Personal Branding–Who Are You, Really?

Everything and now everybody gets branded.  Sarah Banet-Weiser, writing in the Wall Street Journal (1.24.13) reports that in the age of social media, just being you is not enough:

Increasingly, students have come [to me] seeking a different sort of advice, asking: how should I build my personal profile, or what do I need for a successful self-brand? Should I have a personal website, or a strong online presence? Questions that used to be framed as “Who am I, and who should I become?” are more and more “How should I sell myself?”

These questions emerge not because students are more superficial, but because they often feel compelled to compete in a marketplace that requires them to manage themselves as commodities.

This trend is not as alarming or dehumanizing as it might seem.  Social media have given us a chance to express ourselves more completely than ever before.  In seconds we can post pictures, opinions, articles, commentary and cute quotes. Thousands of people get to know us in more diverse ways.  The more we are willing to share, the more complete the picture.  It is only natural that we have begun to think more about how to manage that often scattershot image – how to trim, focus, concentrate, and distill it so that when others see our name, an immediate composite image comes to mind.  If you are sharing baby pictures, recipes, and Tea Party screeds, the image is garbled, messy, and imprecise; but if you restrict your posts to one particular aspect of your life and relate all information to it, then a more focused and clearer image emerges. You have branded yourself.

The brand does not have to be static – e.g., Baby Mom or Tea Party Crank – but can be more dynamic.  A commentator such as David Brooks, for example, does not fall into any particular category, but followers know that when they read him they will usually get an insightful look into current social, political, and intellectual trends.  Others, like Christopher Hitchens was known as a sharp-tongued, brilliant iconoclast; and although you never knew who or what he was going to pillory, expose, or deride, reading his pieces was always entertaining and challenging.

Brands and branding strategies have expanded beyond selling actual products or companies. We are witnessing the expansion of brand language and logic to our personal selves, where individuals often feel obliged to not only construct, but to understand themselves as brands. Branding, at the end of the day, is about selling and marketing things.  When we create a self-brand, we embark on a process that packages, designs, and markets us—human beings—just like other products and commodities.

The unasked question in this article is “Why do we do Facebook and Twitter?” Within the catch-all category of ‘social motivation’ there are many subheadings.  There are those who simply want to keep up with hundreds of virtual friends instead of a few real ones. The virtual network can expand geometrically and the social opportunities within it are almost limitless.  At any time, you can stop the virtual wheel, and get off into a real person’s bed.

For others, it is a way to connect to an exponential world of ideas.  It is one thing to have an opinion, another to have articulated it, and yet another to have shared it; but the real reward is to get responses to it, attract commentary, review, and criticism and by so doing, learn and appreciate more than ever.

I was delighted when I discovered Twitter.  I had always thought it was a teeny-bopper toy to share girly stories, but found it could be a highly sophisticated device which could put me in touch with hundreds of other writers instantaneously. As I scroll down the day’s Tweets, I see many which touch on topics that interest me.  I reply, post articles from my blog, and wait for others to comment.  The hits on my blog have increased tenfold; and if I expanded my Following list beyond the current 50 or so journals and writers, the increase would be even more.

I am concerned about my ‘brand’ because I want to facilitate the communications between me and other writers and their followers.  The more recognizable I become, the more likely readers will click on my posts and reply; and the more the intellectual circle is energized.

Producing one’s visibility through technological and digital tools, across multiple media platforms, is a primary way to create a saleable image of oneself, one that can circulate in a competitive marketplace.  These new, social media enhanced, visible selves, are no longer just versions of who we are, but they have become the essence of who we are. Increasingly, individuals are producing a self-brand not to promote one’s work or accomplishments, but to promote their very presence as a commodity in a market society.

The author, however, goes on to lament the passing of an older, more ‘real’ version of individuality:

Those various reasons one might garner public attention based on what one does, rather than how one is packaged, now seem almost antiquated, old-fashioned ideas in the contemporary economic context. I worry about what this means for a new generation of students and scholars who have been taught to value domain names and retweet campaigns over books and articles and ideas, perception and hype over content and substance, when what we promote becomes the very act of promotion itself.

This is where I disagree.  Why does the exercise that I have described above in anyway mean that I have valued perception and hype over content and substance?  Just the opposite.  Since I have been plugged in to social media, I have never been more intellectually active.  The immediate, critical audience that these media provide has been stimulating, energizing, and motivating.  I look forward to writing every day – articles I hope have substance and insight – largely because I like throwing myself into this large, unanticipated, diverse, and largely unknown reader pool.  What I promote most definitely does not become the very act of promotion itself, as Banet-Weiser suggests.

