Maybe you watched the VMA awards live on Sunday night to witness Kanye West publicly diss Taylor Swift on national television after she won the best female artist award and maybe you didn’t. But by now, you already know about it thanks to the beauty of online news feeds, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. According to Mashable, 300,000 Kanye West tweets interrupted Twitter service one hour after Kanye’s rant and from what I could gather, none of the tweets were positive. In fact, even many celebrity tweeters and recording artists including Pink, Katie Perry, and Kelly Clarkson tweeted their disdain for Kanye’s remarks for the world to see.
Once upon a time, when someone said something stupid on national TV, you would just sit in your living room and comment to those around you “Uh oh, bad move”…or “What a jerk!” And maybe you would have a conversation about it with your friends or colleagues the next day or read about it in a gossip magazine or page six of the Post if you were a New Yorker. And then it would be put to rest.
But times have changed. In some cases, Twitter is replacing the living room, the office water cooler, and the local bar as a source of information and popular opinion. And these opinions can quickly be archived, shared, repeated, analyzed, and rehashed. They serve as a primary historical source of sorts and their impact on the way history and pop culture are recorded can’t be ignored.
The collective observations of many may spread faster than any damage control that Kanye or his PR team can muster. It can take years to build a powerful personal brand…and just seconds to destroy it. On the other hand, it can take seconds to catapult someone’s brand forward in some instances. Obviously Beyonce and Taylor Swift had strong brands before the VMA awards, but the grace they both showed following Kanye’s outburst elevated their brands to an even higher level as evidenced by the social media comments reported on these two recording artists.
And while few of us are rock stars in the literal sense, many of us are trying to become well recognized in our chosen fields. Many of us strive to create strong personal brands that foster feelings of competency, authenticity, integrity, and good will towards others. Our brands can be shattered just as quickly as Kanye’s if we don’t constantly moniter them and keep certain actions in check. Social media practices such as spamming, flaming, and over the top selling can quickly result in a backlash from the collective community and a reversal of positive public opinion.
If you are a job seeker, your personal brand is linked to your proposition of value to employers. You will need to work hard to build your brand online and off and gain a following of supporters for your search. Keep your brand in check everyday and refrain from saying or posting anything that could prove contradictory or damaging to your brand. Humans may have short memories, but Google does not. So if you don’t want something archived for eternity, you are better off keeping it to yourself.
