In My Copious Free Time

building my personal brand?

Sometimes I think about the difference between doing something and being that thing. I blog, ergo, I am a blogger. I write, therefore I am a writer. Right? I don't know. I run and I definitely consider myself a runner even though I haven't run all winter and up until 3 years ago, I thought running was something I simply couldn't do.

Is it really that simple, though? If someone were to ask if I sing, I'd say "Yeah, I sing up a storm in the car." But I would never say I'm a singer. (And neither would anyone who has been in the car with me.) Do you have to be good at something to label yourself as such?

OK, wow...this is so not where I intended to go with this post, but I love it when I start typing and a new truth comes out. The ironic thing is that I've been pondering spirituality for a couple of years now and if I were to label myself, I say I'm closer to Buddhist than anything else. I'm a pretty bad Buddhist, but that doesn't stop me from saying that's what I am. Would a better Buddhist scoff at my self-labeling? Would a real Buddhist scoff at anything? Scoffing seems very un-Buddhist like. These are the very questions that make me a bad Buddhist, I think. But you know what? I am A-OK with that.

Anyhow, getting back to what I intended to say...over the last couple of years it seems everyone has started talking about personal brand. It is apparently a big deal, and every blogger worth her salt is considering how each post builds an online persona (which might be and probably often is different from the real life persona). When the topic comes up, I have two reactions. The first is, "Sweet fancy Moses, my online brand sucks! There's so much of this and that, too much nonsense. Where's my focus? Where's my purpose?? I am not a blogger, I am a total poser!" (Yeah, I know no one uses "poser" anymore.) This is accompanied by hand-wringing and a facial expression best described as "vexed."

My second reaction is a bit more subdued. Here's how it goes: from an upright and relaxed position, simultaneously raise both shoulders approximately one inch. Return shoulders to their resting state. No need to repeat. That's right, part of me just doesn't care about my personal brand. I'm not out to make money off my blog, accumulate a huge readership, promote my business* or new book** or otherwise get famous. I don't want to be Scoble or Dooce. (Not that there's anything wrong with them - we just have different motivations. I think.) I just want to be me, and so far, being me is an inconsistent and often contradictory hodge-podge. But everything I know about brand emphasizes consistency and alignment. It is about focus, about doing one thing and doing it well. Soooo not me.

And let's face it, between parenting a six-year old (who, upon the first loosening of an incisor insisted he could no longer brush his own teeth and keeps announcing he wants to learn Japanese so he can go to Japan instead of having a seventh birthday party) and working a full-time job that I adore but adds up to more than 40 hours a week and has me flying all over the place, I often find myself making choices like "Blog or sleep?" (note that it is now 1:58 a.m. and I am not sleep-typing) Adding "carefully curate my online persona" to my to-do list just ain't happening.

This is not to say that careful attention to one's personal brand is unimportant or frivolous or a waste of time. It's very important for a lot of people and for good reason. But for me, I think I'll just stick to being a person who, among many other things, blogs. I mean, I think I'll just be a blogger.

Oh, one last note. My job title? Brand and Strategy Manager. Maybe managing my personal brand is more life-work integration*** than I can muster.

*I don't have a business. (anymore)
**Don't have a new book, either. Or even an old one.
***I don't believe in work-life balance. Perhaps in my next post I'll explain what life-work integration means to me.

The un-resolution

I know the turning of the new year is a time for resolutions, but that's something I usually don't do. It's hard enough to break bad habits or create new good habits without adding the artificial obligation of the calendar. So I don't do it.

Not that I'm a lazy slob or anything. I did give up all soda in August, and not even on a Monday, but on a regular old Wednesday. Only recently have I realized just how good a thing that was. I never thought caffeine affected me because I could drink all the soda I wanted and it never kept me awake or acted as the pick-me-up that other people seem to get out of it. It was only after I quit that I realized how addicted to caffeine I really was. My head hurt for a solid week without it. But after that the difference was clear. I have had very few headaches in the last four-plus months, and the ones I've had have been sinus pressure related. This may not sound like a big deal, but those who know me well realize it is HUGE. It follows years of having at least one headache a week, usually more.

