Personal Branding

When I began working for Neoworx back in 2000, I thought of Branding as merely a collection of cool images and colors that represented a business. It wasn’t until I began working on an Identity for all of our software titles that I recognized the different personalities for each one: NeoTrace was a shooting star, NeoWatch was a hawk, NeoLock was a bully. This realization allowed me to converse with the product and communicate both its personality and its information with the end user. In simplest terms: I was able to visualize the product and interpret it for the person on the other end.

Nearly a decade later, after honing my skills on numerous products, I am turning those skills inward to create my own personal brand. This is proving to be quite a challenge as I know so much more of my inner workings than I ever knew of NeoTrace, et al. With the amount of knowledge I possess of my own personal experiences, it seems nearly impossible to condense myself down to a shooting star, or a hawk. How can I hope to interpret myself to the end user without a concise definition of who I am?

I believe the word ‘Product’ is essential in determining my own peronsal brand. It was never a challenge to imagine NeoTrace on the desktop because it was a ‘Product,’ and the desktop was its native environment. My native environment is on a farm in Southern Ohio. In order to interpret myself on the web I need to visualize my product. I may be different things to different people, but I need to determine what I wish to contribute to the Social Web — and, of course, how to make enough money to keep the lights on!

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