Web Strategist Lab

Not to dismiss the combined genius of Tom Peters and Seth Godin, et al, but I question the value of using Personal Branding as a solution to current problems. Specifically, if you’re unemployed, enhancing your personal branding is the way to get a job.

Which sounds great. Give yourself a logo and buy bobtheaccountant.com with a blog and a Twitter account and you’re all set. The offers will come rolling in as people looking for an accountant will beg to hire you. As if you are different from 1,000 accountants in the area who are also quite good at what they do.

Personal branding only works if we treat ourselves like a professional service firm. It requires multiple contracts. It requires that we sell ourselves like goods in the marketplace (Buy Bob! Now with enhanced stain-fighting power!), which isn’t to say that a job hunt isn’t exactly like that. But it’s the difference is that a job hunt requires that we end up with one customer. Personal branding is predicated on mutiple customers.

Pitching yourself to one client and pitching yourself to multiple clients are two very different things. To one client, you need to show you can meet their specific needs.  To multiple clients, you end up trying to be all things to all people.

And let’s not get into the idea that office managers, customer service reps, wait staff, line cooks, web assistants, event staff, interns, SQL developers, technical support, managers or the like can bill themselves as “stars” that can be flipped to the next level.  That creative solution that the SQL developer came up with isn’t unique enough to justify a white paper, but was exactly what the organization needed right then, making him or her a hero for 20 minutes.

Can we all be stars? How many marketing stars can the marketing world hold before we go blind from the light?

Being good at something specific, something sellable and marketable, marketed to a specific customer, is how most people will get jobs, not just in the past, and in the present, but in the future.  For all the Fortune 500 companies looking to hire the rock stars of HR, there are all the Fortune 1,000,000 who need someone is qualified and competant and easy to get along with to get the job done.

Dear Staples and Office Depot,

Is the only thing that seperates you two the color scheme? It can’t be your level of service (bad to the level of almost non-existant) or your selection (identical), so I have to assume it’s your color scheme… and maybe the ad agency who charges for the idea of the “easy” button.  But really, you are the same.

They have the same pens. They have the same furniture. They have the same post-it notes in the same bright colors in the same volumes (I read somewhere that 3M has ten thousand SKUs for post-its. Where are they selling them?). The same labels from the same manufacturers.

Looking for resume paper? They have five kinds. The same five kinds. The same brands. The same corresponding envelopes. Roughly the same prices.  Ask the copy shop clerk if they can order paper for you (You know, something that’s a little nicer than “WHITE” or “OFF-WHITE”) and they look at you funny.  Why would anyone want a nice, high-end paper with an ounce of creativity or interest (without turning to the “lady bug and sunflowers” papers of the scrapbooking store) when you could get WHITE? Or CREAM. 

They are the same store. 

And when they are the same store, is it any surprise that one can’t get a leg up on the other?

Mashable had a great article last week or so about Why Big Brands Struggle with Social Media. It’s full of well-thought out ideas like “just another marketing channel,” “does not fit into current structures” and “communities and content are global” which are all true. But it doesn’t really get to the heart of why Big Anything doesn’t really get social media.

The truth is much simpler: social media doesn’t work for big brands because social media is about one-to-one connections.  As much as @comcastcares builds a little buzz on Twitter, it will ultimately fail because years of poor customer service (i.e. not caring about the individual) lead it to a point where even the least nice thing it could do would generate buzz.  And that’s all something like @comcast cares is there for: to build buzz, to show it “gets it.”  If it got it, it wouldn’t need Twitter.

Case in point: @therealshaq.  If you haven’t read this post about meeting Shaq at a diner because of Twitter, you should.  This is an example of one person trying to connect to people. Yes, it is a person who has had to build walls around himself to protect him and his, but he’s still a person who struggles to connect with other people, just like we all do.  In your wildest imagination, do you really think @comcastcares struggles with the idea of connecting? Or is it all about how to generate buzz and dispell a reputation for not caring about customer service or the customer (if it wasn’t trying to dispell that idea, why call it @comcastcares? Why not just @comcast?).

