Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

Personal Brands – Post 1 of 2

A long, long time ago, I was just a dude with a way with words. I used to prater around at school, and then UG, writing stuff up for the in-house rag, beating people up silly with verbal jokes and having a ball of a time.

I loved words. I love them still. The principal reason why I became a copywriter is I love words and love their ability to strike a chord with people. (Persist with me here please. I swear this is going somewhere worthwhile. ) I stuck through the first 1.5 years of being an underpaid, overworked trainee/junior copywriter because I was happy (yes, Happy…unconditionally) about the job I was doing. Along the way, I also learnt. A 1000 small and big lessons that no school can teach. On marketing, on economics, on HR, on managing.

One lesson I continue to learn is Branding. The wrong way, the right way, the grey area between that the majority of brands adopt. The constant-reminder way, the good-idea-neatly-executed way, the song-and-dance-into-consumer’s-heart way. And ad nauseum. (Yes, yes, we shall come to the title presently)

I also learnt of people as brands. Big-shit CEOs, the dude in the corner office. The suave seducer of the stock-market. The playboys and the rag-picker-turned-richie-riches.
That’s when I knew I too could become the big-brand, no pun on my physique. True. I knew I could be popular if I set my heart and my words to it.

Enter Selective Amnesia. As Kingsley puts it:

This is the future of the blogosphere folks – the endless quest, not for ad revenues as some would have you believe, but for Internet celebrity. All you have to do is be a purple cow. Own your niche. Blog your heart out. Do not wait patiently for the get-famous-quick salesmen to show up – become one yourself and ’sploit the bubble. Get up on the Internet and blog, dammit! Cuz sticks and stones may break your bones but links can never hurt you.

I was an amateur code-jock. Writing up silly scripts and half-decent HTML3.0 code on Tripod and GeoCities and Hypermart.com. Tripod gave me a little introduction to this whole blog thing.
In October of 2002, I clicked on a link in Tripod that said “Add blogs to your homepages” or some such shit. I did, not knowing what a blog was. But I learnt. And I was hooked. Here was the writer’s wet-dream. Something that lets you write your heart out and get people to read it.

Show me the dotted line baby. Yes, yes, I still haven’t touched upon the real topic.

Here, let me put it simply. Brand yourself. Be the suave seducer of the stock-market, on the web. And how does one do it? The same rules apply, as in products.

More, tomorrow. I swear.

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