James Burnes’ voice reverberates in the small meeting room at Central Library. He stands in front of a whiteboard covered with notes outlining his company’s five steps of branding strategy: investigation, exploration, decision, confirmation and implementation. Burnes snaps the cap on the black marker in his hand and turns toward me. “Now do you know who you are?”

No. I don’t.

A few years ago, a friend urged me to brand myself as Taffy, an abbreviated version of Taflinger, the funny guy who goes out and does stuff around Indianapolis. But I didn’t know what he meant. I associated brands with corporate behemoths and their widgets, the stuff we buy and sell. But I’ve been hearing more chatter from actors, musicians and athletes about their so-called brands. LeBron James isn’t a basketball player with numerous business interests on the side — he’s a global brand. Oprah Winfrey isn’t a talk-show host, she’s the voice of America’s soccer moms.

But branding isn’t just for Oprah and LeBron anymore. In a competitive online world, everybody needs a way to stand out — a way to package and promote themselves to the masses.

Back in the 1990s, in the buzz movie “To Die For,” Nicole Kidman’s character famously purred, “You’re nobody unless you’re on TV.” Less than 15 years later, thanks to the Internet, everyone’s “on TV,” and personal branding is a way to stand out among the stars. The trend is established well enough to justify the publication of a book, “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success,” by Dan Schawbel, due out in 2009.

Marketable me

Five days earlier, I’d gone to MediaSauce, an interactive marketing firm, to become a brand. I met with Burnes at the marketing company’s Carmel office, where Burnes, vice president of development and strategy, and chief evangelist Scott Henderson peppered me with questions: Who am I? What do I want? Who is my audience? What are your highest aspirations? Meanwhile, digital strategist Don Schindler and media strategist Sheila Smiley tapped away on their laptops.

“You can build a brand around Taffy, that’s great,” Burnes said. “But why? What do you hope to get out of it?”

An easy answer escaped me. I told him that my dream is to work on what I want, when I want, for whom I want, and to make a living wage doing it. But I’m also not comfortable with the idea of being a full-time shill for myself in order to get there. If personal branding is just a 21st-century version of the Dale Carnegie method, you can count me out.

“It’s not about creating this image, this shell image, it’s about finding that solid core of what you’re about and communicating that to the world in a way that’s relevant,” Henderson says.

Henderson calls brands the “mosaic of experience” that people associate with products or services. A brand is what you feel when you see a company’s logo or product. For example, I feel good when I see Apple’s once-bitten logo; I associate innovation and craftsmanship with it. These feelings usually go unarticulated, but they influence who we choose to do business with. And they’re affected positively or negatively every time we interact with the branded identity.

Personal brands work the same way, in that anything the person says — or does or types — can reinforce or diminish his brand.

Sarah Robbins knows the power of a personal brand. The Ball State University doctoral candidate works as director of emerging technologies at Kelley Executive Partners at Indiana University, and in certain circles she’s known as “Intellagirl,” an expert on virtual worlds like Second Life.

Robbins reinforces the Intellagirl brand with an online avatar that looks like her and a logo that incorporates horn-rimmed glasses and her signature strip of pink hair. As Intellagirl, she’s sought after as a project consultant and speaker.

“My brand isn’t something other than the real me,” says Robbins. “It is the real me. Just in a visually and verbally compact package.”

Me, in 50 words or less

The MediaSauce team assigns me to write a personal branding statement. This statement serves as a starting point for the branding process and follows a simple format: To (target audience), (your company) is the (blank) provider/service of (blank) delivered through (blank).

I flail through several versions, feeling less confident with each one. “To intelligent young adults, Neal Taflinger is the preferred storyteller of life in Indianapolis delivered through video, text and photos.”

“To language lovers, Neal Taflinger is the premier journalist of little people’s big stories delivered through video, text and photos.” Somehow I end up feeling like a confused phony.

