Brand yourself!

Have you heard that one yet?

Or have you heard it, have no clue how to go about it, and are feeling bad because you haven't started, everyone else is well on their way, and you're hopelessly behind, as usual?

Before we go further, let's define "personal branding," which, like all fads and corporate-inspired busy work, buzzes around our faces like a mosquito until we can't ignore it anymore. When nebulous ideas are crammed into one to three chic, savvy, easily repeatable words, they mean pretty much whatever the seminar speaker, self-help guru, Silicon Valley geek, talk-show host, celebrity pastor, or university professor says that it means. But for simplicity, let's try this:

Branding yourself means to develop a unique professional identity that sets you apart from the crowd, and once you develop this, you promote promote promote promote promote promote it. Generally, if you're ordinary and don't have an agent, you promote primarily via social media (because most regular people, like artists, can't afford commercial television time or mentions in prominent publications). In effect, you create yourself into a micro-celebrity, another new addition to the lexicon - not a real celebrity, like Beyonce, or Kim Kardashian, or Paris Hilton, who are well known because they are . . . well known, but an Internet celebrity, one who doesn't command the income of celebrities who are created by music and movie production houses.

Your hope is that people will notice you and, once they notice you, will buy your art, offer you fellowships to prominent universities, or invite you onto Good Morning America. Whatever the goal, we are being told that the best way, indeed the only real way to achieve notice and notoriety, is through personal branding.

Well, you say, that doesn't sound so bad. I mean, I am a unique individual, right?

Indubitably true: you are a unique individual. Branding yourself, however, in the way it is heavily promoted, has little interest in the actual individual that you are, but rather, the image of who and what you want others to see. You create a persona - loud and brash, svelte and sophisticated, wry and witty, sharp and acerbic, brusque and snarky - that may or may not have anything to do with You. Indeed, it's a worthwhile observation that people we recognize as successful, celebrated, or famous are rarely, if ever, known for being quiet, thoughtful, humble, kind, compassionate, and diffident. These qualities, which arguably offer more to the world than what we see exhibited on reality shows, are not best sellers, and few, if any, adopt them as a personal brand.

Neither will you be encouraged to do so the next time you attend a seminar on, "How to Create Brand Success and Sell Your Art."

Personal Branding, while it sounds good and sort of seems to make sense, is another item on my list of Myths That Hold Us Back, outwardly creditable advice that we feel like we should follow in order to reach our goals. It's like listening to advice from a prosperity preacher: yeah, the process obviously works for you, Joel, er, Joe, but then again, I just paid $25 for your book . . .

Recently, in my latest batch of interlibrary loan books, I read through Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice Marwick, a tome that reads like a PhD dissertation, probably because it is. Marwick gives an overview of the Silicon Valley geek culture that is, she propounds, the driving force behind why we have the social media outlets that we have, love/hate, and use. Interspersing solid description and analysis of tech culture with the occasional giddy in-the-know and look-at-where-I-am attitude, the book clues non-tech crowds into a world that worships, and rewards, all things tech. For me, reading through this offered insight on something I've always wondered:

"How is it that those really boring computer and tech articles get SO MANY hits? Why do geeky and hyper-business-seminar people garner so much traffic?"

Well, one reason they do so is that the people who write the code that makes various social media sites run, aren't artists. And yet, artists use social media, following "rules" set up by a sub-culture that is as opposite to fine art as cookies are to a Cobb salad. And then we wonder why what works for others, doesn't work for us.

Let's talk about this more next time in, How Come This Stuff Never Works for Me?