Optimize Your Personal Brand (If You Want To Exist)

Photo: grantthai
Photo Credit: grantthai

In a discussion at my office last week, Steve Baker, author of “the Numerati,” described a day when there would be services widely available to help people optimize themselves in the new digital world. He underscored there have long been individual optimization services in the analog world.

Consider college-prep coaches who optimize high school students to pass more easily through the filter of the most competitive admissions officials. These optimizers will advise their clients to do a little more community service here, or another advanced math course there — all in the name of looking attractive to an algorithm. He’s sure we’ll eventually have these personal services in the digital world.

Fast-forward to this week, when, during a presentation at Columbia Business School’s  Brite conference, Steve Rubel underscored the emergence of individual employee brands. These online celebrities help build relationships and trust with customers.  Just as Derek Jeter helps fill seats in the stadium, these employees drive customer acquisition, engagement and loyalty. And the key to building a strong personal brand? Optimizing one’s self in search engines.

Let’s take this one step further: A lack of personal optimization can be a serious disadvantage in a down economy. With unemployment rising, job seekers who are highly visible to employers have the upper hand. Those who are not discoverable don’t exist. No wonder LinkedIn is seeing record traffic and a surge in interpersonal recommendations.

The State Of Digital Personal Optimization

There are scattered tools on the Web an individual can use to positively influence his or her personal search-engine reputation. Consider any number of free social-networking sites and publishing tools: LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as any of the blogging platforms like Blogger or WordPress. But these tools are not part of any cohesive or sanctioned optimization strategy. And, collectively, they all require significant personal investment to learn, activate and maintain.

Whether good or bad, the required sophistication, complexity and uncertainty of various online consumer profile tools may limit the beneficiaries of personal optimization to a relatively small volume of sophisticated Web users. This creates a new kind of digital advantage, if not inequality. And that’s only the public Web. There are many other databases that influence our lives, such as organ donor lists, jury and scholarship pools, and IRS taxpayer records.

Ironically, personal optimization is not even universally recognized or understood as a best practice for succeeding in the 21st century. In Internet circles, sure. But we’re only beginning to hear a lot about personal optimization as scholastic and job competition heats up. The growing sophistication of ad targeting and identify thieves has probably fueled interest, as well.

Digital Personal Optimization: When?

So begs the question: When will serious digital personal optimization services become widely available? There is a mature industry of services firms and software that aid businesses in their attempts to optimize, but there’s very little that’s compelling or affordable for individuals.

However, commercial services are not the only answer; we need fundamental academic research on what digital optimization means for people. Parents should be teaching their children the best practices on how to optimize (and not). If schools are charged with preparing our children to succeed, then they, too, should include personal optimization skills in their curricula.

How are you optimizing yourself for today and tomorrow?

(This post also was my latest column in MediaPost.)

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Published by Max Kalehoff

Father, sailor and marketing executive.

9 replies on “Optimize Your Personal Brand (If You Want To Exist)”

  1. Great thinking again Max. The thing is though, you can't really sell a “service” on this, personal branding is all about how good you are

    a) at marketing yourself

    b) at your profession

    If you're dedicated enough, you can take the extra step everyone forgets and showcase your work digitally. It really is as simple as that, if you're work is great it will stand out. Sure marketing yourself helps, but after a certain amount of time the talented people start to shine.

    Especially in our industry, there's no excuse not to market yourself. If you don't it shows your lack of commitment compared to those who do.

  2. Thanks for you comment, but I disagree. I'm not talking about personal brand marketing or professional competency. Certainly, those are fundamental. I'm asking if those fundamentals are at a baseline, then when will the optimization services come to put your best foot forward? You can have have great command over a subject, be great at marketing yourself in a variety of ways, but if you're missing out on key optimizations, you could be shooting yourself in the foot without even knowing it. At Clickable, our SEM guru Tony proves this to me all the time. Which means I'm either bad marketer, or a good marketer who needs technical help to make sure my good assets are working for us (versus not at all or against us).

  3. I don't disagree with you – I guess I'm more the DIY type and if I noticed a big flaw in what I was doing personally I would want to fix it myself. Someone who wasn't as interested in learning how to leverage social tools would definitely benefit more than me as I would like to be my own personal case study of success. I guess I'm not a good example 😉

  4. This is a terrific blog post about a very important emerging issue — ensuring you can be found online.

    This is something that I have worked very hard to establish, Max, and I invite you to check out me as an example of how a personal online brand can be done. I teach others how to do it too.

  5. “As success became more dependent on evanescent “impression management”, selfhood lost coherence. The older ethic had required adherence to an internalized morality of self-control; repressive as this 'inner direction' had been, it helped to sustain a solid core of selfhood. The new ethic of 'other-direction' undermined that solidity by presenting the self as an empty vessel to be filled and refilled according to the expectations of others' (Lears 1983 p. 8.”

  6. “As success became more dependent on evanescent “impression management”, selfhood lost coherence. The older ethic had required adherence to an internalized morality of self-control; repressive as this 'inner direction' had been, it helped to sustain a solid core of selfhood. The new ethic of 'other-direction' undermined that solidity by presenting the self as an empty vessel to be filled and refilled according to the expectations of others' (Lears 1983 p. 8.”

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