Juggling personal brands

No presentation insight today, but some musings about my personal branding. Skip if you are not interested.

The URL www.stickyslides.com might be down today as a result of scary shifting and moving of my online properties. Things should propagate over the next 24 hours back to normal. It is all the result of a personal branding project. I am a strategy consultant, so here are the recommendations:

Jan Schultink, used as my Twitter handle. I do not have a name like Steve Jobs, so chances are that if you do not happen to be a native Dutch speaker you will find it hard to remember, spell, and pronounce my name.
Axiom One, the name of my company. This name was picked without much thought from a dictionary (I was still in the “A” section). Axiom was trade marked in Israel I think, so we added the “One”. There are thousands of companies called Axiom in the world (even a few are called “Axiom One”, and the connection with what I actually try to achieve in the world is zero.
Sticky Slides, the name of this blog (renamed already once from “Slides that Stick”). I like the name, it covers what I do, still it comes across more as the title of a high school newspaper rather than a serious presentation design firm in discussions with CFOs of publicly traded companies. BUT I have built a lot of equity with the 1,000 or so blog posts in the archive
Idea Transplant, the name of my shiny new company web site. It covers what I do (better than Sticky Slides), unique, serious, and fun at the same time. No brand equity what so ever.

So I am biting the bullet and shifting gradually to Idea Transplant. The longer I wait, the more difficult it will become. Yesterday I followed a crash course in HTML 301 redirects and Blogger custom domains to avoid minimal disruption and to make sure that all links and RSS continue to work. I even managed to swap the user names of 2 Twitter accounts without affecting follower bases (@janschultink became @ideatransplant, and @ideatransplant became @janschultink).

Sticky Slides is moving to blog.ideatransplant.com and at some time I will change the name as well. I will keep the Blogger blog engine to preserve the archive of posts.

6 comments

Magda M2011-01-21 16:49:51

I've been struggling with juggling personal brands as well.

Doesn't help that I compulsively buy domain names.

In addition to HauteSlides I own HauteSquared and HauteVisual.

Then I also have my fabgeekling handle, which I use on twitter because I figured it would be easier to remember than my name. I own the fabgeekling.com domain but for now I've been using the blogger blog, and posterous blog with those handles.

Both handles have their own twitter accounts, blogs and facebook pages.

I used to have magdalenamedia.com domain as well where I had my resume and stuff.

I know I'm out of control. lol

Ralph2011-01-31 17:12:39

Good luck on your new brand/company name. Veel succes.

Jan Schultink2011-01-21 10:59:48

Jakob: alles in het Engels

I started like you, but u-turned re family name brands..

Jakob2011-01-21 09:16:26

Hey Jan, everything looks good so far.

I can relate to the name that is unfamiliar to a native English speaking audience. Still I chose the opposite approach and put my personal identity at the center of my public presence. At least that way things scale beautifully whenever I decide to start new projects. I won't have to build up trust around a brand each time and the upside to my family name is that it is not already taken by someone else online - not that I can safely say I can even build trust for my own name, I am only getting started after all.

As a fellow non-native speaker I wonder: Did you completely cut ties with your Dutch heritage? Of praat je ergens nederlands online?

Jan Schultink2011-02-01 09:40:44

Bedankt!

Cheryl2011-01-23 05:47:18

I am also in the throes of a brand change. like yours my original business name did not accurately reflect what I became. I decided not to make my personal name the centerpiece. Thanks for sharing your ideas.