It used to be that if you wanted to be known as The Food Photography Guy, you could make sure that all of the publicly available info about you dealt with your passion and success as a food photographer. And nobody would know about your love for rebuilding hotrods, your work as your church’s youth minister or the moonlighting you occasionally do as a wedding photographer to make ends meet.

Not so anymore.

Side effects include…

One intriguing side effect of cataloguing our interests and activities on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, et al. is that it’s getting harder to create a focused personal brand. This isn’t just an issue for people involved in unbecoming activities. This is an issue for anyone who claims to specialize in a given area…meaning nearly every business professional out there. Especially as business continues to fracture into smaller and smaller niches.

For The Food Photography Guy, rebuilding hotrods probably won’t affect sales unless you start to gain some notoriety from it. (Success can be a double-edged sword.) Your work as a minister is honest and worthwhile but may cause some to question where your focus really lies. And your wedding photography, oddly enough, may hurt your brand the most. After all, when you need great food photography, you don’t hire a wedding photographer. And if you’re such a great food photographer, why are you taking pictures of bridal veils and wedding cakes?

So what do you do?

Be yourself

You can’t stop being you. And you shouldn’t. As business professionals, we may be specialists, but as human beings, we’re always generalists. Or better, we’re always “multi-specialists”. I think the Internet is just allowing us to finally show this.

You can’t put the cat back in the bag. And hiding from the Internet isn’t the answer. No, I think we’re moving to a new era of personal branding. One that’s less about narrow specialization and more about big ideas.

Like any large corporation, we’ll have a master brand built on our core ideals and interests. Then we’ll have sub-brands and brand extensions built around different interests. And like any business, our brand extensions will come and go – everything has a lifecycle – but our master brand will prevail and grow throughout our lives. And like any large corporation, being well-rounded will be a good thing once again.