I send my attempts to Burnes and Schindler and start to wonder about my relevance to the world. My existential crisis deepens the following Monday when I open Schindler’s response and my eyes zero in on a single, crushing line: “This is still all over the place.” My heart sinks. I sigh and turn to my editor.

“Mindf*** continues,” I say.

Burnes calls the meeting at Central Library. For 30 minutes, Burnes — in front of the whiteboard — and Schindler and I grind our way through investigation, the first of the five steps. Investigation explores the brand’s mission, marketplace, competition and goals; the branding statement is both the inspiration for and product of the investigation.

Burnes starts with a broad, awkward stroke: “To Indianapolis young professionals, Neal Taflinger is the insightful, witty, local storyteller through video, text, and photos.” Schindler argues that relevant should replace insightful. “If it’s relevant then it’s interesting and insightful.”

We talk about how to incorporate what I do — storytelling across several mediums — in a concise way without it sounding like consultant-speak. Cross-platform, multi-platform and multimedia were either too cold or too dated. In the end, we dropped it altogether because my audience understands that mono-media journalists are nearing extinction.

Burnes scribbles, erases and rewrites until my personal branding statement appears on the board: “Taffy is the relevant voice of Indy’s young professionals.”

“Now do you know who you are?” he asks.

I don’t, but I say that I do, at least for the purposes of this meeting. We move on to exploration, otherwise known as strategy and tactics.

According to my MediaSauce team, for me to become a successful brand, I must only tell witty, relevant stories about Indy.

“You have to be where your audience is,” Schindler says, referring to the online and physical worlds. That means I have to develop new communication channels and adhere to consistent (witty, relevant) style in visual, written and spoken communication.

Indy.com, MySpace, Facebook, Smaller Indiana, Twitter and more — I have to be online, adding friends and interacting with them, blogging and commenting on blogs, linking to my own stories, all the while maintaining the right aesthetic and tone. “It’s a lot of work in the beginning,” Schindler says.

Burnes steps out to make a phone call, leaving Schindler to soothe my angst. “You’d still do this at night,” he says. What he means: If I chucked it all and got a job in a warehouse, I’d still come home at night and write, whether I got paid or not. And he’s right. Storytelling isn’t a love as much as a compulsion, and before I started writing for a living, I did it just to do it, penning freelance stories, columns and essays before work, on my lunch break and when I got home.

The next day, Schindler publishes a Google document containing a truncated version of my Digital Blueprint. It’s a customized branding manifesto that can run 40 pages and outlines exactly what the client should do, when they should do it, and how much time and money it will require. Because there’s no account manager to hold my hand through this process, as is typical for a MediaSauce client, we skip the decision and implementation steps.

Even the stripped-down version of the blueprint is enough to keep me busy for days, parsing blogs and social networks, bookmarking and joining ones that my audience frequents. I identify competitors in the marketplace — like Seth Hancock of the “Doing Indy” Web video — and learn where they appear online. I purchase nealtaflinger.com and a year’s worth of hosting.

Within days I am inundated with e-mails from various online communities: so and so has added you as a friend, so and so has replied to your comment, so and so is eating lunch with whatshisname. I get 30, 40 of these missives a day demanding at least some attention. Each time I respond it has to be witty, relevant or both. Rather than post “hi,” or “thanks,” on the wall of the author of a local food blog who added me on Facebook, I wrote, “Thanks for being a champion of good eats in an Applebee’s town.” If it’s not worth saying, I keep my fingers quiet.

But still, I’m invisible. If a brand is what you feel, the logo is what you see, and right now I am not seen.

“Before we even get into designing a logo, we need to get to know you,” says Nathan Shinkle.

What Shinkle and the three other MediaSauce designers gathered around this table don’t realize is that I became a writer so I could talk about everything but myself. We discuss how I stand out in a crowd because of my red hair. Designer and fellow redhead Aaron Scamihorn sympathizes. “It would be a shame to not use elements of your look or personality to create a visual brand that affects people,” Nate Greuel says.