On the other hand, branding has gotten out of hand.  I used to work for a private consulting firm which provided technical advice to developing countries.  The company did not have a particular area of expertise, but easily found short-term talent on the open market to satisfy contractual requirements.  It was not known for its leadership in health, agriculture, education, or democratic reform, but for coming in on time, under budget, and meeting stated objectives.  It bid on everything that USAID offered, won one-third of all bids, and made a tidy profit. Despite this success, the CEO was not entirely happy.  If we branded ourselves, he said, we would be even more saleable and even more favorably viewed within the contracting agency.

Questionnaires were sent out to us, asking for our opinions on what the company meant to us; and what we thought of its mission, purpose, and overarching goals.  The CEO expected, I am sure, glowing comments about saving lives, mitigating misery, reducing poverty, and making the world a better place. The employees, however, uniformly stated the obvious – the company was in the business of making money, promiscuously went after every contract on the street, and had no mission whatsoever other than enriching the stockholders.

Another company I know – this time a non-profit company working in the same field of international development – spent thousands to hire a consulting firm to rebrand it.  The company name reflected its early origins – a small enterprise working in world education – but given its expansion and diversified portfolio, the CEO wanted to project a new brand image.  He went through the same exercise – a questionnaire soliciting opinions about mission, principles, and goals was circulated, results tabulated and analyzed, and a report issued. Not surprisingly, the employees uniformly said that the company only cared about winning.  It bid on just about everything, hired day-labor to fill technical slots, and instead of doling out shareholder dividends, bought a lot of artwork and built fancy facilities. 

It was a shock for both these companies to realize that they had no distinctive, attractive, sexy brand image.  They were money-makers.  They had no consumer base, only USAID bureaucrats to please; and because government regulations forbade any contact with them, contracts were awarded based only on the quality of proposals submitted.  They were contract mills, and they wasted their money trying to create an image of something they were not and would never be.

A small university in the South where I have been a teacher is currently going through a branding exercise; but in this case it is needed and very worthwhile.  The university has had to compete with two State behemoths which have attracted public attention, alumni contributions, and significant government funding.  As state financial resources have dwindled because of the recession, this small university has been in danger of being marginalized or worse.  It needed to show state bureaucrats and decision-makers that it filled an important niche between the two large universities; but it was not clear to anyone what exactly that niche was.  The branding exercise forced it to focus on all its attributes, to identify which of those were lacking in competitor universities, and enable it to position itself as a unique alternative.  The process has not yet been completed, but it should be productive.

The point is that in an increasingly competitive world, branding is not only essential but rewarding.  It in no way demeans the individual or institution, for they are only looking to enhance themselves, not just their image.  While some companies arrogantly and foolishly assume that they can become something they are not and never will ber simply be rebranding, many more understand today’s marketplace and see the need to reconfigure, retool, and refocus scarce resources to succeed.

Such rebranding, refocusing, and consolidating pays equal rewards for individuals who want to increase their personal value.  Some, like me, want only to be part of a larger and more demanding intellectual world; others want to present a more complete and complex personality and by so doing enhance their chances for partnership. 

There are few downsides to this natural and logical outgrowth of a competitive, market society, and Ms. Barnet-Weiser need not be so concerned.

Instrumental Lying

The BBC (1.23.13) reports on ‘instrumental lying’ – tactical untruths to get children to behave:

The study, published in the International Journal of Psychology, examined the use of "instrumental lying" - and found that such tactically-deployed falsehoods were used by an overwhelming majority of parents in both the United States and China - based on interviews with about 200 families.

The most frequent example was parents threatening to leave children alone in public unless they behaved. Persuasion ranged from invoking the support of the tooth fairy to telling children they would go blind unless they ate particular vegetables.

An interesting concept, instrumental lying, and a welcome addition to the many other kinds of lying which are usually used to cover up a misdeed – e.g. Mark Sanford saying that he was walking the Appalachian Trail when he was actually visiting his Argentine firecracker; or John Edwards denying that he had a love child then compounding the lie by asking his underling to take the fall.  Since there is something purposeful in instrumental lying – i.e. the education of one’s children – it doesn’t seem wrong at all; and many people would not even consider putting it into the same moral bin as willful deceit.  Besides, young children have not yet matured enough to distinguish fantasy from reality, so the whole concept of a lie has not yet acquired salience or value.  They believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, after all, so why not invoke Pinocchio and tell them that if they lie, their noses will grow long and pointy just like his?

