Branding & Being a Polymath

My busi­ness part­ner Andrea com­mented on Twit­ter this week that

I totally fail at brand­ing. I tweet about res­cue dogs, acad­e­mia, early music, lam­p­work and jew­elry, words, health care, and politics.

She’s not alone — I could almost have writ­ten that tweet, though mine would have said “I tweet about res­cue cats, com­put­ing, lam­p­work and jew­elry, bel­ly­danc­ing, chain­maille, and teach­ing.” The same thing is true of my blog­ging, as you know if you read Art of the Fire­bird reg­u­larly. I blog and Tweet and post about what­ever I damn well please, which means I may focus on beads one day, cats the next, and my sore abs the third.

Of course, this goes against every­thing you see from the self-proclaimed “social media experts” who state that your Brand must be tightly focused and con­tain noth­ing extra­ne­ous or unre­lated to your major prod­uct. By this the­ory, my blog/website/Twitter/Facebook should be focused only on my lampworking/jewelry busi­ness because every­thing else con­fuses my brand­ing. I should have another set of accounts for ani­mal res­cue, and yet another for teach­ing mat­ters (okay, I DO have a sep­a­rate web site for the teach­ing, but still…).

I sus­pect that the peo­ple who say this either a) don’t have a real life into which they fit social media and mar­ket­ing, or b) have no clue about being a Poly­math (or, as Bar­bara Sher terms them, a Scan­ner). It’s just not real­is­tic to man­age mul­ti­ple blogs or social media accounts for dif­fer­ent things. There’s the time fac­tor, of course, but there’s also the “keep­ing things straight” fac­tor. Sure as any­thing I’d mis-post half of what I write to the wrong place.

I’m NOT only a lam­p­work glass artist, or a chain­mailler, or an ani­mal res­cue activist, or a com­puter sci­en­tist, or a pro­fes­sor, or any­thing else. I’m all of these, and more. If I limit my post­ings to only one aspect, that isn’t the true me. Any poly­math will tell you that we can’t be lim­ited to one thing — even my brother the social media maven doesn’t man­age to limit his Twit­ter and Face­book to one focus!

In truth my “Brand” is ME, ALL of me, and that’s what my blog, and my Twit­ter account, and my Face­book account, reflect. So SEO/marketing/branding rules be damned, I’m brand­ing the Poly­mathic Me, all of her, because that’s what makes me unique!