20:48, 28/09/2005

Personal branding - weblogs as belief systems

Well, I'd been fermenting a thought in my head about weblogs as places where one interrogates oneself with a community of interested witnesses. I was going to make it concrete by having my Second Life avatar, Kei Mars, interview me, with a selection of questions from you, my friends, as well.

But, clever tranny that she is, Siobhan beat me to the punch with her own, highly skilful auto-interview, which made many of the points I was going to raise. I especially (and predictably given my liking for a social drink) jibed with her comments about blogging being like having a conversation with a circle of friends in your favourite pub.

So I'm not going to do that. But it did make me think some more.

I've been working today on some corporate identity for a client - logos, type, colour schemes and usage examples. You know what I mean. Corporate identity is the most outward visual representation of an organisation's brand. In a real sense a brand is a promise to the customer.

When Apple (tagline: "Think Different") puts their mark on an iPod, or a Powerbook, or the iTunes store interface, they're saying, "look. We believe this product is so well designed and so beautiful that we'll put our signature on it, because that's what we stand for. We're asking you to believe and trust our promise and be our customer". As a consumer, you'll either believe in that promise or you won't and that will influence 100% how well a company performs. Branding is totally at the heart of everything a company does.

You can also turn it around and say that a brand is a company's promise to itself. It's almost like a belief system. Brand belief is at the heart of a company's success and how well it does.

You can't sell it if you don't believe in it.

The problem is that in this increasingly fragmented corporate landscape, and in a day and age when trust in brands is at an all time low, for so many reasons (globalisation, Enron and mistrust of government relations with businesses, the mistrust of media owner brands like Fox / Sky who are seen to be pushing murky agendas) we don't know where to turn for brands we can trust any more. Even home spun successes like flickr and Blogger are soon gobbled up by juggernaut corporations and lose their sanctified nature.

Whose brand do you believe in when there's a crisis of faith?

Well, the only thing left is yourself.

This is where weblogging comes in and I believe it's one of the foremost proponents of what has been termed "personal branding". Personal branding's all about leveraging your own belief in what you can do with the skills you're given. It's all about building up microcommunities of shared interest who are passionate about the same things you're passionate about, be it music, birdwatching, books, technology or transvestism.

And the Internet's full of it. The web is inherently brilliant at allowing personal brands to start up, because the social and interactive tools are built in to the networks via the protocols (http, smtp, ftp etc) that we take for granted. Quite quickly one to one can become many to many and that's why sites like flickr, eBay, LiveJournal are so successful. Services like CaféPress have been quick to exploit the unique nature of personal branding so that we can all have our own merchandising department at a low, risk-free price point.

So this weblog you're reading is actually the online community of brand Miss K (tagline: "transgendered z-list celebrity"). It's part of a loose federation of sister brands including the better established tranniefesto (tagline: "a crossdressing adventure" or, in certain applications, "I'm a bloke in a dress, but it's a very nice dress"), Becky's Web ("home of transgendered inactivist Becky EnVérité" - love that one) and Joanna's Diary ("may contain nuts"). All really skilful bits of copywriting and evidence of serious intent by their owners. And of course there's many many more.

Siobhan's wonderful tranniesphere visualisation was a first pass map of this federation of transgendered personal brands. Brands that exist because we believe in ourselves and we believe in our natures and interests.

It's all about belief. See you in November.

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In /musings
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