There were many brands and marks before Bass—enough for the UK to begin to regulate them, after all, and labels and image-making pre-date even the Industrial Revolution. I mean, brands were originally burned into flesh. It’s hard to get more primitive than that. Archaeologists have unearthed branded oils and wine in desert tombs sealed five thousand years ago. One label found in Egypt reads “finest oil of Tjehenu” beneath the royal emblem and a pictograph of a golden oil press. Compare that to the “choicest hops, rice and best barley” beneath the “King of Beers” on a can of Budweiser—as far as branding has come, in many ways it will probably always be a Bronze Age science, because the emotions it plays to are eternal.
But while aspiration and the prestige of association may be timeless concepts, truly new territory has recently opened to the brand: people. In 1997, Tom Peters, a motivational speaker and management consultant, published an article called “The Brand Called You” in Fast Company magazine, and the era of personal branding was born.
His article, really more of a sales pitch, asks readers to first determine their “feature-benefit model” and then to relentlessly market it to employers, coworkers, and the larger world … or else! Those are literally the last two words, and they punctuate all the typical hokum (“Sit down and ask yourself … what do I want to be famous for? That’s right—famous for!” and “You are a leader. You’re leading You!”) that the worst business writing has to offer. Reading it, you imagine Mr. Peters miked up and pacing the rostrum like a lion caged—caged by that darn paradigm that he’s about to explode before your very eyes, with truth bombs, know-how, and exclamation points. He shows the kind of belief that a different type of person channels to rip phone books in half for his tight bro J.C. The byline at the bottom of the piece reads, “Tom Peters is the world’s leading brand when it comes to writing, speaking, or thinking about the new economy.” He was also, at that point, not just the leading, but the only person calling himself a brand. Hence a mouthpiece for the “new economy” takes a page from Bass’s Victorian playbook. And why not? Fake it till you make it. The article kicked off the idea of self-branding as a direct path to success and is still read in marketing classes today.
A few years later, a man named Peter Montoya expanded upon Peters’s idea in a second influential manifesto called The Brand Called You. Yes, it had the same title as the original manifesto, and no, he and Mr. Peters did not work together; in fact, if anything, the two men are rivals in the branding-guru business. Melding the cold steel of cluelessness to brass balls is the well-paid talent of pitchmen everywhere, and Mr. Montoya just might be the master wizard. The Brand Called You (his version) is essentially one long outline, and this is the very first bullet point, which appears on this page:
1. You Are Different. Differentiation—the ability to be seen as new and original—is the most important aspect of Personal Branding.
Naturally, The Brand Called You, the remake, was a bestseller, and Montoya, like Peters, has a thriving speaking career to this day. But if the pitch to be “your own personal brand” had gone no further than the nation’s convention halls and hotel ballrooms, just absorbed like so much cold coffee and muffin dribblings into the tattered carpet of the zeitgeist, I wouldn’t be writing about it. The idea had legs, strong ones, and now you see whenever there’s a public faux pas or a stumble from grace by some national figure, the natural question is: How will it affect his or her personal brand? Peters and Montoya were innovators, and I mean that sincerely. Some of the smartest and most deservedly successful people I know say the words “my brand” without irony. You can see the birth of the idea and its subsequent rise through mentions in print via Google Books:
Of course, the principles of personal branding aren’t new. Neither Montoya nor Peters1 are all that different from Dale Carnegie, who rebranded himself from the plain “Dale Carnagey” by borrowing the golden surname of the steel magnate Andrew, and who, like these latter-day men, reduced character to bullet points and saw influence above all as the key to success. The goals of personal branding are the same you’d find in any empowerment seminar or in any prosperity gospel sermon from any decade. The end has always been wealth and power.
The new part is that “personal branding” asks you to accomplish these ends by treating yourself like a product rather than a human being. Peters again:
Starting today you are a brand. You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?
This is the core concept of personal branding, and like Christianity + the printing press or pro football + television, the idea has found in social media the perfect technology to go global. I won’t rehash the ways sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram give you the power to project yourself to the world. But I will point out that not long ago, only big companies, with big budgets, could get their message heard and beloved by strangers halfway around the globe. Now I can, and so can you, and so can everyone. The hardest part is getting anyone to listen.
The straightforward way is just to be entertaining, engaging, funny. But there’s a reason comedians who can actually make people laugh are very rare. It’s hard. An amateur who tries to build a following by being witty or provocative on Twitter is far more likely to end up the next Justine Sacco than the next Justin Halpern (@ShitMyDadSays), with his 3 million followers and a book deal. For every kid who tweets herself into college or into a cool job at the New Yorker—as people have done—there must be dozens who tweet themselves into the principal’s office, or more likely, into a brick wall of embarrassed silence.
