get it” from those that “don’t get it,” we should embrace social media for what it should be: the ability to know others and be known. And instead of trying to focus on how we can succeed through making brands out of ourselves, we should remember that “sharing” and “listening” are not really about us, but about building real relationships.

Human connections are starting to get touted as buzz words, ROI and KPIs in board meetings, as if we were talking about eyeballs without brains or hearts, but those human connections really truly are what it all comes down to in this life. Online or offline, at times it is necessary to take off our glasses, and remember just how small and blind we really are.

Based out of Tenerife, Spain, Per Schmitz is the co-founder of DooID, a very promising digital contact card with privacy protection that is easy to use. If you’d like to easily share your social identities, and do so pretty quickly, check out DooID.

1. How did you get started?

When I accidentelly stumbled upon Tim van Damme’s virtual business card (http://timvandamme.com), I was blown away by its simplicity and usefulness. Tim’s card displayed all the important information about him in a stylish, easy to understand format. My first reaction was “wow, that’s the way I’d like to present myself to the world, too.” (that was in January 2009). The more I thought about how my v-card could be like , the more I wanted to build an application around the whole concept, to make it a service accessible to everyone. There were other services like content aggregators already, but the approach is clearly different: virtual business cards are reduced to the max, minimalism is the key. The main purpose is to show a person’s contact data – nothing more and nothing less.

2. Who would be interested in using DooID?

The platform might be interesting to everyone who uses a business card, e-mail or social networks – so almost everyone who has got a computer nowadays. This is by far the biggest challenge in developing DooID: the app has to be easy to handle for anyone, even people with very few computer knowledge. Many users are overstrained by the technology that surrounds them.

3. How are you better/different than competitors?

One of our main features is the option to password protect whatever you want. All contact and networking data can be password protected by clicking  a little lock icon. Another important difference is our design concept: DooID offers professional design templates and the possibility to customize colors, backgrounds and appearance, to make your DooID suit your personal needs.

Users can even augment their card with DooID’s add-ons and tools: location map, e-mail signature, mobile version, video-bio, status cloud, e-mail form, analytics and more give extra value to your virtual business card. Our IPhone version allows to e-mail your v-card link straight from the mobile phone with one click – a powerful tool for tradeshows and all kind of professional use.

4. What’s the European startup landscape like?

A difficult question. As I live and work on the Canary Islands I always felt a little outside the scene. I met interesting people and got in contact with amazing projects, but always via internet. I think many European startups miss the infrastructure there is in the States. Big events and  tradeshows are very important to meet the right people that might help you along the way. If a European startups wants to get in touch with the big players of press and industry, they need to travel to the States. Paying plane tickets and hotels is something many young startups can’t afford. That makes things more difficult, for sure.

5. What are some of the main social and mobile trends that people are paying attention to in Europe?

In general, new technologies start being used in Europe later than in America. Twitter is a good example: while it’s already mainstream in the US, in Germany or Spain most internet users might have heard about it, but don’t really know what to use it for. If we talk about really popular trends, social networks like Facebook, Tuenti (most-trafficked website in Spain) or Xing have made it to the “real world” user. Also mobile internet is getting a major trend, be it via smartphones or using netbooks. Location-based networking is still exotic and time will tell whether it will be a popular trend or not.

6. It seems like people are more prone to share their private information in public online settings these days. Do you think the word “privacy” is starting to mean different things to different people, and how does this affect how they view DooID?

I think social media is changing the way many people see their privacy. They convert to public persons and care less about sharing private details with unknown individuals. Maybe it’s the way services like Facebook influence our culture and social behaviour. There’s two groups of people (talking about social media users): the ones aware of those changes and the ones not. On a personal level I think it’s very important to be part of the first group and adopt your bahaviour to our new social environment.

Talking about DooID, privacy is a very important point. Users can password protect whatever they want. I’m surprised by the ammount of positive feedback we get on this feature.

7. Where did the name DooID come from?

The name is kind of a mixture of “good-sounding” nonsense (the doo) and our main keyword (id for identity).

8. What’s the vision?

Exchanging contact information is a daily habit in our profesional and personal lifes, being a help in this process is our main vision. A virtual business card should be seen as a smart extension of traditional ways of exchanging contact data. Does the virtual business card pretend to kill the paper one? Surely not. As long as there’s wallets, there will be paper business cards doing a good job. Ideally you would combine both, displaying your v-card address on the paper-card. People now can always access your up-to-date contact data, even though mobile number and adress on the business card you gave them changed two years ago.

I believe we should all seek to do something meaningful with our lives. While paying the bills is essential, we should try to pursue something that we truly get excited about and enjoy doing on a daily basis. We should try to impact the world in a positive way, even if in a small way.

I’m personally passionate about the convergence of technology, marketing, and the social web. I feel like a huge nerd reading the sentence I just wrote, but it’s true. I like to think, learn, and talk about those three things as much as I enjoy playing sports and listening to music. It’s how I’m wired. If you’re reading this, you might be wired like that too.

So this is a short version of the story of how I went from being a social media participant to a social media content producer to a social media manager, in less than one year…

Up until two and a half weeks ago, I was a tech and business consultant. For the three years prior to that, I had been a consultant with a promising career. I had worked on challenging and interesting projects concerning innovative mobile web sites, IT cost-reductions and, my favorite, identifying social media opportunities for communications service providers.

