So tonight Dan Schawbel, self-proclaimed Personal Branding Guru (and maybe he  is a guru - after all, he's got 23,000+ Twitter followers and I haven't even cracked 1,000 yet) tweeted about Katie Konrath's blog post, "Personal Branding:  It's Not About You".

It caught my attention, because a while back I wrote "An Introduction to Personal Branding:  It really is all about you."

Of course, those of us who are out here blogging and tweeting and social media-ing all the time know that a decent title can ensure even the most dreck-filled article or PowerPoint deck gets some attention, so both of our titles were tongue-in-cheek.

However, it got me thinking...

The thrust of Katie's piece was really that people need to see 'personal branding' for what it really is:  A sales tool. 

In sales, you don't just yammer away at the potential client endlessly.  You ask them questions about their hot-button issues, the things that are keeping them up at night, how they measure success, etc., and then you show them how what you do will address these business issues.

The same, as Katie says, is true of personal branding:  Instead of telling people all the great things you've done, are doing, and could do for them if only they'd pony up your hourly fee, you should identify your potential clients' business issues and then, clearly and concisely, demonstrate how you're going to deliver against that.

So far, so good:  It's amazing how many personal-branding websites I've seen which have pages and pages of things like 'Awards I Won In 1996 When I Worked At Bombardier' and no pages like 'How working with me will deliver demonstrable results within 3 months.'  Katie is absolutely right that personal branding needs to be built on what stakeholders need/want, not what we want to deliver to them

I've written an awful lot of blog posts in the past few years - upwards of 150, at least.  My goal with blog posts has always been to add some original data, analysis or insight to the conversation.  Because at the end of the day, isn't personal branding supposed to be about establishing a unique proposition, positioning, and personality?

In Dec 2008 I did a blog post with "7 Top Tips for Job-Seekers" - which in fact was just a refresh of a blog post I'd done in 2006 - and it continues to be the single most popular post in the whole blog, even though there are zillions of 'tips for job-seekers' blogs all over the internet already.

By contrast, in Apr 2009 I published a whitepaper about grassroots corporate philanthropy which was filled with original ideas and data - and hardly anyone was all that interested.  

I spent 30 minutes on the blog post and it gets 1000+ visits a month; I spent more like 30 hours on the whitepaper and I've only had a couple of media interviews.

So what have we learned?

It's clear that my 'stakeholders' are more interested in job-seeking tips than the paradigm shift in workplace philanthropy.

If I did nothing but write blogs which were "7 Handy Tips for [something recruiting-related]", I'd get a whole lot more traffic to my blog(s).  People love retweeting articles with titles like '5 Tips For Reducing Time-to-Hire' or 'Thinking about RPO?  6 things you need to know', they love referencing them in presentations or their own blogs, and the media loves that they can just copy and paste the stuff into their publication without having to waste any time on that pesky journalism or editing.

However.

In the long-term, where does that leave my personal brand? 

I'd like to be able to say that in the long term, people who go the '7 Handy Tips' route end up with a weaker personal brand.  (I'd like to be able to say that because I'd like to think that, in the long run, all these epic-length blog posts of mine are actually going to have been worth it.)

But all of us are so new to this hyper-networked world - heck, when I wrote my first big whitepaper in 2001, hardly anyone was talking about personal branding; today, there are, like, 8 million 'Personal Branding Architects' on Twitter alone - that I don't think any of us really know what the prognosis is, or whether the brand equity delivered by a whitepaper is actually higher quality than the brand equity delivered by a '7 Handy Tips' blog post.

(Oh great - another question to ponder all week.)