Why Worrying About Your Personal Brand Is a Waste of Time

With the rise of social media has come the inevitable question of how to organize and present your professional life online. It's likely that co-workers, clients and potential employers will Google you, so of course you should give some thought to what they'll find. But is it helpful to consciously curate the available information about you as a personal brand?

UK newspaper The Guardian tackled this question recently in response to an online kerfuffle over some disparaging remarks about the whole idea of a personal brand from Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten. Personal brand enthusiasts responded to Weingarten's skepticism by saying that Weingarten himself, like nearly every successful professional, has a reputation that amounts to a personal brand and is being a curmudgeon for knocking a concept he's benefited from.

So what stance does the Guardian column by Oliver Burkeman take? Creatively, it concludes that both Weingarten and his critics are correct. Yes, as personal brand advocates assert, a solid professional reputation is an essential. But yes, Weingarten is also correct in mocking those who waste their time stressing about that reputation itself rather than the work that will develop it. Burkeman writes:

The brand-boosters are right that anyone with career success has a brand: they're known for doing something well.--" But there's a huge unexamined assumption here: that just because you've got a brand, it makes sense to focus on branding, instead of getting on with what you do well. These needn't be mutually exclusive: a little self-promotion's probably essential. But being hyperconscious of how you're presenting yourself is a hindrance, not a help; in everyday life, psychologists will tell you, it's a hallmark of social anxiety disorder. It can also be a waste of time. "Managing and growing a personal brand can be a huge distraction," the self-help author Tim Ferriss â€" a frenetic self-promoter himself, thus hardly instinctively hostile to branding â€" said in one interview. Steve Jobs "has a personal brand, but it is Apple's product design that makes it such a valuable company". Jobs's reputation is a by-product.

Are you a convert to the idea of a personal brand or is thinking about the concept simply a distraction from real work and real life?

Read More on BNET:

• Is Personal Branding a Load of BS?
• Personal Branding: 5 Secrets of Success from Guy Kawasaki
• Why Your Personal Brand Sucks: Attack of the Clones