I am also obviously going to talk about Web Content Management, which I think is interesting as this turns the discussion from the theoretical and well ordered filing system that your organisation should become, to being about achieving something. WCM is about publishing to the web, not about having well ordered drawers of stuff.

I’ve been in this WCM industry awhile, so lets put aside the crystal ball a minute and ask if we have yet delivered on the CMS promise of 10 years ago? (That’s we as in our industry, rather than we as in our company). Of the democratisation of contributing content, of connecting our Knowledge and Information Workers (as Forrester refers to them), the people that know stuff – with the people that want to know stuff?

And I don’t mean those projects where we have hundreds of content authors or an Intranet, I mean connecting the real people (not hundreds of marketers) in an organisation with your audience through the web.

Connecting people? That sounds like a job for social media. With Social Media we are now breaking down communication and marketing barriers in 140 character chunks. Are our websites, or the messaging and brand values they are used to project now being blown apart and deposited in crumbs around the web? We are now potentially all becoming the messengers, representatives, dare I say marketers for our organisations and any other brands, products, destinations, services we interact with and comment upon. But, for all that, websites are still the destination – the majority of tweets are linking people with web content.

Peng T. Ong (founder of Interwoven) in a the forward of the 2001 book “Web Content Management: A Collaborative Approach” – he talks about the motivation behind founding Interwoven – of enabling users and ‘web masters’ (it was 2001) who are “enmeshed in trying to launch websites” amidst the “chaos of building websites” – pains that organisations still feel today.

We are also seeing the “enterprization” of social media, corporate twitter governance, of paid bloggers and of a greater profile for blogging on corporate sites. We are all becoming accustomed to consuming opinion and news when researching products and services and I think we are become less tolerant of and less attentive to the polished sales and marketing message – people want to meet and understand the people behind the brand, we want to hear their opinion and see them. This appears to be to be convergence, as the ownership of the message is moving from marketing to ‘the people’ as at the same time the consumer becomes more accustomed to and expectant of a less formal, blogger, opinion based style of content.

This gets me back to my point, publishing web content is about the people – tools will need to be adopted by engineers, consultants, product managers and customer service reps – not just sales and marketing – the people our audience want to get a feel of.

Using that phrase does rather alienate half the population and maybe doesn’t even translate that well into US English but, forgive me, you know what I mean – it’s the most basic, fundamental fear of most normal people in most social situations, and social media is the most extreme of social situations.

I thought for a bit that this was a peculiarly English trait, that we are slow to embrace the ‘paradigm shifts’ of ‘Personal Brand’, we have a terribly over acute sense of… well.. being British about the whole thing and “after you, no.. after you”, a debilitating cynicism and apologizing for being in the way, but it transpires that my modest US colleagues feel it too.

Take Twitter for example, here you are in 140 characters or less trying to be interesting, whilst negotiating the subtle niceties of ‘twittiquette’. One chap who confidently writes excellent, witty, entertaining blog posts was agonising over whether he should tweet them twice, for the UK and US time zones of his followers – or if double tweeting made him look like “a douche bag”. I’ve met the fella, he doesn’t seem to be a douche bag.

I’ve agonised over it in a couple of blogs posts, I’ve tried to figure out who ‘I’ am and who the ‘you’ should be when representing your companies – heck, I may not even publish this post as the mortal fear of ‘cockness’ overcomes me.

But, the fact is, I think you need to be yourself, as Oscar Wilde said:

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Alright so sometimes that needs to be corporate you, but you none the less, the ‘you-ness’ is important. (For more on this, Chris Brogan makes a great point in his post about being aways ‘on‘).

I can’t believe that anyone can maintain a Personal Brand for long; people are not products. Nestle can reinvent their chocolate and make it tasty with two glasses of milk and make that their thing, their brand. Toyota can make owning a car cool for Californians again with the Prius, by adding a slightly more efficient engine. But surely we are eventually going to come unstuck, by making promises our talent, knowledge, coolness – whatever – can’t keep?

(Sorry to keep throwing links at you, but there’s a great discussion on that here, on David Spinks’ blog)

Surely your personal brand is your aspiration to be good at what you do, but recognising that you aren’t quite there yet? By trying too hard to be cool, by subtracting the real ‘you’ out of your social media persona – you’ll really end up looking more of a cock? Or way worse, bland and uninteresting – part of the echo chamber, rather than saying something new.

Lets look at the superstars of this stuff – take for example Seth Godin – in this inteview with Josh Berhoff he talks about his secret – which is to love what you do and write about it. It’s effortless for him, as he’s found that magic formula. Seth can write freely and without shame, galvanised by the love and enjoyment of the thing.

Someone once said to me after I came off stage at a conference, “You looked like you enjoyed that, you didn’t care if anyone else was watching”. I took that as a compliment, I do deeply care about the audience, but any nervousness or anxiety was carried away by enthusiasm for the subject and the opportunity to spend half an hour talking about it.

So maybe it’s time we all just relaxed, admitted that being a bit of cock sometimes is actually part of our personal brand. Yes, maybe I’ll commit some sort of embarrassing Twitter faux pas, but surely if I admit my mistakes and come over all human – my little community will forgive me?