Today I found When Brands Collide on Own Your Brand, where Mike Wagner elaborates a bit on the subject of Personal Brand. In it, he discusses how the concept of personal brand is more important, and has more impact than in previous years.
Ever since I read this post on Personal Brands by Shel Israel, I’ve been seeing more and more discussion on the topic. Not that the concept is ‘new’, but that the impact in our society is/will be huge. The implications to businesses as employees with strong personal brands could affect the bottom line. As we move into the future, and blogging continues to grow, the audiences of those blogs will continue to grow.

In our daily lives we travel in small geographical circles that are very comfortable, very well-known to us. Most of us work with the same people every day, we go to the same places, see the same things. The physical audience in our daily lives is small and well known, we know who we can be upfront with, we know who we need to handle with ‘kid gloves’. We have the ability to see another’s face when we communicate with them, and see the impact our conversation has.

When we blog, we connect with people who have similar interests, but are geographically dispersed. And because of the revolution in communications technologies, we have an audience of hundreds of millions of people. Through tagging and searching, we find each other and start conversations. Since we can’t view each other during the conversation, we tend to be more honest and open in what we say and do. The ability to have clear honest communications is at the root of blogging – and as a side effect, you can learn a lot about the blogger.

Now take the concept of personal brand and figure in that massive audience. Can you see how personal brand (a person’s reputation) can now be built to have the name recognition of a corporate brand? In the blogosphere, there are already a number of people who are approaching this kind of recognition.

So for the rest of us Z-Listers the important part is to understand what your blog says about you. What power you hold in your hands when you post to your blog. You have a powerful tool to shape your career or your life, and that massive audience that we can write to, but how do you want to use it?

Technorati tags: naked-conversations, own-your-brand, personal-brand, shel-israel