It was going pretty good. However, my interest in social media was growing. I found myself thinking about the rapidly changing social web on a daily basis. I read blogs like TechCrunch and magazines like AdAge. I listened to podcasts like Buzz Out Loud and kept up with the latest in social media thanks to people I had started to get to know as friends (instead of followers) on Twitter.

I was fascinated by all things social on the Internet and I wanted to further explore the future of the web. I needed a creative outlet. I needed a new “home base.”

So, after two years of thinking of domain names, I finally decided it was time to write a blog I’d actualy read myself. I had created several sites and blogs in the past, but this one was going to somehow stand out from the gazillions of blogs out there.

One night, I was watching a Gary Vee video (the kind of Gary Vee video that gets you excited about stuff) when Jennifer Leggio wrote a tweet with a typo. That tweet inspired the name “Social Nerdia” and Gary’s video reminded me that working hard was going to be worth it. I asked Jennifer what she thought about the name, and she suggested I buy the domain name.

I did.

I had created most of my own previous sites, but I was going to need a really good CMS to be able to pull it off this time. Plus, I didn’t really want to spend any money if I could build Social Nerdia on my own. I chose WordPress and was pleasantly surprised.

WordPress was much better than I imagined it to be and it gave me enough flexibility to make Social Nerdia my own. I decided to make purple the main color. I mean, TechCrunch is all about the green. Gizmodo is pretty much orange. Engadget and Mashable both like blue. Most social networks are also blue. UPS owns brown. You get the idea.

I was going to own purple.

After creating the site, I wrote my first blog post. I called it “The Mindblasting Explosion that is Social Media.” The word mindblasting came from comedian Russell Peters. In the post I talked about how companies and people were using social media, and even mentioned the now popular “snake oil salesmen” that everyone was trying not to be.

In the months to come I interacted with people on Twitter, created videos that I posted on YouTube, and wrote blog posts about products, news, and ideas. Good friends, my brother, and my wife all started contributing to the site. I was enjoying my new life as a blogger.

Sometimes it felt like no one was reading. Other times, a single post created more buzz than I thought it actually deserved. Google Analytics (and later Woopra) provided great insights, but I knew that content had to be my focus, not numbers. I knew a lot about marketing, but content that people actually cared about was hard to come up with.

One day, I noticed that Andy Milonakis was on Twitter. Andy is an actor/comedian/rapper, but he got started making online videos. I exchanged a few tweets with him and sent him a few interview questions. He answered them. And just like that, I became an interviewer.

Soon I had interviews with people like Alex Bogusky and John A. Byrne.

At first, the interviews were all via email, but one day GM’s Christopher Barger changed that. His social media team agreed to do a phone interview with me even though I hadn’t mentioned anything about a phone. A phone interview? I had no idea how I was going to record this phone conversation, but I agreed anyways.

Kara Andrade recommended I use BlogTalkRadio, a web site that lets you turn your phone into a podcasting machine. I fell in love with podcasting. I soon bought a microphone and then another one. Skype and I became very good friends. More importantly, I started to have amazing conversations with admirable people. “The Social Nerdia Show!” gave me a platform to talk with people like Loic Le Meur, Brett Erlich, and Bob Knorpp. I connected with almost all of them through Twitter and I’m still in contact with many of them.

There’s something about Twitter that makes people more willing to respond, more willing to talk to anyone willing to start a conversation. Some people say it’s like a new telephone, but it seems like some people are answering this new telephone much more than the old one. The cool thing about this new telephone is that it lets you be public or private, and always encouraged you to be as transparent and authentic as possible.

One of my favorite interviews was with Matt Moller and Keith Swiderski, Samsung’s Social Media Strategists. The interview with them went well so I decided to send them my resume the next day. I knew there was a social media position available in Dallas (where I lived), so I hoped somebody had a contact there. I received a reply soon after. I was told there was a Social Media Manager position…

In New Jersey.

Less than two months later, I moved to NJ to join Samsung Electronics America as Social Media Manager. While I know that the timing was more than perfect, and that my work experience was what ultimately got me the position, I’m quite positive that I would not have gotten Samsung’s attention with just an e-mail.

Or anyone’s attention, for that matter.

These days, if you want to work in a competitive area that people are passionate about (like social media), you’re going to have to get creative and you’re going to have to work hard. It might take a lot of long nights of hard work (like when you have to post-produce a podcast that had 18 minutes of silence), and many sacrifices (like moving half-way across the country away from family and friends in the middle of winter), but in the end, the things you learn and the people you get to meet can make it all worth it.

So worth it.

I am very grateful with Samsung and one of goals in life now is to help turn the company into a truly social one. I absolutely love what I do every day and I am excited about the opportunities and challenges that will come in the months and years to come.  Not only do I get to think about what a Social Media Manager is, but I also get to be one of the first to help define what one should be.

If I have any advice for anyone, it is this: get started.

Think about where you’d like to be one year from now, learn from people that have more experience than you do, and imagine how you could take it to the next level. Don’t be afraid of your dreams and don’t be limited by whatever usually limits you.

If you don’t know where to start… try WordPress, Twitter, and BlogTalkRadio. None of those tools will do the work for you, and we can’t know for sure if they’ll be around five years from now, but each of them is a good starting point.

They were most definitely a good starting point for me.

Disclaimer: I recently joined Samsung as Social Media Manager. While I am employed by Samsung, the views expressed on this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Samsung.