I think that rather than a personal brand we should be people and finally people want to get know other people. Of course we should keep some stuff to ourselves as we do in our offline professional life vs our offline persona life, but rather than controlling ourselves too much we need to keep being us (our personality/rather than our ideal).

For example, porn bots are the best superheroes on Twitter according to your definition. They don’t give too much away about their personal life, but we get to see ‘the goods’. Their nakedness IS their cape.

Meh, but most of us aren’t bots so…for those people who aren’t bots, or there to promote themselves or their company in some way, why would they care about personal branding? They don’t.

But what do I know? I’m drunk right now. What I’m saying is, if someone is building a personal brand, for whatever reason, I agree with you. I like your superhero persona. But not everyone needs to be or can be a superhero like you.

See? That diarrhea mouth above is why I usually just lurk.

Makes perfect sense to me. We all have different aspects of ourselves that we show/present in different situations. I don’t show my ‘party girl’ persona to my in-laws. The same is true on the web. Who I am on my personal accounts is slightly different than who I am on my business accounts. I’m the same person, but I ‘show’ a different aspect (or facet) of myself depending on who my audience is.

True or not, I feel as if I could reach out to Chris Brogan just as I would reach out to other peers, but I would never feel comfortable reaching out to to lets say Seth Godin, I love what he has to say (at times), but I feel as if he is talking ‘at’ his readers vs. to them or with them, so I think it has more to do with how you handle your success vs. the success itself.

Does that make sense?

Do you want to be related to or responded to? Engaged with or followed? Seen as a peer or seen as a leader?

Chris Brogan is a real person, but due to his success, his personality become archetypal by association. Same with Arrington, Scoble, Kawasaki, iJustine, etc. The less personal your relationship, the more likely people are to process you via sociological shorthand.

There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but if you’re successful, you’ll end up becoming an archetype — or a superhero/villain — by default.

Offline, people still have not reached this level of authenticity, so I felt I was able to be vulnerable in this online space. When I say this I don’t mean that I am going to tell you my life story, but to be able to speak candidly and to not have pretenses and for it to be okay.

Kind of in the same lines of this post, there is a post I just read by Brian Solis – http://www.briansolis.com and in his post he talks about how being able use this space has given others the confidence they need to take it offline, which to me is a beautiful thing about social media, and one I find to be true.

So although, I have no problem with being authentic and vulnerable online, and at the same time drawing the lines on what I share. I have not learned how to tap into my inner super hero when it comes to putting my shield up, and not letting what others say have an effect on me. I will not let this stop me from writing in my blog, or tweeting, but the nonetheless, it still exists.

Was this post by any chance inspired by the House episode last night or just a coincidence that they are related?

We tell people what we want them to know. Social media is that all exposing tool that provides an opportunity to for us to give some insight into who we are and what we do/are best at. From here it gets a bit confusing as people take what they have read and create an image of who they are by who/what they want us to be. It is the creation a sort of superhero or under performer that is equated to “knowing them” or feeling as if they do. Expectations are created that ignore truly who the person actually is. With this exposure, it is almost at times setting ourselves up as if we go outside the norms of what people expect from us there is backlash and we are crucified but when we stay within the norms of expectations we are rewarded with the I agree, great post, you are awesome blah blah.

There is an image that we want people to form of us and we use the SM tools to put that out there. It does not always work that way as character, full transparency or anything, the community will let you know if you have violated their image of you. Almost kind of a pressure cooker here but then again we cannot please everyone. The backlash can be hurtful as you have to wonder sometimes why people feel the need to go at someone they barely know. Hmh.