Why Your Online Branding Strategy Backfires

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. re: his 1961 Mother Night character, Howard Campbell, who survived WWII by helping the Nazis and pretending to be a Nazi.

There are two kinds of people I don’t trust: I don’t trust people who, in this “reputation economy”, have no online footprint. As some of you know, I own a Linked group called “Linking Liberally”. About a week ago I received a membership request from someone whose values and beliefs were impossible to discern from her Linkedin profile so I did a Google search. Nothing. I used her email address to search for her Facebook account. There was no Facebook account associated with the email address associated with the applicant’s Linkedin account. So I started sending Linkedin messages to my considerable liberal network in her area – even at her place of employment. Nobody had heard of her. Before I rejected her membership request I gave her a chance to send me some evidence of her liberalism; the name of a person who could vouch for her liberalism, for instance. She couldn’t.  If people who work where she works do not know she’s a liberal, I’m not convinced she’s a liberal - or even that she gave her real name. And it's not just that people she supposedly works with had heard of her, it's that she left no online footprint at all. In this age of Google and Bing and social media, how do you not have some online identity unless you're using a fake name? 

I also don’t trust people who have a carefully-crafted “online brand” – especially the ones who want me to pay them to show me how to have a carefully-crafted online brand. Unlike many of the so-called marketing gurus who are trying to revive or extend their marketing careers by pretending to be “social media experts”, I have actually read dozens of books on branding and I understand what a brand is and that’s why I don’t trust people who want to use a “social” medium or a “relationship-based medium” as if it’s TV. The whole point of social media and relationship-based networking is that people should know who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in and who your associations are and either resonate with your or not based on those values, beliefs and associations.

And while I’m on the subject of trying to create an online persona or brand, let me say this to people who have drunk the Kool Aid that you can be one person on Facebook and another on Linkedin. Headhunters and recruiters and others who have a need to know who you are will look at everything – your blog, your Tweets, your Facebook, your LInkedin. Everything. I never cease to be amazed at the people I encounter online who keep their Linkedin profile “strictly professional”, scrubbed of all evidence of their interests and values but whose Facebook page is a disturbing look into their immaturities, prejudices and shady associations.

People who think they can get headhunters to look only at their Linkedin profiles remind me of the idiots who say “We have to fight ‘em over there or we’ll have to fight ‘em over here”. You have no control over where terrorists or headhunters go. They go everywhere. Just as you can’t keep terrorists from fighting us here by offering them the shiny object of a war in the Middle East, you can’t stop a headhunter from looking at your Facebook page and your Tweets by offering him the shiny object of a Linkedin profile. Headhunters and terrorists go everywhere, they look at everything.

For the record, I have no “online strategy” or “online brand”. This blog is not part of any “online strategy” to mislead you about who I am. I am the same in my blog as I am on Linkedin or Facebook. You don’t need one of those so-called “social media experts” to help you be yourself unless you don’t know who you are.

Remembering L T Anderson

Instead of watching Mad Men last night I read the packet of old L T Anderson columns Gazette Editor, Jim Haught, was nice enough to send me. I got to chat with Haught at the "Textbook Wars" discussion at the Culture Center and mentioned to him that I was a huge L T Anderson fan and that I was looking for any collections of the late columnist's work. Jim graciously mailed me a huge packet of Anderson's stuff - mostly from 1971, 72 and 73, the same period in which I was a Gazette delivery boy in St. Albans and started every day reading the Gazette opinion pages before I delivered my papers.

I had forgotten how many anti-war columns Anderson wrote and how many of his columns held up what passes for Christianity to ridicule because of its failure to oppose war, indeed, for its Old Testament style eagerness to cast America in the role of Old Testament Israel - the good guys - and anybody some American president happens to declare war on in the role of Philistines or other Old Testament bad guys. And L T didn't just excoriate what passes for Christianity these days for its failure to oppose the Vietnam war until practically all the godless opposed it first, L T knew that what passes for Christianity these days is an enthusiastic military recruiter and PR department for the old, white, rich politicians who send poor young men off to war by invoking God and justifying their sacrifice by assuring grieving parents that their children died "defending freedom" or "defending their country" and were not sacrificed in vain.

I had also forgotten how much fun L T Anderson had with faith healers like Charleston's "Lacy The Stranger" and with "Honk If You Love Jesus" bumper stickers.

