The Scott Steinhardt Brand

For well over a decade, branding and brand management have been integral focus areas of my profession. Branding (and all things pertaining to) is something I believe I do rather well, especially from the communications and owned/earned media side of things. My work in branding is something I take with a degree of pride and passion.

Yet my own personal brand is not something I handle with the same amount of care. This is on purpose, and there are plenty of reasons why I have not crafted a well-manicured personal brand.

Everyone Has a Brand

Everyone has a personal brand, which is the image they project outward to people for a desired impact and takeaway. This exists particularly online these days, though occasionally bleeds into the real world.

Yet some people are their brand. Think the friend who is always instagramming something around a specific subject and speaking in buzzwords, the person who made custom shirts to read a certain (often nonsensical or hackneyed) slogan, or the Driving Crooner. Few of these are genuine. Many of them are forced. Being in the presence of them is a chore at best, embarrassing at worst. These are all bad examples of personal branding, mind you, but they vastly outnumber any good examples.

By “good” example, I mean a person who has taken their brand and made something from it. A business. A legitimate following. These people all have to start somewhere — many with various misfires and misguided attempts at personal branding.

A smaller number of individuals naturally and accidentally fall into a personal brand by doing good work. These are the personal brands I personally enjoy, as I don’t detest personal brands outright. I actually follow quite a few people because I feel that their personal brand aligns with my values and interests, and the bulk of them don’t feel like something that was built in a laboratory or in a boardroom. Many of these people are journalists or experts — not thought leaders — and I think they have done a good job of manicuring such a brand.

The vast majority of personal brands exist purely to establish oneself on social media with a persistent yet low-effort way of worming their way into conversations. (See: everyone who latched on to the right-wing grift machine over the last decade-plus.) A lot of these brands are grating, rather non-distinct from the one after in your social feed, and serve no purpose other than to further the interests of the person — sometimes in the worst way possible.

Time as a Factor

As someone who spends a fair amount of time each week working on the personal brands of executives and for the brand of a specific company, spending any more time on another brand (my own) has always been an exhausting thought.

There is also the idea of sticking to a particular lane in my personal brand, which does not excite me. I don't want to be the “something” person in the same way that many people on LinkedIn are the “LinkedIn person,” the “AI person,” the “crypto person,” and so on. I like to talk about technology as much as I like to talk about New York, and I like to throw in random tidbits about the history of rock music as much as I like to discuss photography. “I contain frickin multitudes,” as is the quote from John Proctor is the Villain which itself is a bastardization of a quote from a Walt Whitman poem.

I also don't believe everyone needs to have a brand. I like working with other brands and I like to take a break from brands and branding when I get home. I don't like to eat, breathe, and sleep any particular brand — my own included.

I feel I can be seen as a valued member of society without a cohesive personal brand. I'm an excellent worker and an expert in my own rights without having to develop a brand that has specific keywords attached to it, a mission statement, and so on. I like doing that for companies and executives. Yet I find doing that for myself to be exhausting and would rather communicate outwardly (like so) instead of building a cohesive personal brand.

This is also why I don't have any publicly facing profiles on most major social networks. To do so is to play manager of your own personal brand and be quote on all the time. I would rather sacrifice my own branding in favor of a quieter, less public, and more “bouncier” life outside of work.

Potentially Caving Down the Line

What my personal brand looks like down the line may differ. I may be the “something” guy after all. I may stick to one or two lanes because the crappy analytics built into the site tell me that certain topics resonate more than others, and I decided to follow that data. I may use that information to help craft a more tailored newsletter or blog going forward if I've developed a larger audience that is decidedly interested in reading what I have to write on a certain subject or two. This is all not to say I will never develop a cohesive personal brand; this is just to say why I haven’t thus far.

At the same time, I may just continue to say to hell with it and continue to enjoy my piece. Life is short and time is finite. There are plenty of other things for me to focus on, and carefully branding myself isn’t one of them.

Five Things I’m Checking Out

1) No Logo by Naomi Klein, which I referenced in an earlier draft of this email but cut for relevance. I’m about to read it again for the third time.

2) This Alice Neel painting I saw at the Met, which as existed as a print on my Hammond organ for the better part of two years.

3) Folio, the best Pocket replacement I’ve come across thus far.

4) This small Daring Fireball thread on the sale of The Browser Company to Atlassian. I regret ever recommending Arc or Dia to anyone reading this.

5) Macho Man Randy Savage with arguably the best improv’d pro wrestling interview (promo) ever, done while performing slight-of-hand tricks with a small container of coffee creamer.

What I’m Listening To

Earlier today, I got on the B44+ to go to Sheepshead Bay. I tapped in using my phone, sat in the back, read the news on my phone, and cue up Bob Seger’s ”Night Moves” on my phone. As soon as the song goes silent in the bridge, I’m forced to pause the music as I’m gently pulled off by an MTA officer. As it turns out, anyone who used the new OMNY pay system on the bus over the past 20 minutes did not register in the system due to a technical error, and the system registered six of us as having gone on the trip without paying.

Instead of looking at the footage of us tapping in and realizing the system error, six of us were given a written warning from the MTA (which is slightly more than a tepid verbal reprimand). I told the officers (kindly) that I would challenge the warning, that they should look up in the system how we all tapped in, and so on. When I got on the next bus, I finished the song and, pissed off and barreling towards my destination, decided to listen to the self-titled Bad Company record, which absolutely still rules 51 years later.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Scott