Personal Branding Liberates You from the Prison

This is a response to Carlos Miceli’s post on Owl Sparks: Prison, Fear, and Personal Branding

Carlos start the post with:

“Let’s skip all the positive things about social media that have been mentioned countless times, and criticize it for a change:

Social media is a prison.

I like the post including the title, discussion, and Carlos’s reminder that social media is a prison.

I wrote an article before few days Your Life History is Not Private Anymore! and here is part of it:

Everything you do online is archived: on social networks, bulletin boards, websites and Google’s constantly growing collection pages. People will get the first impression about you by what your Google results say. Strong results provide credibility when searched by potential employers or clients. YOU are the one who is leaving a trail behind that everyone will see and judge you on. It’s not late to be careful, deliberate and safe.

To: Carlos and million of people around the world.

We are living in web 2.0 age and we are learning new things every single day, I wasn’t on Twitter before 1 year, I wasn’t on Facebook before 2 years, I wasn’t using Internet before 10+ years. Today, we are bounded by policies and most of them are restricting our online activities. Add to that, we, the IT team will happily do our job by blocking some websites and preventing access to Internet messengers.

Is that a prison?

Yes, it is.

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Carlos said:

I blame all those Personal Branding blogs. Because of them, we are afraid. Afraid of being honest and direct. Afraid of being human.

OK, if you hear a personal branding expert telling you: Dont, Dont and Dont, then DO NOT CALL HIM/HER AN EXPERT. Personal branding isn’t here to fear or tremble you and we aren’t here to promote ‘Dont.’

Personal Branding is about being YOU, about being authentic and being the real human. I’m the first person to dis-follow anyone who tweet like a machine and hide any friend that share the same status on all social networks. Sorry, but I need to see the human side of YOU. We all are engaging in virtual communication so being YOU is the only way to makes our life good and keep the human’s conversation else we are a robots.

Personal Branding guru William Arruda said “Personal Branding is Permission to be Yourself.”

Personal Branding isn’t a nightmare that will keep you stay awake or the evil that documenting all your online activities. YOU are the one who is blogging your life in non erasable disks that are hidden somewhere in the world. Personal Branding is a process to help you makes a difference in your activities and at the same time warn you that a stupid picture or harassment comment could be used against you one day. I’m sure Carlos and all who is reading this post want to have a unique and memorable personal brand. We cant achieve that brand without hard work, commitment and adding formal flavor to most of our online activities but don’t have the fear to have fun or being YOU. The fear comes when you become someone else. Why? because people will see and know you are fake.

At the end, it is up to YOU to stay in the prison but personal branding here to liberate you from the prison. Thats it, being YOU.