And I had forgotten that L T shared my love of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

What I had not forgotten was that L T Anderson was, in Jim Haught's words, "a genius". Haught told me he used to send Anderson's columns, ten at a time, to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Twice a finalist, Anderson never won the Pulitzer though his many fans think he was robbed.

Anderson died in 2004 at the age of 83. I wish he could have lived long enough to lampoon today's version of what passes for Christianity but the absence of Andersonian theological commentary on what passes for Christianity today is less tragic than it would have been had Anderson not predicted that paunchy, red-faced Baptist preachers would still be lap dogs for old, rich, white politicians who want to send their parishoners off to be maimed and killed.

The columnist whose sardonic wit made me giggle with every folded paper I threw in the 70s, would not have been the least surprised that the church of the 21st century campaigned for a president who used a terrorist attack as a pretense for attacking a country that had nothing to do with attacking the US.

Are Résumé Facts Standing Between You and The Truth of Your Calling?

Todd Solondz’ excellent but controversial 2001 film, Storytelling, shows how “non-fiction” can be used to tell lies and to mislead and how “fiction” is sometimes the best way to tell the truth. We've all seen reports that say anywhere from one third to one half of job applicants lie on their résumés, but I keep waiting for the report that explains how a résumé that contains no factual inaccuracies or omissions can completely misrepresent the applicant.

I’m not a Mormon but a few years ago my favorite Mormon, Dave Kravetz, arranged for me to get a seat at a 2-day career workshop conducted by Doug Mallory, a manager with the Latter Day Saints Employment Resources. Last night I was re-reading one of Doug’s excellent pamphlets in which he says he worked for 16 years at a job which was a “mismatch from the start” but he kept working at it only because he was succeeding and making good money. Doug’s résumé contains the facts about those 16 years but it doesn’t tell the truth that, as Doug puts it in that same pamphlet, he had “simply refused to make changes” in his career path “in spite of the obvious warning signs.” After years of, in a sense, living a career lie, working at a job for which he was a “mismatch from the start”, Doug launched a new job search that had “no passion” and “no enthusiasm” and “no goal except to get a job” that would support his family. Doug didn’t lie on his résumé but his 16 year career at a job for which he was a “mismatch from the start” misled prospective employers about who Doug was and what he was called to do with his life and made it harder for Doug to find the truth about that calling.

“The fact was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew what I didn’t want to do,” wrote Doug.

The truth of Doug's calling to be an outstanding employment expert who would help unemployed and underemployed Mormons reverse what Mormon President, Gordon Hinckley, called the "crucifixion of their souls", was obscured behind the fact that for 16 years he was a successful salesman.

Many people's résumés are the history of what they don't want to do anymore.

My résumé could be the basis of a Doug Mallory book or a Todd Solondz film about how the facts in my résumé present a totally false and misleading impression about me.

When Bill Gardner (@oncee) asked me what kind of work I’m looking for I reflexively said I would send him a résumé but sending him a résumé won’t tell him about the kind of job for which I am best suited. The facts contained in my résumé will mislead more than they will enlighten and inform Bill about Joseph Higginbotham.

For example, an unguided reading of my résumé will reveal the fact that I was a sales rep, a branch manager and a general manager in the healthcare industry, that I’ve had hiring and firing authority and budget and P&L accountability and that I wrote professionally for a bunch of business magazines and even got paid a few ridiculous honoraria for speaking to business groups but what it won’t tell you is that I would have gladly taken a cut in pay to apply my skills at a charity or a non-profit organization but simply didn’t know how to get there from where I was.

Then there are the Lexmark years. Talk about misleading. My résumé would be more truthful if those seven years of words like “program manager” and “software development” and “project manager” were omitted or if I substituted a brief essay on how I would have rather used my skills, but résumé convention dictates that résumés continue to obscure truth behind misleading facts.

Small employers see the word “Lexmark” and get the idea that a guy who worked for a Fortune 500 company wouldn’t be happy in a small organization.

That’s a lie.

Or they get the idea that if I spent 7 years with a manufacturer I must like manufacturing.

I hated project management with a passion. Project management violates the first thing I learned from favorite business professor, Susan Hitt, who taught me that good management never gives an employee responsibility for getting a job done without also giving that employee the authority necessary to get that job done. Project management violates that rule.