Many parents use Santa Claus to achieve their behavioral objectives, albeit short-term.  They recite the key lines from the popular Christmas song:

“He knows when you are sleeping.  He knows when you are awake.  He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”

Parents need all the help they can get, so who can blame them for a little deceit to keep their little ankle-biters in line for a few weeks?  I have never heard of any parent using the Easter Bunny as hall monitor, but few children would want to risk the thought of no brightly-colored Easter eggs left in the hedges for them to find.

In our family, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were kept as benign, generous, and miraculous figures.  Why deliberately sully the magic of a jolly, red-suited Santa and his sleigh of reindeer coursing through the night sky, coming down the chimney and leaving presents? That would be the real sin, not perpetuating the fantasy lie.

As a child I remember only one instrumental lie spread by my parents – coffee will stunt your growth – but there were plenty of half-truths said less out of conviction than out of old wives tales.  “Don’t go outside with a wet head or you will catch pneumonia”, for example, or “Don’t sit in drafts because they will give you sciatica”. Too much ice cream would give me constipation, and not enough carrots would ruin my eyesight.  There were too many lies spread about masturbation to decide who actually said them, especially my parents.  Jerking off gave you warts, made you blind, gave you the palsy, addled the brain, and weakened your resolve.

I heard the best indirect injunction against masturbation in India. Loosely translated, the warning said” “You have only so many shots in your magazine, so use them wisely”.

Apparently parents resort to very twisted lies to control their children:

The most frequent example was parents threatening to leave children alone in public unless they behaved.

There were "untrue statements related to misbehavior", which included: ''If you don't behave, I will call the police," and: "If you don't quiet down and start behaving, the lady over there will be angry with you.''

Under the category of "Untrue statements related to leaving or staying" a parent was recorded as saying: "If you don't follow me, a kidnapper will come to kidnap you while I'm gone." (BBC)

I once took my young son to see the film Pinocchio. There is a scene in which  Pinocchio is shanghaied by Stromboli to be a puppet in a circus and is carted off in a wagon.  The animation shows Pinocchio looking out the back, staring into a dark rain, sad and distraught because he was being taken from his beloved father, Geppetto. My son started to cry, and as many times as I had seen and loved this great Disney classic as an adult, I had never realized how painful this scene of loss must be to a child. Once I saw Pinocchio’s journey through a child’s eyes, and realized how his death to save his father would be so saddening and disconsolately terrifying to a child, did I realize what the fear of separation and loss must be.

Telling lies of kidnapping, police abduction and parental abandonment are cruel and indefensible.

Under the category of "Untrue statements related to leaving or staying" a parent was recorded as saying: "If you don't follow me, a kidnapper will come to kidnap you while I'm gone."

There were also lies motivated by protecting a child's feelings - labeled as "Untrue statements related to positive feelings."

This included the optimistic: "Your pet went to live on your uncle's farm where he will have more space to run around." (BBC)

Once, when we vacationed in Italy for the summer and rented an old farmhouse in Tuscany, we rented a rabbit as a pet for our children, an animal raised along with chickens and ducks by a local farmer.  When it was time to go back to the United States and to return the rented rabbit, my son asked what would happen to Buns.  “Mr. Vanni will give him a good home”, I lied.  “He will be very happy with all his bunny friends”. 

My daughter who was two years older gave me a quizzical look.  She had seen the skinned rabbits lined up in the butcher shop with only little tufts of hair left around their paws, and knew exactly what was going to happen to Buns.  I changed the subject before she could expose my lie.

I used to tease my children all the time and make up implausible but possible stories.  I told myself that these untruths were educational tools to help them become discerning, analytical adults; but my children saw it differently.  One summer we were on an interminable road trip, and a large RV passed us slowly.  It was enormous, bus-long, with railings on the roof.  “What’s up there, Daddy?”, asked my daughter. 

“A swimming pool”, I said.  “These big campers have heated pools on their roofs so that children can have fun and not be bored on long trips”. 

Many weeks later, when we were on an upper level of an outdoor parking lot, my daughter looked down on a big RV, similar to the one that had passed us on the road.  There was of course no swimming pool on the roof, just junk – extra bicycles, beach chairs, and umbrellas.  “You lied to us”, said my daughter angrily.  I replied that I had not lied, but had just made up the story.  “No”, she insisted.  “You lied!”.

