Brand new Brand YOU
"Personal branding reflected in the zeitgeist. Watching the pros in entertainment, politics, business. And now you. What makes YOU different?"

3. You’re not just building a Web site. You’re starting a conversation.
You’re not building a site just so that Web crawlers can log your presence on the Net. The whole point is to generate conversations with other people. So ask yourself, Is this site going to make people think? Is it going to make them want to talk to me? Is it going to make them want to refer the site to someone else?

Other people have to be able to reach you: to rebut you, to challenge you, to inspire you, to entertain you — and yes, to hire you. You’ve got to design your site with those goals in mind. That’s why most so-called community sites don’t work: They don’t truly foster conversation.

But the ones that do work take this principle and run with it. Some of them are touching, such as Abbe Don’s Bubbe’s Back Porch (www.bubbe.com) and Derek Powazek’s Fray (www. fray.com). Others are frivolous but somehow satisfying, such as Derek’s Kvetch (www.kvetch.com). Whatever the specifics of each site may be, they all offer their audience a voice. They all invite conversation, although you don’t need to participate in these sites to appreciate them. This lesson is one that publishers are already starting to learn: If you don’t give people an opportunity to participate, when they do come to your site, they’ll just move on.

Another rule: The more personal the conversation, the better. But making a conversation personal requires involvement and accessibility — two attributes that scare most people. And opening yourself up to feedback can sometimes be unpleasant. The kind of feedback that most people get from their site is usually encouraging, interesting, and thoughtful — but sometimes it can be vitriolic and nasty. Some people will interpret your having a site as an open invitation to be mean. But that’s not enough of a danger that you should avoid creating a site altogether. After all, none of us enjoy all of the conversations that we have in our offline life, but we don’t use that fact as an excuse to refrain from all conversations. And in business, conversations are essential to getting anything done.

4. Authenticity matters.

The sites that work best are the ones that are authentic. Here’s where a lot of corporate Web sites run into trouble. When you look at the average corporate site, you get the sense that somebody in the marketing department put it up — and that no one who actually runs the company has seen it. I often hear people at companies joke about what’s on the corporate Web site. “Yeah, right,” they’ll say. “Like that’s true.”

This may sound weird, but you can learn a lot by comparing the sites of porn stars with the sites of mainstream film and music stars. Porn-star sites are often more personal, more intimate, more authentic, and more interesting than the sites of traditional stars — which usually read as if a pr department had created them.

Compare, for example, the site for the porn actress Aunt Peg (www.auntpeg.com) with the site for the singer Michael Bolton (www.michaelbolton.com). Aunt Peg’s site may or may not have been created by a publicist, but when you experience it, you think that you’re interacting with an actual person. Porn stars are, literally, not afraid to expose themselves — they have nothing left to hide! Of course, they’re characters: They’re trying to create and maintain a persona. But the lesson here is real: If you’re reserved, if you worry about revealing the real you, then you’ll create a site that isn’t authentic, complete, or representative.

Why be authentic? Because if you’re not, that fact will become apparent very quickly. The literacy rate in this medium (and in media generally) is soaring. As more and more people create their own Web sites, they start to understand this medium better — and they lose their patience with disingenuous stuff.

So, as you design your site, ask yourself: Are you talking about what really matters to you? Or are you talking about what you think should matter to you? If something matters to you, it doesn’t matter how you say it. The personal and the professional are so inextricably linked that the core of your professional brand will always be the most personal expression of “you.”

5. You change. So should your Web site.

Your site is a representation of you — and “you” is not static. The person you were last month is not the person you’ll be next month. And your Web site should operate on the same principle. Read some of the many diary sites out there, and you’ll see that some things in people’s lives change, while other things remain constant. Apply that lesson to your Web site: Make it easy for people to see what’s changing. And make sure that the things that don’t change speak loudly about your brand.

Some changes are cosmetic. That’s fine. Your site doesn’t have to reinvent itself totally. It can record the small, even superficial changes that you’re experiencing. But don’t leave it at that. Suppose that somebody visits your site and comes back a year later to find that nothing significant has changed. That’s no different from running into an acquaintance after a year apart — and realizing that she has no new ideas, no new perspectives, no new experiences. She’s exactly the same: She hasn’t learned anything, or taken any risks, or grown one bit. How boring!

Unfortunately, Web tools today are so bad, they don’t allow you to change your Web presentation very easily. So you may have to satisfy yourself with adding a few more links or with getting rid of some links — depending on what’s in your head space at that moment. For instance, if a personal page has a dead link, think about what message that broadcasts to the world: “Hi, everyone. I’m not paying attention!” That’s not the kind of free agent that a client would want to hire. And that’s not the kind of person that anyone would want to have a conversation with.

Personal Web sites, and the brands that they represent, are new. They come from a tradition, but they’re new. That doesn’t mean that something else might not supplant them in the next 10 years or the next 50 years. But whatever form such communications take, they all speak from the same human need — the desire to identify yourself, to tell the world, “I’m here. This is who I am. And here’s what I have to say.”