What do you think is the difference between your professional brand and your personal brand? Well, think about who you are at home and when you are out of the office. How do you spend your free time? And how do you like to interact with your family and friends? That is your personal brand.
Some people really don’t want their professional and personal brands to ever intersect and that’s a choice. Now, most of the people who work with you, either with you or for you, want to know a little about you. It reassures them to know something about their off-duty side. In fact, a colorful off-duty story about yourself in the right way can help build your word-of-mouth marketing and make it memorable.
For example, have you ever known someone who was an executive Monday through Friday in a pinstripe suit and a perfect red power tie or power tie color of the year? And then the weekend is the best Harley rider? There is nothing wrong with that. So if this person wants to be Mr. Executive during the week and a Hog Rider on the weekends, great. That’s a clear professional brand and a clear personal brand.
We just want this person to be careful, neither his family nor his company want to see him on the news in a bar fight. And we certainly hope he doesn’t join the Hell’s Angels. But if he took a charity trip or went to his son’s race day in his business suit and riding his motorcycle. Come on, how cool would that be?
On the other hand, here is a story of an IT project manager who had an unfortunate collision between his professional and personal brand. And it goes something like this. This project manager worked for a company that provided laptop computers to his employees. And they were pretty lenient about the use of laptops. They allowed off-call resources to take laptops home, even if they weren’t traveling. And the company even allowed resources to use the laptops to access their personal emails and visit some websites.
Of course, the assumption was that people would do this outside of business hours. Then one day, when a meeting was about to start and most of the attendees were in the room, this project manager who was going to facilitate the meeting made an unfortunate confession. “I just came from human resources,” he told the entire room. “I almost lost my job. The desk support team was working on my laptop and they found pornography. I knew I shouldn’t have let my son borrow that laptop.”
Wow, too much information, clearly not managing your brand. And what do you think people walked away thinking of him? Because half the people probably thought it was his son and that good, you know, he should have better controls over his son, but I bet some of those people walked away thinking, “Yeah, sure dude, you got caught.” , not?”
Look, what’s a great way for a politician to lose his job? Getting caught doing something in private that he’s sworn not to do when he’s out in public. People will search for you on Google. They will find your website. They will find your blog. They’re going to find your MySpace page. It’s great to hear about your hiking club. It’s not so cool to see drunk photos of you dirty dancing or close up photos of your private tattoos. So the general rule of thumb is that if you don’t want people to know about it, don’t post it online, or better yet, don’t post it at all.