So this past couple of days I’ve been reading, rereading and analyzing the Manifesto: I’m not a brand from Maureen Johnson.
I agree with her in the points she mentions. I’m a person and as a person I believe in having a personality. I know businesses have been dehumanizing us for a long time. The values businesses where built with were not human at all (risk mitigation, efficiency, are you kidding me?). The internet and this full time connectedness has made us able to share with everyone more of our life and our personalities. It has give us the social animal tag once again. We didn’t lose it, we were just told to hide it most of the time. And here comes the controversy Maureen talks about.
So with traditional media it was ok to create sales pitches for ourselves and our brand because our exposure was for just a small share of time, our 15 minutes of fame at most. It was good that we expressed just some ideas if we got the chance because of the limited amount of time and expectations where that we would do it. And in fact not many people got to share their ideas on media.
The lucky ones who got air time were the people with something to say that was interesting enough for a broad audience to hear it. Right now we can broadcast and our probable audience will be a combination of our closest circle of friends combined with people with whom we share common interests. Here comes the concept of tribes as proposed by Seth Godin and Kjell & Nordstrom in their books. The idea is that we will join a group of people with shared interests that would’ve been impossible to gather without the increased communications hardware (technology, systems, etc.)
But now we can broadcast all the time, by choice. We can choose what things to share and what things not to share. But many of us have decided to share our humanity and our day to day life with the rest of the world. This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s called Social Web or Social Media after all, so we have to expect it to be a social space and therefore be ruled by the norms of a social space. So in a social space I don’t want to be a brand and I don’t want to be a brand anywhere. But it also shouldn’t be a surprise because we’ve been wanting to express ourselves openly for a long time.
So why do we have to pretend to be brands now that we can communicate all the time. It’s no longer something about limited time or space to express ourselves. We surely can sell our products, services, businesses, they’re part of our life…but there’s more to it, too.
I want to be me. I’m a person and my professional life is as much of me as my personal life, my interests, rants, etc. So why do I have to stick to a message and repeat it trying to sell myself all the time.
Besides of wrong, that will be utterly boring. I would become one of those sellers that buy a franchise and then go and try to sell products to all their friends turning himself into a former friend instead. How horrible is that really? Can you imagine ruining a friendship because you try to sell to people in a social space. You shouldn’t. We should be original in our approach to what we do on the Internet.
I say original in a sense that we should try and put out our personalities and not some sort of created super me character or brand that says we’re the best agent/seller/baker/etc. We don’t have to share all, but at least we should be original and not try to sell all the time. The Internet is not the ultimate sales channel is the ultimate networking, collaboration and communication tool.
Why I don’t want to be a brand?
Thinking about it I can feel that becoming a brand will be terrible for me (or any person in the world) because we will close up our human side into a little corner and just pretend to be something we’re not (or just a part of what we are). Trying to do this on-line on a regular basis can be pretty demanding, but doable. The problem comes when it’s time to meet people offline. Yes the incredible and underrated offline world where we are supposed to meet the expectations generated online and where all the things happen. If we build our brand we can either end up showing some flaws we didn’t show online and becoming instant morons or we can end up being boring enough so that no one will like to meet us anyway.
When I was a kid I was fooling around the internet, drawing stuff, creating geocities sites of my favorite cartoons, playing games on Yahoo! Games and meeting new friends all around. I grew up with this and it was awesome. Then I found about the culture of the Internet in places like 4chan (the good threads) and shows that proposed what mattered to me online like Epic Fu. It was all about collaboration, knowing each other, making mashups, having fun and making meaning. To all of this projects money was a secondary objective (not less important for it) but meaning came first. Many studies (the last one being about the Customer Centric Businesses - Which i love to quote) show that companies and ventures with a meaning end up making more money, so this should be the right approach.
Of course, then all the people that have money as the primary goal, mainly because they haven’t stopped to think about what they really want, came to the online world and tried to turn it into a place for sales and wanted to see returns without changing the underlying culture and goodness of business. With goodness or betterness I refer to pursuing a higher goal and make an impact besides making money. Take for example Google, Apple or 37 Signals, they all want to make money, but their higher goal is trying to organize the world’s information and providing a awesome and simple user experience (for Apple and 37 signals, each one in their own style).
Well, this people that come to the internet with the idea of “turning it into a giant commercial” are not really adding any value to our experience as humans or as customers, mainly because we don’t care and because as humans we like to stick to real people not brands.
For example, we don’t stick to Apple because of the Apple brand, but because of the Apple community that shares some values we identify ourselves with. The same happens with a lot of products we buy. We don’t like unhuman things we like being part of communities. Just notice how many people go and gather together to cheer for their teams for the world cup. Peru isn’t on the world cup and peruvians are getting together in groups to cheer for their favorite teams. So after the lonely 20th century we’ve become utterly fond to social life.
Then we get this people telling companies to open a Facebook account and a Twitter account and that they will measure exposure and brand awarness. They should measure brand love, but that’s another rant.
So going back on track. All this weenuses and hosebags Maureen talks about are there just to make money out there without aunthenticity and tell us that whatever we do that doesn’t make money or doesn’t seem as professional is a waste of time.
Well, unless you’re really freaking boring you can still have fun online and help causes we like and do the right things because we like them. We can still do businesses with a higher purpose and make lot’s of money while we do it. And then we can also invest that money in spreading the love around the world.
So please, stop talking about personal brands or any brand. Let’s start doing things on the internet that reflect our personalities. Let’s write a blog post about marketing and one about love. Let’s share an interesting link about social media and a link to our last doodle.
I’m glad i can find a lot of people that do this. Let’s have a personality and not a brand.
*“Let’s have a personality and not a brand” is a line that i got from Tara ‘missrogue’ Hunt who is utterly smart and the top person on my “I must meet IRL ASAP” list. This is because she has been a source of inspiration in an uncommon and much more passionate vision of the world and how we can make it better.
