Personal branding book¶

Rajesh Setty has published a free pdf book about Personal Branding for Technology Professionals (PDF link).

His number one premise (to me at least) is that you need more than just technical skills if you want to "thrive in the marketplace for the long-term". You also need personal branding. It's not just about branding, you need short-term and long-term skills, but branding yourself helps you get the most out of it.

Oh, for the people who cringe when hearing the word "branding": there's a whole list of common reasons why people find it challenging to try it or do it or to even think about it. Perhaps one of them will resonate with you.

I'll have to delve more in-depth through the book, but I noticed already one area that might need attention: leverage all your projects. Try to make your projects work together. Build leverage. It's almost military theory in that sense. Attack at one place. The enemy has to react to that. Use that reaction as a lever to make another attack easier. And again. Let your projects support eachother in the same way. At least, that's what Rajesh is suggesting!

I'll give you two examples of things I know I've done (perhaps unconciously) that help me with my "branding" (if you want to call it that). I see googleability as an important goal. Just google for "Reinout van Rees". Just try to find some old classmates via google and you'll see how unbelievably unfindable many people are.

• Since the beginning, I've made a habit out of it of putting my full name in my email signature. Not just my first name, but my full name. Googleability.
• No IRC nick. My name is reinout, so my nick is reinout. No irc-nick-to-real-name mapping challenges at conferences. Of course I'm bloody lucky that "Reinout" isn't exactly a very common name :-) This isn't that important, though. You won't google IRC logs that much. It remains one extra layer people have to pass when they want to find out more about you. "Hey, optilude writes great code and Martin Aspeli writes great documentation. If only I could find one person that could do both..." :-)

  In my case, if someone refers to me in an email or so, it will always be "Reinout". It can't hurt the googleability.

Request: I'd like to know what you'd tell your colleagues/friends/clients about me if they would ask about it. One of the sets of questions in the book is "How do your close friend describe you to their friends", "How do your colleagues describe you to their friends", "How do your clients describe you to their colleagues". So tell me if you wouldn't mind. Just one or two sentences or so. reinout@vanrees.org . :-)