Social Media has turned you into a brand

Before the advent of Social Media, it was commonplace to “research” someone by asking a mutual friend. This was efficient. You would get some basic information about them and would form an opinion. The opposite would be true as well, trusting your friends to positively advocate when someone asked about you. Now that we have Social Media, we can let people speak for themselves.

The pictures someone posts, the captions they include, and the stories they broadcast all go to create a carefully crafted image. A brand. The intention, of course, is to get likes and views. To be relevant. You become your own brand marketer, and you ask your friends (fellow brand managers) to help you pick the best picture and the caption to go along. No longer is Social Media about sharing and connecting, it is about brand management. You are not just building any brand, btw, you are building a luxury brand.

Luxury brands work to garner aspirational attention from the general public. These brands employ very stringent marketing campaigns and take extreme precaution to uphold their brand value. The problem is that this concept of luxury brands has ported over to Social Media, and now everyone wants to manage a luxury brand, they want to be a luxury brand. People take 50 pictures to get the perfect angle, edit the photo to remove the blemishes, and use filters to enhance the lighting. A marketable version of yourself is now ready for the world, but what’s the message? 10 minutes is taken to create a caption, you don’t love it. Its been 3 days since your last post tho, it’s been too long, so you go ahead.

Posted.

You begin to scroll through the other brands to see how they are performing. Wait… you’re kidding me. Did you see Jenny’s post? Your brand looks SO bad in it. So you need to text her, as a luxury brand you cannot have someone else tarnishing your brand value. So you text her, “Jenny! That advertising you just posted makes my brand look stupid! Can you remove it!” As a luxury brand you need to continue to build desire, and nobody desires a brand that had a weird face with a bad angle.

Removed.

Good job, you successfully managed your brand and were able to get 150 likes in 1-hour… what.. Brian posted 10 min ago, and it already got 250 likes.. How does his brand get more likes than mine? His brand doesn’t even have pictures from the Calvin Harris concert, and all he does is take pictures hiking? What does that brand have that mine doesn’t? Do people not appreciate the luxury that my brand has to offer?

If you haven’t noticed by now, your bio is your slogan

Your brand is so intrinsically tied to you that when it begins to underperform your standards, you begin to wonder what is wrong with you. How can you walk away from Social Media? Without a brand, no one will know how awesome you are, how sought after you are. No one will know how luxurious you are.

Social media has turned you into a brand manager and has emotionally tied you to the brand you manage. Don’t let it in too deep. Go ahead and manage your brand, but don’t let your brand manage you.