Sissela Bok wrote Lying and in it explored the moral and ethical dimensions of lying and how the practice, although common, was never justified.  She quotes Charles Fried:

A good man does not lie. It is this intuition which brings lying so naturally within the domain of things categorically wrong. Yet many lies do little if any harm, and some lies do real good. How are we to account for this stringent judgment on lying, particularly in face of the possible trivial, if not positively beneficial, consequences of lying? (Right and Wrong, 1978)

Robert Fullinwider (www.infed.org) summarizes Bok’s “Theory of Veracity”, a very strong moral presumption against lying:

What, she asks you, would it be like to live in a world in which truth-telling was not the common practice? In such a world, you could never trust anything you were told or anything you read. You would have to find out everything for yourself, first-hand. You would have to invest enormous amounts of your time to find out the simplest matters. In fact, you probably couldn't even find out the simplest matters: in a world without trust, you could never acquire the education you need to find out anything for yourself, since such an education depends upon your taking the word of what you read in your lesson books. A moment's reflection of this sort, says Bok, makes it crystal clear that you benefit enormously by living in a world in which a great deal of trust exists – a world in which the practice of truth-telling is widespread. All the important things you want to do in life are made possible by pervasive trust.

There is but one definition of a lie:

What is a lie? A lie is a statement, believed by the liar to be false, made to another person with the intention that the person be deceived by the statement. This is the definition used by Sissela Bok and it has antecedents as far back as St. Augustine.

However, there are so many shades of lying (white lies, tales of fantasy, half-truths, minor deceptions) and so many compelling cases for benign lies (withholding a diagnosis of terminal cancer, “Mommy will be back soon”, or “The weather will probably clear”) that most people lie without even thinking twice about it.  Yet, as Bok observes, such pervasive lying is corrosive, and ultimately destructive.

Parents should indeed give the question of lying a second thought; or at least to distinguish between malicious deception and harmless, teasing fictions.  No one has even tried to show a correlation between ‘instrumental lying’ to children and their eventual veracity; but that misses the point. Lying can hurt children.  It sets a bad example – that lying is an acceptable way of enforcing volition; and, as Bok suggests, it contributes to a world in which the child’s first instinct is to wonder what is true.

The study raises the longer-term issue of the impact on families of such opportunistic approaches to the truth. It suggests it could influence family relationships as children get older.

Researchers concluded that this raises "important moral questions for parents about when, if ever, parental lying is justified". (BBC)

Volunteerism–Myth And Reality

America is a country of volunteers.  Almost 30 percent of us volunteered for a US non-profit agency in 2011 (The Business Journals 3.12). I was one of these legions, albeit years ago.  At prep school I tutored slower students from the town in French and Latin ; and at Yale I was a member of Dwight Hall, a social service agency which ran a variety of programs in New Haven.  I told stories to second graders in poor, black neighborhoods and tutored math students in area high schools.  In Bombay, I volunteered to teach basketball to kids in a nearby private school. 

In all this I don’t remember having what one corporate interviewer described as a ‘social service motivation’ – i.e., doing good – but got involved in these programs because I enjoyed being around children. The ivory towers of the Ivy League and its feeders were very confining, and spending time with ‘real’ people in ‘real’ communities gave me the contact with the more intimate and personal life that I missed. 

The schools in New Haven were in the ghetto,  and the children had unbelievable stories to tell during Show-and-Tell.   “My Mommy took a bottle upside my Daddy’s head and he didn’t get up for a long time”, said one.  “My Mommy turned on the gas and when my Daddy got close to the stove, she lit it and burnt his butt”, said another. It was sad, but funny.

I was reading French literature of the mid-19th century and la nostalgie de la boue, a desire to get back to the dirt, grime, and bare reality of the world after a life of poetry and fine arts, and my sophomoric fantasy was to experience a reality that I would never have to live. Perhaps more to the point, the children were goofy, uninhibited, silly, and giddy – far from the stuffed, taxidermy of Imbrie Buffum or Maynard Mack, my college professors.

After Yale I worked at St. _______School in Westchester County, a home/school for potentially delinquent children who had been referred by the Juvenile Justice Department of New York City.  These children lived at St. _____ and because they were not socialized enough to attend public school, were taught on campus.  Every summer, college students like me lived at the school, organized games, outings and events. This was in the Sixties, in the first days of civil rights, so no one in the administration of the school looked askance at 5 white Ivy League kids shepherding 100 black ones.  Like Dwight Hall at Yale, St. _____ gave me a chance to see what life was like beyond the wall and to enjoy the silliness of young children.  A lot of the spontaneity and joy had been beaten out of them from a shitty home life in the slums, but they were still children.

In short, my desire for la nostalgie de la boue, a slice of life was satisfied. My cruise on the surface of ghetto,slum, and dysfunction gave me perspective without pain.  I was neither transformed nor proud.  I simply liked what I did.

