Don’t brand yourself into a corner

With all this talk about branding yourself online, it’s easy to forget that you can go too far.   You can brand yourself right into such a tight corner that your friends and colleagues can’t see you as anything else but that one little niche. 

If you’ve worked in the same industry all your life, what are you, besides that image of you your co-workers have?  Yes, I was in high-tech PR for more than 25 years, but I am so much more than that.    I love books, old books, new books.  I like to go to northern California on wine-tasting tours.   Heaven on earth to me is spending time on Martha’s Vineyard and soaking up the “ocean life.”  I like badminton and volleyball.   Do my former co-workers know this?  Probably not.   Does my family?   Probably not.   

In the mid 90s, I worked for a software company that saw the market opportunity in Y2K, and positioned itself as the Y2K Company.   Bad move.   The stock bump from that period of time was short-lived.   Who wants to work with a company that has unintentionally pegged itself as an entity that wouldn’t live past the year 2000?   They should have kept their branding more expansive.

What are you doing today to brand yourself that just might come back to haunt you?