If Comcast really cared, it would build scalable help systems and not shunt half its technical support calls to far-off lands. It would do things that actually helped the customer. If Comcast really cared, they would realize that they work for the client, not the other way around.

Shaq gets it. He knows that without the fans, he’s just a really tall, fit guy with a goofy smile. He knows that the connections that he makes (or, on a more scalable sense, the fantasy that any of us could potentially connect with him) is what pays his salary.  

Shaq is a great and strange example because he is one person, and he is a big brand all in one.  But you can see from the post, his Twitter account is about the man, not the brand.

Until Comcast can get an employee to willing want to get a Comcast tattoo on his or her ass, they aren’t a fan of the company, they just play on one Twitter. And Twitter and the other social networking sites make that very obvious to everyone. It shines a light on the difference between a person and a brand.

I’ll admit that I am completely biased for Google.  I was a fan in ’99 for the leanest and meanest search engine you ever did see (remember when Netscape was a portal?!).  I was a fan of tight little ads with no images.  It took me a little while to see Gmail as a contender, but now I live on it.  For work, we use Blogger internally, Google Reader to autoblog, Gmail for large-file distribution, YouTube for video distribution, Labs stuff for RSS presentation, etc. Soon, we’ll be using Domain Apps to allow all users to have a free email account (100 times better than the one we have been offering up to now).

So I was a little surprised to find myself in a conversation last week (it was a Friday, which might explain things) with my boss about Google.  She’s an old-school newspaper pro, so you can guess she doesn’t always have a lot of faith in the internet (she likes things she can control), having watched it rip apart the classifieds business, the ad business and soon the news business itself. And I get that. When the next big thing comes along and I can’t figure out how to port RSS feeds and email to it, I’ll be in the same boat.

Her point was that Google, while being an amazing disruptive revolution, it can’t last.  Google’s money is made of the backs of ad sales, right? (Last number I saw was something in the double-digits that started with a “9.”) But you can’t sell ads unless you have people to see them.  Ads that started on a search engine (because it was popular) spread to other areas like Gmail and Reader, and your website (you put the ads on your site to make some extra money).

But at some point, all those sites will realize that Google makes a lot of money bundling all these sites up as places to serve up ads. These sites get pennies for ceding tracks of their web space. I mean, aside from the big 100 blogs, who really sees any money from AdWords?  Sure, there’s a check for $25 every quarter, but… you’re not thinking of quitting your job to blog.

And you blog because you consider yourself an expert on something.  Knitting, web strategy, taking cute pictures of your cat, etc. And what happens when you begin to value that expertise better?  That little check from Google isn’t going to cut it. They will revolt.

What we see now is consolidation of the blogs (Huffington Report, Gawker Media, etc) who can get just big enough to justify selling ads themselves instead of relying on Google to do that work for them, thus getting a much higher return.

Like craigslist, Google undercuts the competition with lower rates, broader use and higher return in order to disrupt existing technologies.  Instead of paying $50 for an ad in the local classifieds, you put it on craigslist for free (and I’m a huge fan of craigslist, as I met my girlfriend that way). Instead of a magazine ad campaign, you buys AdWords for a fraction of the price. My boss wonders if there’s a level to which you can’t undercut the competition. How do you compete with craigslist?! (No really, newspapers would pay for the answer.) There’s no way to be cheaper and more global or easier. 

Her point concluded with the idea that business run on being able to always start a new way of doing things that undercuts existing processes (see: industrial revolution, assembly line/job specialization, or Microsoft). But what if we’ve reached the limit of that ability? How does Google grow? How does it find other businesses to undercut as it seems like there aren’t any left?

It was an interesting point, that I would counter with the idea that that’s probably how it felt to Detroit in the 1970s just before the Japanese showed up and showed them everything they knew was wrong. Or Microsoft monetized software (at the time it was kind of a stupid/genius move). Or Google started to give tools away for free.

There’s always something more, right?