The children with whom I worked were, I think, also satisfied.  They could tell that I liked them, and liked being with them; and despite initial suspicions of the white boy from Connecticut, gave in and had a good time.  In short, my volunteerism was an expression of very precise and particular personal interests, none of which had anything to do with ‘helping’ or ‘caring’; but it had the result that organizers wished.  The kids were happy, learned French, math, and Latin. It was a perfect balance.

Which brings me to the enforced volunteerism of my own children’s day.  At neither private school which they attended was there any real sense of the purpose of volunteering.  Was it for the benefit of the students, i.e. to teach them empathy, solicitude, and charity? Was it for the benefit of the slum communities in which the students were to work? Was ‘real’ volunteering only working with black, poor communities; or was teaching a drawing class at an after-school class for wealthy white kids OK?  What was the definition of community?  Was it someone else’s community, such as the neighborhoods of Southeast Washington where my children were bussed to pick up someone else’s trash, needles, and used condoms? Or was it their community – the libraries, hospitals, and convalescent homes of well-to-do Washington?

Because of this lack of clarity of purpose and the enforced, obligatory nature of the volunteer program, most students emerged from the experience more hardened in their opinions about those less fortunate than ever.  I offered to go with the students of my son’s school to ‘help the community’ clean up the area around a church located in a poor area of Northwest DC.  However there were no members of the congregation there to pitch in, so the little white kids picked up cigarette butts, candy wrappers, soda cans, dreck and shit that church-goers had stepped over.  What kind of a message was that?  

The next year, my son decided that he would volunteer for something more suited to his interests and abilities and taught advanced drawing to an after-school program at a private art and dancing school.  He had found the school, elicited an interest from the director, and proposed the work to the head of the volunteer program at his school.  “No”, said the Director.  “That is not real volunteering”; by which he meant that the only way to fulfill your school and moral obligation was to suffer in the course of doing good.  Needless to say my son never did any volunteering ever again. 

Many of the 30 percent who volunteer do it for their church or some other familiar, close-in social group; and relatively few go out of bounds; but in so doing they represent the best of volunteerism.  My mother’s favorite adage was “Charity begins at home” and in these less Depression-straitened times it can be expanded to include one’s own crowd.  My neighbor, for example, always picks up the paper from our next door neighbor who is old and infirm and is the first to shovel his driveway when it snows.  She always refused payment on behalf of her son for chores he did for us.  “He’s your neighbor”, she said. 

For many years my wife volunteered at the Vassar Book Sale in Washington, a grand affair filling the halls of the Building Museum with used books collected by alumnae, women who also sorted, selected, and worked the register.  The book sale always generated revenue for the school which in turn used it for scholarships.  The ladies volunteered because of allegiance to Vassar, an old, formerly Ivy League WASP redoubt in the 30s and 40s when they went there.  Vassar didn’t really need the relatively small amount of money generated; and the sale was more for the ladies who did something for their alma mater and got to shmooze with Washingtonians not unlike them who loved books.

The point is, volunteerism need not – should not – be a piece of someone’s social service agenda.  My mother’s other adage was “God helps those who help themselves”; and hard love and the withdrawal of social service programs, well-meaning volunteers, and social reformers will do more for inciting people to change their own lives than any external assistance.

Individualism if interpreted as the acceptance of personal responsibility is a good thing; and is the only way for dysfunctional communities – the ones getting volunteer help alongside public assistance – to give up the culture of entitlement and move on, up, and out.  Volunteerism can prolong the misery of the dysfunction, delay the onset of internal, homegrown activism.

Obama’s calls for diluting individualism with a dose of collectivism are somewhat discordant.  The world has changed since the day of his volunteer activism and community organization in Chicago.  Online petitions clog the web and produce results as do online contributions to organizations promoting environmentalism, elder care, or education.  Tens of millions of dollars were contributed by American conservatives to defeat Obama in an almost successful attempt to extirpate the enemy – i.e. volunteerism at its most active and effective.  Not your grandfather’s volunteerism to be sure, but volunteerism nonetheless. 

In fact, this social networking, online activism is paired with market forces.  Marketing experts, armed with big data and sophisticated algorithms group atomized individuals virtually and create large volunteer groups.  Viral commercial marketing does the same thing, and engages consumers into promoters.  When you ‘Like’ a product, place, or service on Facebook, you have volunteered your services to the companies behind them.

So, both Obama’s Inaugural and the now institutionalized MLK Day of Community Service are quaint, old-fashioned, well-meaning, but way off-target in this dynamic, changing, electric world of 2013