You can see something of what it takes to build a following using our text analysis algorithm. Here are the typical words for what I would call the “rank amateur” and “budding professional” follower levels:
most typical words for …
people with <100 followers people with 1,000+ followers
#thehungergames partnering
#upset #heyboo
#worthit vamping
#whyme optimizing
roethlisberger sourcing
workaholics marketer
#wordsofwisdom tweetup
#hurryup visibility
#depressed monetize
#wishmeluck industry’s
#getonmylevel optimize
#studying brownskin
#idiots merchants
cincy influencers
#collegeproblems robust
#sunny yeen
#notokay guwop
#finalsweek talmbout
#tebow innovators
#silly partnered
#impatient bezos
#leavemealone infographics
#holyshit livest
#suckstosuck strategist
pujols entrepreneurial
#saveme slideshare
#yeahbuddy yass
pattys amplify
#girlproblems goodmorning
#killme creatives
On the left you see the kinds of simple, fleeting concerns you’d expect from people on Twitter. On the right you see almost entirely management jargon: if you have a lot of followers, you are in fact much more likely to speak like a corporation. But some words on the right aren’t typically professional: #heyboo, talmbout (a contraction of “talking about”), yeen (“you ain’t”), yass (“your ass”), and a few others. Those are people using Twitter just like the folks on the left—to talk shit, complain, one-up—only they’re doing it in wider circles, to thousands of followers. The users behind those words are black, and those terms’ presence on the right side of the list is evidence of the different way African Americans tend to use the service. (I emphasize tend because no group is a monolith.) Observers call the phenomenon Black Twitter, described here by Farhad Manjoo in Slate:
Black people—specifically, young blac
k people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It’s this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.
By “dominate,” he’s referring to the fact that in Twitter’s early years there was a lot of confusion from white users when hashtags like #uainthittinitright and #ifsantawasblack would make the service’s Trending Topics list, alongside the latest deep thought from Ryan Seacrest or marketing gimmick from Old Spice (just as #heyboo might seem confusing alongside “monetize” above). Most users on Twitter follow institutions of one kind or another (celebrities, journalists, products) and those institutions don’t follow them back. The mainstream culture of the service is organized around that one-to-many communication, organized, in fact, around the brand. But black users tend to focus on personal use and are highly reciprocal—hence high-follower counts and the enhanced ability to launch memes to the top of the charts.
Anyone hoping to build their brand on the service in the mainstream way—to become the one for the many—should realize that Twitter is very much the world of the One Percent. Its most precious resource, followers, is distributed far more unequally than wealth. In my sample, the top 1 percent of accounts has 72 percent of the followers. The top 0.1 percent has just over half. It is much, much harder to get to a million followers than it is to make a million dollars. There were 300,890 people who reported over $1 million in income to the IRS in 2011. Right now there are 2,643 Twitter accounts with 1 million followers, worldwide. Perhaps half are in the United States. Being an American with 1 million Twitter followers is roughly equivalent to being a billionaire.2
Of course, that assumes the followers are real. I bought some for one of my accounts to see how it works. On a site like TwitterWind, you can choose a number from a menu (I chose 1,000), pay up ($17), and a day or two later, and pretty much all at once, you get that many new, useless friends. The followers-for-hire do nothing at all but exist, and yet almost everyone with a really big Twitter following has probably bought some—especially the people for whom seeming popular is practically the whole job, like celebrities and politicians. When the Republican nomination was still up in the air, Newt Gingrich boasted, “I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined.” The only catch was he’d paid for about 90 percent of them.3 Mitt Romney (almost certainly) bought followers, too: for example, he gained 20,000 followers in a matter of minutes one day in July, which was about 200 times what he was getting immediately before and immediately after. Now, please note two important points: one, a person can buy followers for someone else, so this very well might’ve been some twenty-first-century Nixon working his ratfucking magic; it was certainly a good way to make Mitt look like a doofus. And, two, I’m sure Obama and many, many Democrats have bought followers for themselves. Craven attempts to game the system are a staple of both parties. They’re just usually not as easy to catch as this:
You can understand why these guys do it. The more popular someone seems to be, the more popular they become. It’s as close as you can get to buying votes, at least until the Supreme Court makes that legal in 2018.