It's hard to imagine any physical difference greater than losing the frequent headaches. But I didn't just kick the caffeine*, I also kicked a huge amount of sugar. Well, high fructose corn syrup, which isn't sugar--it's worse. I haven't noticed a big change in my weight (and frankly, I wouldn't want to notice one), but I have notice a big change in how I feel. Before, I would feel horrible because I "didn't eat soon enough." Now a haphazard eating schedule doesn't bother me nearly as much and I realize it's because I've gotten off the sugar roller coaster. No more highs and crashes. This probably contributed as much to my headaches as the caffeine.

*I haven't given up caffeine entirely. I still drink Starbucks chai latte, which has some caffeine in it. One grande has about 30% more caffeine than a Coca-Cola Classic, but I don't drink 3-4 of those a day. I don't even drink 1 a day, and I can go for a long time without one and feel no physical effects.

Anyhow, back to resolutions. I didn't intend to write about giving up soda. Instead, I was going to write about the idea I had to blog daily. This thought has entered my mind a few times that last couple of days, but it's just silly. There's no way that I'd do it. No way. Of course, that's what I said about soda. The reason I could never give up soda for good is simple. I always knew I could give it up for a day, but "forever" seemed impossible. Now I realize you don't give anything up forever. You might make that big commitment, but in reality, you give it up every day. 134 days later, I realize you can't get to "forever" without adding up a lot of every days.

So, see you tomorrow. Probably.

Accidental spam

For some reason my blog feed rebroadcast the last 10 entries...I have no idea why, but sorry for the re-runs.  The new season premieres soon.

I knew him way back when...

A long time ago in a former life (a.k.a. 10-12 years ago when I was living in another state and working in another job) I had this coworker named Mack. He was one of those guys who was great to work with -- helpful, friendly, funny -- just an all-around good guy. He was also a good customer of the business my mom owned and SHE thought he was an all-around good guy, so that means it is not just idle speculation or my opinion, it is a fact. A while back I stumbled across Mack on MySpace, but because I basically suck as a MySpace citizen, I didn't really do anything else. Then one day I was minding my own business and a coworker sent me a link to a post at 10,000 Marshmallows, a terrific marketing blog. The entry started off, "Mack Collier wrote today about why so many corporate blogs are, in a word, terrible." Mack Collier! I know him! I'm sure you can imagine all the "small world" discussion that followed.

The point is that this was the nudge that actually made me do something, so I subscribed to Mack's blog, The Viral Garden. As it turns out, Mack is a total smarty-pants when it comes to marketing. His blog does everything a blog should (a.k.a., what this one does not do ;)) -- it informs, makes me think, invites conversation, and expands the conversation by linking to an entire constellation of conversants. <--made up word for people who have conversation Through his blog he also maintains a list of the top 25 marketing blogs, and yes, his blog is right up there. When he isn't busy writing for his own blog, he's also contributing regularly to Marketing Prof's Daily Fix and Beyond Madison Avenue. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading what Mack has to say about marketing, brand, and community. Through his own writing and blogs I've found through his, he's already immeasurably and unknowingly helped me at work as I partner with our Being Known function (a.k.a., marketing) to launch our company blog.

So, if you have any interest in marketing, branding, The Donnas (I couldn't resist that, Mack), or building a community that is passionate about a topic, product or brand, do pay him a visit. It's worth the click, I promise.

(And yes, I just used up my a.k.a. allotment for the entire year.)

From the stats...

53% of visitors to this site yesterday accessed it using Firefox. I read somewhere recently (probably Seth Godin's blog?) that 50% of BoingBoing readers access it using Firefox, which makes me wonder about the overall profile of blog readers. Is it a tech-savvy thing? An anti-establishment thing? Do blog readers just have better browser taste? (she says with a wink)

sorry 'bout that

I just activated FeedBurner for my blog and it broadcast the last 10 entries again. Mea culpa, or happy re-reading, or something like that.

This is what you get

I've been thinking this week about why I blog. I didn't start this blog for the same reasons some others start blogs. It doesn't have a specific purpose such as like discussing cloth diapering or reviewing the latest episode of Lost. When I began this, I'd been using LiveJournal for about three years as part of a fairly closed community of "friends." I use the scare quotes because this group is an online community that grew out of participation in a usenet group. They are my online friends, although I am closer to some than others and there are several in the community who I consider real-life friends--our families get together, we've held each other's children, we manage to carve out a weekend together here and there even though we're scattered up and down the East Coast.

