Your personal brand: Marketoon of the Week

In the latest Marketoonist, personal branding meets the digital age on LinkedIn.

Fishburne’s take: Tom Peters ushered in the age of personal branding with a 1997 cover story in Fast Company titled “The Brand Called You.” This was a liberating shift in thinking at the time.  I still have a copy of that Fast Company issue.  This was six years before LinkedIn launched in 2003.  

And yet thinking of ourselves too much as brands can take away from what’s human and real.  If everyone acts too much like a personal brand manager, all communication can start to feel like marketing. There’s a line between personal branding and self-promotion.  I think it’s less about what you say about yourself and more about what you do.

Why we care. LinkedIn is a top B2B marketing channel, in addition to a personal career booster. Communications that “feel like marketing” is something that marketers work to avoid all day, every day, regardless of channel. They do this by using data strategies that help make the messaging personal, when appropriate, and also relevant and of value to the recipient.