On the phenomenon of the Personal Brand
Plus some boring web and email address housekeeping.
The phrase is a recent occurrence, Google’s data show it goes back to 1937 but it appears to be mostly just the words “personal” and “brand” appearing next to each other. The actual phrase itself seems to have started to pick up in the 90s with business books about networking, mostly in finance.
Then with the 2000s we had “Be your own brand” by David McNally and a few other notable titles as the world of internet entrepreneurship was maturing as a very real avenue folks were exploring back then.
And nowadays, the advice to brandify yourself is everywhere in industries dominated by relationship-driven transactions. And that ranges from the creative world all the way to finance. It’s powerful, it’s useful, it’s a great career move but it’s also somewhat odd.
The why behind personal brands
Job retention in certain sectors has dropped slightly but not as much as I assumed, and in some areas it has risen slightly! Researcher Craig Copeland wrote for EBRI “Over the past 40 (or nearly 40 years) years, the median tenure of all wage and salary workers ages 25 or older has stayed at approximately five years.”
Though the picture becomes more interesting when getting into the weeds of it all. Generational differences are by far the biggest factor, essentially the older generations stay at the same employer for longer. Which fits a little better with my preconceived notions. Though this isn’t just generational, it’s also age. The thesis there is that older folks value stability and tenure often provides that.
As a side note, this paper from Rodriguez and Zavodny found, among other things, that older folks were more likely to be laid off in an economic downturn compared to younger workers, despite younger workers voluntarily changing jobs more frequently.
So what does this have to do with personal brands? Essentially, my hypothesis is that more younger people are either self employed contractors, job hopping or getting into content production work due to the internet. Of course those who don’t do this will get older and if what we know about age is causal then those people will contribute to lengthening tenure statistics, thus keeping the average steady.
But in the last year I’ve anecdotally seen a lot more focus from my peers on Personal Branding. Blog writing, LinkedIn and Twitter activity, open source work for the sake of open source work, speaking at meetups.
Internet identities
There’s a slightly more nuanced side of this I want to talk about though, it’s specific to the internet culture side of things, and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot while rethinking my writing strategy. Myself and a lot of people I know have a handle, a username, a moniker, a nick(name). An identifier specifically for internet communication. If you read this publication before I changed the domain, you might remember it was southcla.ws, which is a neat little domain name trick I used to express my own username.
I’ve been known as “Southclaw” (and later, southclaws) for a long time. Since the time when “social media” was largely on forums that looked like this:
And that expanded even more when I added an S, bought the southcla.ws domain, changed my handle everywhere to “southclaws”, in many ways that was the settling of my “personal brand”.
In many ways, I’m a bit proud of this social-capital built up over years. The website is useful as a digital business card, and everything stems from there as “<whatever site>/southclaws”. There’s a certain clout I’ve noticed in a few folks from the days of IRC that arises from having a unique handle.
(also, if you’re interested in internet culture, do look up the origin of the term “handle” it’s rooted in truck drivers and amateur radio nerds! Perhaps that should be a future post…)
Optimising for context
In the last year I’ve attended a lot more in-person events. This is partly due to the lasting effects of Covid disappearing from daily life, but also partly my work and my personal interest in meeting more people of more varied backgrounds here in London.
One thing that’s very difficult about a brand optimised for text-based medium such as the internet is telling people with your voice. Outside of the times when it’s a simple LinkedIn swap, saying “south [at sign] C, L, A, dot W, S” out loud is hilarious but also kind of awkward for everyone involved.
My background is in tech, and I earned by stripes on internet forums by writing code and then teaching code to others. But my whole professional being is not just about technology and code any more. With that, not everyone I’m talking to understands that “.ws” is a valid top-level-domain. I’ve had estate agents, recruiters, investors and many more folks “correct” my email address to all manner of things:
south@claws.com
south@cla.ws.com
south@claws (no TLD!)
southclaws@gmail.com (technically I do own this but I never check the inbox - it just auto responds with a message telling the sender my actual email address)
The culmination of these experience has lead me to believe that, while custom domains are really cool for showing off to fellow technologists, they’re not actually that useful in the real world, and when in a loud, crowded environment it’s much simpler to hear “at gmail dot com”.
And so, we reach the true deep dark motivation for this article. To shill my new websites and get you to email me!
New year, new me
As I mentioned above, my professional “brand” isn’t really solely technology. I want to write more long-form articles with the research work put in. But at the same time, I’ve also got over 10 years of tech industry experience that could be perceived as a wealth of knowledge given the right font choice!
My digital business card
Hopefully saying “barney dot is” proves to be vastly simpler in a bustling cocktail bar on a Thursday night. Not that I frequently tell people my website in cocktail bars, but as they say, hope for the best plan for the worst!
It exists purely as a traditional “home page”. Somewhere I can call my own, not too tightly tied to my internet identity and simple enough that it’s memorable and sharable in a variety of forms.
And yes I did choose “.is” because it’s the TLD of Iceland, my favourite country on earth. It’s also probably not going anywhere any time soon.
I’ve also got a brand new email address, which I was going to write about but dunking on email is played out.
Send me digital postcards, my username is barney @ my new mail provider hey.com (I’m assuming we still do that thing where we obfuscate the email address in creative ways to prevent spam? Honestly, I just do it out of habit nowadays…)
Technical writing
And my technical writing will now continue to live with my still-alive internet identity, which was originally the domain of this Substack publication so hopefully that won’t cause too much confusion with readers or Google indexing:
It’s a hand-written blog, which is best for that kind of content. Substack is amazing for the simplicity of getting straight to writing but lacks some of the features one might want for things like code snippets or interactive elements.
Whatever you call this thing
The astute reader may have noticed the domain name for this site has now changed to blog.barney.is! I did consider yet another domain for this publication, purely because I really really enjoy branding things. But I decided that was a distraction and I should just sit down and write more often.
Technology, culture, creativity and how they facilitate each other. I hope you continue to enjoy reading!
honourable mentions and writing inspirations - basically just blogs I shamelessly copy
Paddy,
the best writer I have the privilege to frequently sit in the same room as (he’s also bossman at Odin, where I tap keys, click mouses and draw rectangles for a living). I don’t know how he manages to write more than once a year with a startup on one shoulder and a newborn on the other. Huge source of inspiration, big ups. I’ve followed Matt’s work for a long time, since he wrote for Vox and ran The Weeds podcast. His writing makes the important parts of politics and policy interesting to me, which is great given the less important parts of politics are often the most written-about.