The End of Social Branding?

I recently listened to a podcast discussion involving Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane, and Gina Trapani that focused on, among other things, their combined frustration and general dismissal of the concept of building a social brand on the Internet.

The old me would have perked up his ears and become sensitive to the fact that maybe social branding was on the way out.  That being too obvious about building a reputation and an image online would become a downfall instead of a viable career tool.

The new me took a deep breath and dared to think that maybe these rather popular Internet pundits might just be wrong.  Ooooooh.  I know.  Living on the edge.

Look.  I’m as sick as the next person of dealing with all of the pretenders loading up their Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages with action statements, personal spam, buzzwords, trending links, and general inspirational crap in an effort to drive me to their for-profit creative efforts.  Too many of the folks that are signing up to follow me on Twitter these days simply do not pass the smell test.  You must give to get and too many are trying to simply get.  Quoting Aristotle, making some pithy statement about pop culture, or linking me to the latest story posted on Boing Boing isn’t enough anymore.

What I’m looking for, and hopefully what I’m giving, is honesty and original content.  Creative, from the heart, from the soul, take it for what it’s worth content.  Not every tweet or Facebook update is pure of heart, sharing links and a little self promotion is part of it all of course, but I try to give more than I ask for in return.

I see it as only natural that people like Laporte, Lane, and Tapani would announce that social branding is coming to an end through sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter.  Top users like them, along with others like Kevin Rose and Gary Vaynerchuk have already rung out most of the juice these sites have to offer to them.  They’ve peaked.  Their followers have stopped growing exponentially.  Their traffic is becoming stagnant as the masses turn to follow Oprah, Shaq and Ashton Kutcher.  Of course Internet celebrities are becoming turned off by Twitter and the like.  They’re being overshadowed by the influx of mainstream users.

But social branding still has much to offer to the average user of social media.

Average users, like me, still have marketing, branding, promotion, and interaction to go.  We don’t have 15 years of television publicity backing us going forward.  We haven’t yet blogged for Microsoft.  We haven’t appeared on the Today Show.  We don’t have venture capitalists throwing millions of dollars at us because we have a core group of people that will follow us wherever we go or to whatever we create.  Not yet.

Most of us still have miles to go.

We still need to let the world know who we are and why knowing us might be of value.  And, more importantly, I still need to get to know you and learn why knowing you might be of value to both of us.  Continue to build your brand my friends.  We’ll all be richer knowing more about each other and by allowing the top 10% to drift away like they always do.
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