Cam Beck “Brandjacks” Joseph Jaffe’s Personality

It’s a world where corporations hire personal brands, leverage cause-based activity to boost reputation, and affiliate with other brands to enhance (or destroy) their image. Before the social web, this trend manifested itself in a well-manicured set of partnerships through corporate marketing and sales. Those days are over. Now individuals and companies alike can bolster their reputations — or worse “brandjack” — by simply swiping a badge, converting a logo into a complimentary or negative image, or affiliate themselves well-known personality via a link or a photo. Companies struggle with and usually fail to control the unlicensed widespread use of their brands.

Affiliation and alliance-based identities are no longer linear and sometimes include unwilling participants. Today they represent a mesh-like confluence of identities and reputations, commitments and past experiences. These coinciding moments occur with the click of a camera, the insertion of some HTML code, or a casual reference on Twitter.

As a result, friending MC Hammer on Twitter becomes a moment of triumph and credibility for long adoring fans. And companies can make big waves by hiring the Internet Famous, such as Fast Company’s troubled hiring of Scoble and Israel. Consider how Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop has built a perception of a powerhouse aggregator by simply encouraging bloggers to boast about their listing.

Smart organizations are already leveraging the brandjacking trend with great success by promoting affiliation. Consider the (Lil) Green Patch program. Individuals get to look environmentally conscious with their personal green patch on their Facebook page and the Nature Conservancy receives matching donations to fight rainforest deforestation. The effort claims to have saved more than 96 million square feet of rainforest so far.

Image (by David Alston) from left to right Jim Long is interviewed by Twebinar Host Chris Brogan and Radian6’s David Alston. Radian6 dramatically increased its visibility by hiring Brogan (and Long) to execute the Twebinar series on their behalf. The Twebinar series was a smorgasbord of brand affiliations.

This trend is one I’ve had a lot of fun mocking this past year. However, it’s a trend that will only accelerate as the social web becomes more common and corporations become more savvy in their adoption of corporation social media and their ability to affiliate themselves with disparate personalities and brands.

Yet the era of “sampling” brands and reputations raises a lot of questions and possibilities (image by Shashi Bellamkonda). For while affiliation and alliances with other reputations can boost credibility, sooner or later a reputation needs to stand on its own. Or does it?

We may be entering an era where the less discerning eye can be easily swayed by images of grandeur. Substantive transparency could be less valuable than smart brandjacking — what was often called name dropping in the 1.0 world.

The new bubble won’t be venture-backed or real estate-driven, but instead a bubble of false perceptions may rise. And this time it won’t come from marketing machines but instead the social web itself. Could the anti-PR machine become its own worst nightmare creating celebrities and brands without substance?

But ultimately the smart will stay smart, and reputations will sooner or later return to their ultimate barometer: Performance. While brand affilitiation may work for a period of time, without core value many lesser composite images will fall to the wayside. Markets ultimately want real answers to concerns, desires and needs. The era of sampling will need more than glue to build the house. Substance is required for long term success. That means product marketing becomes even more valuable for the CMO’s office.

A few days ago a friend who recently launched a new   business asked about the importance of creating an online presence. She’d been doing well in her local town based on word-of-mouth alone, but wanted to ramp-up her marketing efforts.  I replied, somewhat cavalierly, that if her business didn’t have an online calling card of some sort, it may as well not exist. This is not entirely true, of course, but the point I was trying to emphasize was that today’s online footprint is the equivalent of yesterday’s requisite Yellow Pages listing.

She completely understood and while eager to jump right in, was somewhat concerned about the “how.” As the founder and head of her company, she felt that she was one of its main evangelists  — and her enthusiasm for her work certainly shined through. She’d heard the terms “transparency” and “authenticity” being thrown around, and was trying to figure out how to present her personality online in such a way that it advanced her business goals. She was asking all the right questions and, as a result, she’ll be successful when her site launches.

But I wasn’t entirely surprised that she was struggling with striking the right balance between online sharing and not revealing too much — even some social media and communications professionals frequently confuse authenticity and transparency with letting it all hang out online. No wonder clients are confused!

No, I’m not going to provide links to questionable online behavior – calling people out publicly is not my style (although it does seem to be an unofficial sport among some members of the online community, who take enjoyment in other people’s mistakes and feel it’s their duty to embarrass the heck out of them) – but spend just a few minutes online, or even conduct a relevant keyterm search, and you’ll find a plethora of examples that will make you cringe. So, for example, while talking about your latest vacation is ok, oversharing in excruciating detail about the effects of the local diet on your digestive system probably isn’t.

Showing personality doesn’t mean being myopic about your online behavior and how it will be evaluated and received, but neither does it mean people should be so fearful of criticism that they become cardboard cutouts of themselves. Stand for something! But don’t let it all hang out!

What are some of your favorite examples of how to show personality the right way?