Personal Brand, Reputation, and The Mistake of Closed SourceA video description of why reputation outranks brand every time

Tags: actions, brand, interactions, job market, jobs, participation, personal brand, reputation, seesmic

Today’s Web interfaces are all about the Flash (literally). Smooth charting, cool effects, callouts to references — ways to try and simplify complex data collections.

Problem-solving and diagnosis requires a far deeper dive than the flashiest interface could ever provide, because it comes down to the numbers. The actual measurements that make up the flashy chart. If you look at the data used by a professional trader and a someone at home looking at stock charts, there is a substantial difference.

When you get down to that level of analysis, the interface becomes irrelevant. Any analyst worth her or his salary (or salt - same thing) can tell you more from a spreadsheet full of relevant numbers than they can from any pretty graphic. This is true in any field.

When do traders or Web performance analysts use pretty charts? When they have to explain complex issues to non-technical or non-specialist audiences. When these analysts work on solving the sticky problems faced in the everyday world, they always fall back on the numbers.

Web performance data consists of the same few components, regardless of which company is providing the data. In effect, beyond a few key pieces of information about how the measurement data is captured, all Web performance data is the same.

Just because the components that make up the data are the same does not guarantee that the data from two different providers is of the same quality. In an imaginary system, Web performance data from all the major providers could flow into a centralized repository and be transformed using an XSLT or some other mangler so that it would be indistinguishable in most cases to tell which firm was the source.

But a skilled analyst would quickly learn to recognize the data that can be trusted. That would be the data that quickly and accurately represented the issues he was trying to diagnose. The data that flowed with the known patterns of the Web site. The data that helped him do his job more effectively.

In the end, a pretty interface can go a long way to hide the quality of the data that is being represented. A shiny gloss on poor data does not make it better data. It is critical that the data that underlies that pretty chart is able to live up to the quality demands of the people who use it every day.

Selling the interface is selling the brand. Trust in the data builds the reputation.

Which one sold you when you chose your Web performance measurement provider?

Tags: branding, data, flash, interface, measurements, reputation, Web interfaces, Web Performance, Web performance analysts, web performance data, Web performance measurement, Web performance measurement data, XSLT

I spent some time today pairing ideas that separate Branding from Reputation. These came from my discussion of Branding being closed-source and Reputation being open-source [here].

It’s just a start, but it’s a start.

Tags: branding, reputation

If you are interested in the area of social media marketing, head over to Peter Kim’s blog and check out Social Media Marketing’s Scalability Problem. The post is excellent, and the comments are the kind of conversation that needs to be had in this area.

The best comments so far:

• Aaron Strout
• John Bell
• Phil Gillman

The interesting thing is that this post is nearly two months old. And without realizing it, that’s about the time I started writing about conversation and community, branding v. reputation, and how the content-based advertising algorithms are failing the social media market.

I agree with the commenters and Peter Kim that there is a scalability problem when you are trying to have a conversation. that’s why companies rely so much on branding. However, if you take the time to build a community, you don’t have to scale your own conversation, as you will have the community willing to build your reputation.

Conversations and community happen around the reputation of brands, people, and products. And where there is a gap between the branding message and the reputation conversation, that’s when the greatest problems arise.

Tags: Aaron Strout, branding, community, content-based advertising algorithms, conversation, John Bell, Peter Kim, Phil Gillman, reputation, social media, social media marketing

Last night I asked myself what would happen if blogs and social-media sites were no longer allowed to have advertising on them. What would be the revenue model for them? How would they generate income?

I fell back to the position that these sites were not originally created to be driven by advertising, but to develop “personal brands”, a topic that has been discussed by Chris Brogan [here and here] and others.

Then I realized something else: The idea of a personal brand, and the concepts of community and conversation, are mutually exclusive.

How can a brand interact with a community? How can a brand participate in a conversation?

People do these things. And while brands are important to people when thinking about companies, when dealing with with people, there is a far more important factor that gives a person’s opinion weight in a conversation: Reputation.

In a conversation and in a community, how you are perceived, regarded, and trusted is critical to allowing what you say to matter. If you have no reputation, your opinion may be politely listened to, and promptly ignored.

It comes to this: Branding and Brands, be they corporate or personal, are closed-source. By their nature a brand is something that is directed and defined by the brand-ee, not the community.

Reputation is the opposite of that. Reputation is what a brand gets from the community, from the conversation had outside the branded entity.

What does this mean?

Branding is closed-source. Reputation is open-source.

Tags: branding, brands, Chris Brogan, closed-source, corporate branding, open-source, personal branding, reputation, social-media sites