And then there's the misleading fact that I have sometimes kept the bills paid through self-employment. For some reason, a lot of employers think that anybody who's ever worked for himself will not be happy having a boss. The truth is that, except for my freelance writing and speaking activities, all my "self-employed" consulting work came about by accident, not because I sought it. Yes, it's true that some people become self-employed because they have a problem with bosses, but self-employment can limit the sort of work a person is able to do and, for most of us, I think career satisfaction is about the work itself, not about who's the boss. For example, if you've always dreamed of building a better car but you know you can never raise the kind of money it takes to start a car company, you might be quite happy to work for an existing auto maker if they are committed to letting you find a way to build a better car.

Every once in a while the truth comes out in a job interview. An interviewer once asked me which of my past jobs I liked the most and why. I told her about my first general management job with a company that had what I call "walking bankruptcy". Because I have what Justine Menkes calls a "healthy skepticism" about data, I was able to find hundreds of thousands of dollars in overstated sales numbers and inflated receivables and write a new reality-adjusted budget. I did something previous managers didn't do: I questioned everything. I didn't accept what the stacks of green bar computer paper were telling me about sales, accounts receivable, etc., and I bothered to find out how our software worked. Working as it was designed to, the software was doing some very strange things that nobody noticed because nobody had asked enough questions. I enjoyed that job because it gave me a chance to use my problem-solving skills and to go to work everyday knowing that I was making a difference.

"So you're a software geek?" an interviewer once asked me.

"No, I'm a problem solver."

"You're a numbers guy" said another.

"No, we had a CPA looking at the numbers and drawing the wrong conclusions because he wasn't looking behind the numbers. Smarter numbers crunchers than I were looking at the numbers. It took looking behind the numbers, questioning the numbers to solve this problem. I'm a problem solver" I said.

I like the challenge of getting a job done on little or no money. Because an interviewer once asked me the right question, I remembered something I really liked about another GM job. In this role, the company's financials were in great shape and the operations and billing were humming like a well-oiled machine but the company was losing market share and there were almost no sales. The previous manager didn't like sales and marketing and hadn't budgeted any money to solve this problem so my first challenge was to figure out how to increase sales revenues without any advertising budget. Early in my career, a Charleston company had put me in charge of their advertising, events and PR so I learned how to write good ad copy and press releases and I learned how to use press releases to get "earned media" or "free media" for my company, so, without an ad budget, I managed to get radio and newspaper coverage which led to invitations to speak in venues where I could meet the professionals I needed to reach.

And I networked with everybody, joined everything. I went anywhere I thought I might meet a professional who could refer business to us.

Our sales tripled in 2 years.

I don't think I solved this sales and marketing problem because I am a "marketing guy" or a "media guy" or even because I'm a good networker. I saw a problem. I solved it. That's what I was paid to do. I was the manager and my company was paying me to see and solve problems.

I like to solve problems.

And I like to find cheap or free ways to solve problems.

I brought in my first Lexmark project at 5% of projected cost because I approached the project differently than other project managers would have. And the executives loved the outcome.

But I still hate project management.

Over the years I’ve recruited, hired and career counseled enough people to know that what I’ve just said about my own factual but misleading resume can be said of dozens or hundreds of people who read this blog. So I’m going to send Bill Gardner that résumé I promised him, but I’m also going to tell him that the truth is lost in the facts. Perhaps sometime this weekend I’ll find the box that contains my copy of Storytelling and see how Todd Solondz illustrates how facts can be used to tell lies.

My favorite fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., wrote ""Be careful who you pretend to be because you are who you pretend to be." One of Vonnegut's Mother NIght characters had survived the second world war by pretending to be a dedicated Nazi. He was so good at pretending to be a dedicated Nazi that he became, in effect, Hitler's PR man.

Yeah, I know, it was just a novel. But just because it's fiction doesn't mean it isn't true.

I know from experience that dozens if not hundreds of people reading this blog have survived by pretending to be sales reps or accountants when their teachers , spouses and friends knew they were gifted to be writers or consultants or something else that's not in that pack of misleading non-fiction facts we call a résumé.

And now if you'll excuse me, I need to find a job so I'm going to get back to what I was doing before I wrote this post. I'd like to tell the truth but the employer didn't ask for the truth, he asked for a résumé.