This is a quick blog post about “Building your Brand”

Everyone seems to have some kind of web presence game going on now. It seems to look like this:

• Get all the social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat (for dogssakes why??), YouTube, Google+…oh wait Google is shutting this down.
• Get accounts at several blog hosting sites, Reddit, Medium or roll your own with GitHub pages.
• Buy a domain name for extra credit.
• Write a blog post about how you put together X, Y and Z to do 1, 2 and 3. Then link all the social media to it.
• Make a video showing how you put together X, Y and Z to do 1, 2 and 3. Then link all the social media to it.
• Refer to your video in another blog post.
• Refer to your blog post about your video in another video.
• Refer to your friends’ referering to your blog post about your video about your blog post about your video.
• Initiate referral inception.

Not only is this a lot of work, it’s a lot of useless work. You could totally be using the time you spend on social media inception to put together D, E and F to do 4, 5 and 6.

Companies hire people to do this work for them. But the expectation, if you are just a regular person looking for work, is that you do the social media inception all by yourself. It’s called “Building your Brand”. It’s the next resume…because the basic resume doesn’t cut it anymore. I get why - you really can’t get much information about a person’s expertise from a resume. But then again, you can’t really get this from 1 hour of interviewing by 5 different people. I would argue though, that you cannot get this information from one blog post referred to several times by the same 3 Twitter accounts. It’s no different from a blurb in a resume about what you did for 6 months working on that one project.

The other thing about Brand Building that I find frustrating is that I have to do it on top of all the other crap I do, i.e., write code, go to conferences, talk to local developer groups, talk to the kid’s school’s PTA, talk to my in-laws, talk to my parents, try to convince my spouse that he should take over some of the talking, general housework, cooking, cleaning, laundry, dusting, dishes, and so on and so forth. I don’t think I am the only parent out there who has been told to put time into doing social media inception when there are far more important things in their lives to take care of.

Lately I’ve been trying to tackle the other side of the coin, i.e. I have content to write about but no time to write it, let alone post about it on social media (granted, my social media presence is pretty minimal). The reasons are the same; too much time spent trying to keep things up at work and help the kid survive and not enough time spent writing blog posts.

And so here is a quick blog post written during my lunch hour, which will hopefully make up for the dirth of blog posts for the year. And my condolences to all the folks trying to “Build your Brand” with whatever little (yet important) content they were able to generate over the course of their lives.