Personal Branding seems to be the “it” topic of the week.  You have Chris Brogan writing a free ebook on Personal Branding for the Business Professional. Then Dan Schawbel is talking about pitching to journalists using your personal brand.  Now David Armano adds his upcoming presentation to the Chicago New Media Summit entitled “Brand U.0″.

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As a branding professional, this buzz about personal branding intrigues me.  I know it’s not a new topic by any means, but it is surprising how few people think about it (including me).  I think I need to spend some time mulling this one over…

Sorry I’ve been a bit slow with the postings this week.  I have a major presentation today but wanted to get a post out amongst the prep.  Here are the postings that caught my eye this week:

• Ian Schafer “How I Use Twitter”:  I was negative on Twitter for a long time but Ian sums up graphically why I have jumped on the bandwagon.  As he says, “[Twitter is an] efficient way to be notified of news, help out colleagues, network, and generally have intelligent, and believe it or not, intellectual conversations.”
• David Armano “The Conversation Economy”:  Armano’s poses an interesting question…has the conversation economy moved?  Sitting in the halls of P&G, I will tell you that I think it is just beginning and big brands are just now starting to wake up to that fact.
• Fred Wilson “The Hidden Return of Online Advertising”:  Fred points to a new comScore study that says online ads have a bigger impact for retailer’s offline sales than they do for their online says.  Interesting….
• Why do users flock to social network sites?:  Interesting study from IBM that summarizes why users go on social networking sites.  The breakdown is 53% Purely Social, 38% Professional, and 9% Brand Kinship.  The 9% shocks me.  What do you think?
• New TV shows coming to Xbox 360:  I love this quote from Mitch on Six Pixels of Seperation, “Traditional Marketers sit and stare at the changes taking place in the Marketing world. Here’s the raw truth: they think it’s just a fad. “  He writes this in article about veteran Hollywood Producer Peter Safran announcing he would create original TV content for Xbox 360.
• CollegeHumor’s Secret to Success…T-Shirts:  While the guys at CollegeHumor are media moguls with a hot website and an upcoming MTV show, one of their unknown secrets of success is that they are also fashion moguls.  Their website Busted Tees sells ~30,000 shirts a month and rivals better known Threadless.com.