We ARE the brand

A while ago during one of the IM conversation Tom Biro and I were having he had what I consider a genius idea. 

See Tom and I have a situation.  Both of us write for AdJab but we also have other blogs and online efforts.  Tom writes TheMediaDrop himself as well as Open the Dialogue for his employer, MWW.  I run Movie Marketing Madness as a personal blog and also Bacon's Blog for Bacon's Information whom I work for.  I also write a column titled Movie Marketing Madness for FilmThreat.com.  So both of us are multi-bloggers. 

The problem we have is one of branding.  How do we alert people to the full range of efforts we're involved in and not neglect one or more of the others?  Tom's idea was simple: We encourage people to search for us.  When you run "Tom Biro" through Google you'll see TMB, AJ and OTD all come up within the top five results.  Do the same for "Chris Thilk" and you get my stuff. 

Tom's point is that quite separate from whatever we might be doing, we are the brand names.  TMD, MMM, these are all just outlets for, essentially, us. This isn't at all to say that we're looking for new jobs - at all - or we actually need to be writing elsewhere. But let's just say that we're both comfortable with, and like being, interviewed on a number of topics, and don't feel like reading all the ProfNet requests out there on the wire? (No, we're not that obnoxious to think we know everything, stop it!) Do we, as probably-somewhere-on-the-C-list bloggers have enough cache that people might think "wow, I thought I remembered Chris Thilk writing about that a few weeks ago..." and yet they might not know where to find out about it?

By writing in multiple locations as Tom and I do, it kind of divvies up your abilities to possibly different audience - which is fine - but it's not necessarily a good thing as fragmented as the Internet can be. Herein lies the concept - do we place advertisements, perhaps in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, online, perhaps even through a podcast like Joe Jaffe's Across the Sound? It wouldn't be about branding our jobs, or AdJab, or anything else necessarily, just a kind of fun way to say "looking for xyz? Google Chris and/or Tom, and yada yada yada." At the very least, it seemed like a fun experiment, but it's unclear where it would lead.

Needless to say, the opportunity to write here at JJ might be a good jumping point for things like this, and it allows us to pose the question - should bloggers - let's just say mostly the fully freelance ones - "brand" themselves out there? We all know that the sites they run and the words they write create the brand that they are, whether they like it or not (ask most bloggers who've been asked to do a paid gig or guest host how they got there, and the answer would actually be that their brand got them, even if they don't say it). So would marketing yourself by way of a search engine just in a way to, effectively, make yourself famous, work at all? Or is it just a parlor trick?

--CT (with help from TB)