The conversation sprawls for an hour, and one of the designers, Aaron Hogan, is visibly excited. He volunteers to take on Taffy’s logo so we arrange to meet a few days later at the Alley Cat in Broad Ripple.

Hogan and I shoot the breeze against a backdrop of a silent Sunday football broadcast and jukebox din. I talk about taking my work, but not myself, seriously, about my fear of becoming a caricature.

“The goal is to not be a douchebag,” Hogan says reassuringly. He promises logo treatments by lunchtime the next day.

Hogan’s e-mail arrives as promised, eliciting laughs from friends and co-workers. One treatment, a simple rendering of my messy pompadour over my name, stands out. We go back and forth about Taflinger versus Taffy. Again, I’m wary about the caricature effect. Taffy is an easy handle, Aaron argues, easier than my last name, at least. “Does everyone you know call you Taffy?” Schindler asks. Taffy it is.

Going into this project I thought personal branding was marketing BS, and I still do when, as Schindler says, people “put the brand before the content.” But the identity crisis it triggered and the conclusions I came to while resolving it were real.

I am going to give it a go. I am going to work to maintain a consistent voice, look and feel to all my interactions (which means I can’t ever change my hair). I am going to strive to produce work that supports the idea that I have something interesting, witty and relevant to say to young professionals in Indianapolis.

Will it grow my audience or have any tangible effect on my career? I’m not sure. I’m still not sure I buy it.

Do you?

Links

- www.nealtaflinger.com/blog

- www.cafepress.com/NealTaflinger

- www.indy.com/people/Neal%20Tafli...

- www.facebook.com/people/Neal-Taf...

- www.myspace.com/taffyonthetown

- http://www.smallerindiana.com/profile/NealTaflinger

- www.twitter.com/nealtaflinger

- www.vimeo.com/user885974

- www.youtube.com/TaffyontheTown

A brand of action

You can whip out your library card and learn how to establish your brand on the cheap or you can dig deep and have professionals hold your hand through the process. Taffy got the quick and dirty version of MediaSauce’s steps, but they were kind enough to explain the full process for Indy.com’s readers.

Before any work is done, blueprint contracts are tailored to meet the needs of each client and signed. A client could expect to pay in the thousands for a full range of MediaSauce’s services. An account representative is assigned who will act as a liaison to the creative team. Then the real fun begins.

Investigation

MediaSauce researches the client, market, and discusses possible strategies internally.

Exploration

MediaSauce’s team shares its thoughts with the client, gets feedback, and if everything is kosher, the team moves forward with specific tactics. Plans begin to form and budgets are created to outline the time and cost involved to implement the brand strategy.

Decision

Mediasauce presents a firm plan, budgets, and time lines to the client. If the client likes what the team is doing, they move forward and sign contracts at a Confirmation meeting.

Implementation

The creative team selected for that project meets and begins executing the plan as outlined in the Blueprint.

At the end of the process, clients receive any materials promised in the contract (Web site, video, logo art, etc), as well as a style guide and communications audit to ensure consistent presentation of the brand.

Looking to brand yourself?

Start by asking yourself the following questions:

1. Who am I?

2. What do I have to offer that is unique and relevant?

3. Who is my audience and where are they?

4. What is my highest aspiration?

Once you answer those questions, you have to figure out how you are going to reach your audience and how you’re going to present yourself. When the brand is you, you have to accept the fact that everything you do affects the perception of your brand. The line between personal and professional gets blurred, so you have to be mindful before and during each interaction.

Finally, you need a visual style. That might just be a particular font, color, or style of signing your name. If you want to be known as Bill S. Preston, Esq., every online profile, e-mail signature, and blog comment has to carry it.

Once you’ve gotten yourself together, go wild. Get online and find your people and help your people find you. Get active in communities relevant to what you do and what you care about and have meaningful interactions.