[comic via Toothpaste for Dinner]

“Personal branding” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot in conversations these days. Not that I’m complaining of course. I use the phrase a lot, and why shouldn’t I? It’s a pretty succinct expression. Whether it’s your blog, your Twitter feed, or your Facebook profile, the way you choose to identify yourself online is, in essence, your personal brand. Considering that I work in the world of social media, it makes sense that it would come up.

The problem is, I’m not entirely sure what my personal brand is, especially when I compare myself to of some of my peers. Take Tim Jahn for example. Through his work with Beyond the Pedway, Tim has made connections at every creative company in a 50-mile radius and has carved out a nice niche as Chicago’s go-to digital video guy. Likewise, Rebecca Denison has turned an aptitude for social media measurement (as channeled through the eyes of a young Gen-Y professional) into a very entertaining and frequently enlightening blog. It’s no wonder she’s a member of the excellent team at Edelman Digital.

Looking at those two and how they have spent time crafting their identities online, I am somewhat envious. Where they have a clear focus, I feel like my web presence is fractured. At first glance, you might say I’m a blogger focused on copywriting and social media. Under closer examination, however, that identity doesn’t hold up. For one thing, I don’t update this blog nearly as often as I should, and, obviously, you can’t be known for something if there’s no content to validate your expertise.

That’s not to say I’m not writing online of course. To the contrary, I’m active everyday creating high quality content for my company, ReputationDefender. Unfortunately, while much of my writing there focuses on social media, it is social media as defined within the scope of the ReputationDefender brand (reputation management issues, personal privacy, etc). For the company, that is good, and it is exactly why I was hired. However, for me personally, it doesn’t help to define my brand as a marketer since it doesn’t appear on my personal blog.

Apart from ReputationDefender blogging, I also spend a lot of time writing for the entertainment news website Screen Rant. In this role, however, I don’t even consider what I do to be blogging, but rather online journalism. While I inject opinion into the articles I write, and occasionally pen longer editorial pieces such as this recent piece about Captain America (NERD ALERT), the focus is on getting the facts right and crafting a clean narrative. In other words, I treat writing for Screen Rant as if I were writing for a magazine or newspaper. It’s a different medium and it deserves a different approach.

Given my competing priorities online, I sometimes find myself wondering whether I should even call myself a blogger or if I should just go with the more general term of “writer.” Perhaps six or seven years ago what I am doing with this website could have been called blogging, but, considering how far the medium has come, I’m not so sure anymore. If you don’t have a clearly defined niche or a regular audience for your primary website, are you still blogging or is it just an exercise in vanity?

What do you think? Am I imbuing the word blog with too much importance? If you spend most of your time writing for some other publication online, does that define your personal brand, or is only what you post under your own name? Let me know what you think in the comments.