Everyday account holders are no less susceptible to the lure of easy friends, even if they don’t have Barack’s or Mitt’s budget. Two of the five most common hashtags in my randomized Twitter data set (coming in at number one and number five, respectively) are #ff and #teamfollowback. The first stands for “Follow Fridays,” which was an old-school tradition on Twitter—on Fridays you would tweet out people you like for your followers to follow. It’s now just general (any-time) shorthand for “hey follow these accounts,” and commonly blasted out by users just trying to drive numbers. The second, #teamfollowback, is the hashtag/handle for a Twitter account that basically does for free what politicians can afford to pay for. The idea is you follow TeamFollowBack, and the account’s other followers will follow you. You then, in turn, follow them back, and everybody’s numbers have risen. It’s like the old idea of a “web ring,” which in the days before Google was a way for websites to all link to one another and ensure traffic. It’s also like the old idea of a full-on circle jerk. Here’s TeamFollowBack’s self-description:
We will help you get followers that follow back! THE ORIGIONAL [sic] & THE BEST - Promote OUR hashtags #WILLFOLLOWBACK #TEAMFOLLOWBACK
So this is what the self-as-brand can lead to: chasing empty metrics. I know when I tweet, I’m as interested in who shares it, and how quickly, as I am in whatever I was originally trying to communicate. The few times I’ve posted to Facebook I’ve sat there and refreshed the page to catch the new comments, as though I’d never been on the Internet before. Jenna Wortham from the Times describes this mentality well: “We, the users, the producers, the consumers—all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation—are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.” I can tell you from the inside: companies design their products to jam that loop open. OkCupid shows you little counts of your messages, your visitors, your possibilities. We know that those numbers keep our users interested, especially when they go up. Without little bits of excitement, a webpage or an app seems dead and people drift off. The broad term for this is “user engagement,” how many people check in every week, every day, every hour. It’s basically how fast they are running in the hamster wheel that’s been set down for them there in cedar filings, and it’s one of the most obsessed-over measures in the industry. Sites show you counts, totals, badges, because they know you’ll come back to see them tick up. Then they can put your increased engagement on a slide to impress their investors.
That’s the thing: it’s one thing to reduce yourself to a number. When someone else reduces you, it feels ugly. Klout is one of the leading personal analytics firms; they look at all your social media accounts and, through a little proprietary black magic, give you an all-in measure of your online influence, 0 to 100. You’ll remember per Montoya (and Carnegie): influence is what a personal brand is all about, and Klout helps you figure out how you’re doing. Right now, my Klout score is a fairly pathetic 34. TeamFollowBack comes in at 60, which makes me want to either laugh or cry. On the one hand, these people have gotten the equivalent of a D− grade on their only reason to exist. On the other, they have a higher score than anyone I know.
In 2012, Salesforce.com, the cloud-computing behemoth, posted a job opening that listed a Klout score of at least 35 as a “desired skill.” It wasn’t positioned as a requirement, but they put it up there along with the allow-us-to-state-the-obvious attributes like “ability to work … as a part of a team,” so it was presumably a core part of the job. Salesforce’s business specialty is quantification—they help companies market through data.4 So it’s not that surprising that they would approach hiring in the same quantified way. But even though numbers like credit scores have been an odious part of the HR process for some time, seeing a Klout score on a job listing got a lot of people upset.
BetaBeat’s article “Want to Work at Salesforce? Better Have a Klout Score of 35 or Higher” got the general reaction just right with their one-word subhead: “Ugh.” However, the real concern: that we’re all going to be reduced to numbers, and soon, deserves a longer discussion. Salesforce was, and is, a trendsetter—certainly in the world of online marketing. They were Forbes’s “Most Innovative Company in America” the same year they put up that post. They hire hundreds of people a year, and, even more to the point, when award-winning innovators do something new, other companies copy it. If Salesforce is asking for Klout scores, then everyone will soon be asking for Klout scores. People don’t want t
o be reduced to a two-digit number, concocted by a company that even in the vaporous world of social media startups seems kind of bullshitty.
But given that Klout uses many of the same reductive tools that I myself have employed to gather data, where does that leave you and me and the book we’ve both spent all this time with? Well, the short answer is: right there with Klout and Salesforce. Reduction is inescapable. Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world. It’s a by-product of the basic physical nature of the microchip: a chip is just a sequence of tiny gates. Not in the way that the Internet is a “series of tubes” but in actuality. The gates open and close to let electrons through, and when one of these gates wants to know what state to be in, it’s all or nothing—like any door, a circuit is open or it isn’t; there are no shades of maybe. From that microscopic reality an absolutism propagates up through the whole enterprise, until at the highest level you have the definitions, data types, and classes essential to programming languages like C and JavaScript.
Thus, information is reduced by necessity. But fundamentally the objections to the Klout-score requirement were about the people being reduced to digits, not just their information. And here’s where Dataclysm diverges from Salesforce’s job post, and indeed Klout’s whole business model.
As many numbers as there are here, they’re not meant to stand in for any one person. A single number never could. It’s a truth summed up by the apocryphal story that Einstein flunked math in high school. He didn’t. But he could’ve, and if he had, who cares? If he got a 35 in Algebra II, so what? Is he suddenly not smart? No number, no test, no single measurement—not IQ, not height, and certainly not a Klout score or friend count or reply percentage on OkCupid—is a whole person, which is exactly why, beyond illustration, individual users don’t appear in this book. But by aggregating a bunch of these small and inadequate parts of us together, we get something big. The law of large numbers is an idea we’ve brushed past a few times, but I want to lay it out explicitly: the full truth of data is only revealed over a large sample. Imagine a mysterious die—you can’t count the sides but you can roll it and see what comes up. Roll once and you could get any number, you learn nothing. Roll it a bunch of times, you get the distribution, you get the average—and that defines the die right there. You know the shape only through aggregation.
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) Page 16