Plausible Me. Your Context Online.

 

A few years ago I was fascinated by the concept of "personal branding".  Carefully craft the image of yourself. Conscious about your mission. Radiating what you're about.

Stuff like that.

Especially in the online space it's a phenomenon that has taken off beyond imagination. Presenting yourself as an "event", right next to Nike, Coca-Cola and Mac Donalds. Dan Schwabel summed it up quite nicely  with the title of his book about personal branding: "Me 2.0".

I am still fascinated by this topic. But for a different reason.

Originally I was keen on finding out how this would work. How do you write your mission statement? Do you need a suit in your profile picture or not? Are you a nice person online or opinionated?  Do you use formal language or just yell "whatever" on every occasion?

Branding is work.

Writing an elevator pitch is an awesome exercise in self-awareness. Tell in 20 seconds what you are about? Why are you fantastic? … Go!

Branding is also incredible powerful in communication. Your conversation partner can look you up online before a conversation and get some context about you. A context that helps them understand your message.

A context you carefully created.

In here lies my current fascination.

Is it correct or not? When you yourself are curating your own personal brand online, the best we might get is a "plausible me", a phrase coined by Laurent Haug. The context provided online is not necesarely true, it's plausible.

Your online digital footprint, the digital trail of your online activities over the years, provides important clues. How long are you online? Do you stick with one topic or are you switching back and forth every year?

But this digital shadow of "you" might not be sufficient. It might still be curated. So the best we can do is "plausible".

You need face-to-face interaction with someone to validate the profile.

Or. You need a continuous raw feed of data, not curated. This might be provided by the mobile real-time web. With for example pictures taken with a mobile phone directly uploaded to Facebook you get a transparent stream of information.

But this kind of transparency has it's own troubles and doesn't solve the validation issue.

You loose the benefit of a single context. Even if at best we can hope for is a "plausible" perception of our conversation partner, it seems better then an entirely wrong context. Out of context.

Sometimes politicians say stupid things during newspaper interviews. Luckily, they can always claim it was taken out of context. Politician really want to control their message.

But even the most notorious evangelists of “being yourself”, “awesome authenticity”, “just say what’s on your mind”, “let your message flow free” a.k.a. The Social Media Advocates (yes, that’s me included) have concerns about message and context.

As Jonathan Fields writes:

“When I’m at an event, a gathering, meeting or just having lunch, I’ve come to learn that every word out of my mouth is fair game for social media attribution and distribution. … And, that freaks me out a bit. Because when I put the message out there, I give it context. But, when others translate it to social media, especially media that only allows for cherry-picked snippets… who knows?”

The continuous  raw stream provided by the real time web will increase this "out of context" phenomenon. It is fragmented, without direct context, waiting to be copied and published, and misrepresented. In that sense, the worse has yet to come.

Perhaps in a few years I reflect back on personal branding, and will think it  wasn't that bad at all.

Who knows?

Bas de Baar is a writer who draws about people in transition. He loves to make visual maps and travel guides for the collaborators of our brave new world.