Can we really separate our personal life from our personal brand? When every person is a channel and broadcasting something to the world is as easy as sending a tweet, everything we say or do is pretty much out in the open. If we say one thing and do another we will sooner or later get called out.
For our personal brand to have substance, it has to be consistent with our personal life. It is dangerous to build a personal brand around a certain image or persona that we’re not willing or able to live up to.
That is why when guys like Eliot Spitzer or Tiger Woods get exposed we feel cheated and let down. It’s as if we had bought an expensive product only to find out that it doesn’t perform as advertised.
It used to be that business was business and what we did in our personal life was personal, but in the age of personal branding and social media business is personal.
Great point “business is personal.” Clear, concise, and should be common sense – sad that it isn’t for many. Thanks for the post. Consider yourself re-tweeted
I think that it is somewhere impossible to separate your private and business life, because you will need your personal life and experience to feed your discussion through Twitter for instance. Otherwise there will be no consistance brought to the debate. As a consequence, one who wants to be a community manager or a kind of influential web person has to reveal more or less its own choices, and that is why we call those people “leaders in opinion”.
It is more a pb with Facebook, that used to be developped in the real-life-friend sphere.. Are lists the solution ?
Did Tiger ever say “I’m perfect”, or did everyone just assume that?