But anyway -- I had been LiveJournaling, but all my posts were locked and viewable only by this group because that's what felt safe. Eventually I noticed a few things. First, I wasn't really satisfied with the amount of control I had over what I did in LiveJournal. I wanted my postings to look a certain way, but I didn't want to have to be a programmer to do that. (Clue: I am not one with HTML, XML or any other ML.) I wanted something that felt more my own, rather than my own little chapter in the enormous LiveJournal book. I was also feeling a bit of, for lack of a better term, interest drift in the community. I do believe you can make meaningful connections with others online, and I realized that if I wanted to continue to do that, I needed to look beyond this closed community. Finally, I began to wonder what I might do differently if my audience was both limitless and unknown to me. What issues of privacy did that raise? What would I actually feel safer talking about in a different forum because of the norms that had developed in the closed community? (Some good, some not good in my opinion.) How does being public shift the conversation? 

I began poking around and settled here at Typepad with this blog. I started it, played around with its appearance, and then stalled for a while, unsure about what I wanted to do or say. After a period of inactivity, I finally got my backside in gear and began an effort to update it with some semblance of regularity.

So that's what's been going on for a few years now. I'd stop and look up when I began this blog, but it's Saturday and I have laundry going and I'm just too lazy to open a new tab in Firefox. Let's just say it's been about three years. This has been a bit of a digital catch-all where I toss in things I want to remember, stories about daily life, bits of things that amuse or delight me, the occasional photo or two, and sometimes a complaint or opinion about current events. And while no one keeps a publicly accessible blog only for themselves, it is still more for my own benefit than anyone else's. I like having this different kind of record of my life. It's never going to be comprehensive (I shouldn't say "never," I know), but I like that it's this different representation of me that, added up with many other things, forms a sense of me. Not me exactly, but close enough, and everyone looking in is going to take away their own image of the sum of those parts, just like, if someone met me in person they would carry me in their minds differently than I carry myself.

So what does all this mean? Why am I thinking about it? One reason is that I've been considering giving up LiveJournal (not reading, but posting there) entirely. Life moves and I have to make choices about where to invest my time, and it might eventually come down to a choice between this and that.  Not sure how I feel about that. But the other reason is that  we've been building on our blog  at the firm where I work, and so I've been paying a lot more attention to things like how to generate traffic and how to foster an environment where a community can form. This is one clear area where I easily integrate work and life, because I can't have those discussions at work and not think about how they apply to the other parts of my life. What do I really want out of this blog? Do I want to try to generate more traffic? Do I have the time to invest in that? Do I want the headaches, like trolls and comment spam, that can go along with that? I look at what happened with Kathy Sierra and think that it's a scary world out here in the open, and maybe I'll just keep my head down. (Not that I have any interest in generating traffic that big or any belief that I could.) But there seems to be a lot more upside than down, and I think about all that I have to learn and gain (intellectual, not monetary gain) by doing my part to build community on the web. How would being a part of something bigger change me? How much more would I learn?

Notice I'm putting aside the nuts-and-bolts questions like "Just how do I do it?" and "What will I say?" I think that once I decide what I want, I'll figure out the rest and it'll either work or it won't. But it's the initial decision that is the important one.

As I turn this over in my mind, here are some things I know I am NOT going to do:

1. Stop talking about things like handbags or makeup or fun new music. I like these things - they can delight me. No apologies.
2. Start talking about things I don't care about. I'm not going to blog about whatever is hot just for the sake of getting others to read.
3. Avoid taking a stand on the issues I care about. Sometimes I shy away from issues because of their controversy and I end up only posting something about politics or current events when I'm really good and mad. Gotta stop doing that.
4. Write haiku. I still don't like it, remember?

So, where does this leave me? With a lot of questions -- 15 in this post alone. I  guess I have some thinking to do. But the washing machine calls, so I need to stop thinking at the keyboard and start thinking while I put some laundry in the dryer and think about what to pack for tomorrow's trip.

How about that

Last night I posted about my latest crushes, Flow psychology being one of them. This evening, Lifehacker has a piece on Flow. If they post something tomorrow about bamboo socks, I'm going to start getting creeped out.