I Blog Therefore I Am (A Brand)

Blogito Ergo Sum!

It isn't right, of course, and I don't mean just the Dog Latin. Not every fool who starts a blog is a brand, not in their wildest dreams. It doesn't even matter if you've been blogging for ages, a brand you are not unless your ramblings have a theme.

And too many who have a theme run out of steam. Look at You Pissed Me Off, You Bastard and, at first, he is a brand. But the woefully small number of posts show that either he ran out of steam, or maybe that something (someone?) persuaded him to give up. That one's a great pity. He is, was, a personal brand. But heaven help him if his employer had discovered his old blogging sideline, because employers tend to view aggressive bloggers through jaundiced eyes... Just in case.

There are other styles of blogger.

Look at Matt Cutts. He has been branded by his followers as Mr Google Search, and he works for Google, so his brand is doubled. But he doesn't represent Google except when he seems to.  Matt is a demigod of search engine geekdom. He also has some cute cats. And he's been blogging since 2005. He's an old hand. He's definitely a brand, he's a corporate player, too, but how useful is his brand? And to whom is it useful?

Matt is not a corporate blogger. He's a personal blogger. His brand is portable, but, when he leaves Google one day, will his brand dissolve?

Then there are corporate bloggers, busy executives who are also charged with raising the profile of their organisations like Tim Callan of Verisign. Tim's been blogging for ever and he sticks methodically to his core topic, adding value to it and thus to Verisign. Look at the url. If Tim ever leaves Verisign his blog stays put, under corporate control.

So Tim Callan is not a brand, or, if he is, he's a small sub-brand of Verisign.

So far nothing seems really satisfactory.  Build a brand of sorts, and then watch it dissolve.

What about the big cheese, the numero uno honcho?

Tom Ilube is CEO of Garlik. He blogs as Mr Bojangles.  Two problems there. One is that no-one can remember how to spell the company name and it is surrounded by typosquatting-like domains, and the other is that Mr Bojangles is not easy to find in Google. Just look! So that doesn't work either, not really.

I'm not even going to use myself as an example. A brand I am not!

This article was kicked off when I read a CNN Business article: Branding Yourself Online.

As far as I can see you can, as I do, make a total arse of yourself online sometimes, but you can't yet create yourself as a personal brand.  I don't think you'll ever be able to. Even celebrities are celebrities first and bloggers second.

Or have I got that wrong?