Here’s an excellent article on a very important trend I keep telling my friends and colleagues they should pay heed to: Personal Branding.  Courtesy of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (M Booth’s oldest client).

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Jim MacMillan is profiled as a succesful example of someone who re-invented himself though social networking.

While still employed as a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Daily News, he had launched his own web site — jimmacmillan.net — for posting his photos and linking to related stories in the news. Like many professionals, he also created a profile on Facebook, Twitter and every social network he could learn about, roughly 40 in all. Eventually, he took a severance package from the newspaper and threw everything into social networking. Today, he has close to 14,000 followers reading his posts on Twitter — a number on a par with some celebrities — and keeps in touch with about 475 friends on Facebook. He believes he reaches a larger and more engaged audience than when he was at the Daily News.

Jim is part of a growing mass of professionals — including musicians, writers, artists and even business experts — who are engaging large audiences by making songs available on a MySpace page, sharing their expertise on Twitter or building a national readership by blogging.

With today’s tough job market and struggling economy, people need to differentiate themselves and start to employ the same kind of branding techniques used by many of today’s top businesses.

- Danny