For Sean

I just came across this: http://www.danschawbel.com/personalbranding.htm

And if you read even the first 2 paragraphs you will swear it is an article from the Onion or an SNL skit. But its not, apparently Dan Schawbel, "personal branding expert for gen-y" is a real person with a real service.

In addition to being immediately exhausted by Mr. Schawbel's existence, the site made me think of Sean and a game we used to play decades ago when we were right out of college and living the high life as a ubiquitous yet totally amorphous consultant we used to play a game called Consultant Bingo (yeah yeah, lots of people did just I only played it with Sean). This game (at least between us) really just entailed being vigilantly on the look out for the inane consulting jargon that was infesting even the smartest and most well intentioned of people.

When we came across such nonsensical verbiage we would, in our heads of course, yell bingo and then would email the nonsense to each other. It was really a way of making sure neither of us actually drank the cool aid and succumbed to the paradigm shift of wasting our bandwidth on inside the box thinking. BINGO

Anyway, back to Dan Schwabel, just for a moment. Read the first two paragraphs of his web site and see if you can figure out what this guy is pedaling. He uses about 300 words and so far as I can tell says precisely nothing. Its brilliantly vapid and my guess is that he is actually making money personally branding gen-yers.

It of course saddens me to think that gen-yers (whoever the heck they are) feel the need to create a persona for themselves instead of just actually being themselves. That they believe that Dan Schawbel can craft a better version of them then they actually can just by being whoever it is they really are. But then again how successful can someone who's self proclaimed Major Accomplishment is having interviewed Philip Rosedale and Gina Bianchini. Who are they you might ask? I have no idea but I bet the are very adept at facilitating collaboration among information architects. BINGO

In case you were wondering, I do find the idea of a personal brand somewhat intriguing . . . in a purely for entertainment not in a for profit sort of way. If you had to come up with a marketing slogan for yourself what would it be . . . today ; )