Thinking further about personal branding, I have come to the conclusion that in order to really delve into this topic I am going to need to brand myself. I have found some interesting sites like this one or this one which instruct individuals looking to strengthen, create, and/or protect their personal brand(s). I am going to be using these sites, and/or any other sites I stumble upon in my research to create my own brand. Here is where questions about authenticity come into play; am I ready to truly brand myself, Ryan Kahn the female college student, or would it be more beneficial to me to take on a slightly different role in my branding experience...
I have no real reason to be intensely inauthentic in creating a brand for myself, my imagined audience is not very broad at this point and I do not feel all too much is expected of me as a young college student. On the other hand, will I become tempted to fib some new qualifications and experiences to make myself seem brighter and more alluring to employers, (my most important imagined audience)?
Creating a brand for someone who is just absolutely not me, some kind of fake identity, is not entirely off the table. I suppose this would be the most inauthentic decision I could make, in some sense. The benefit to creating a fake individual to build a personal brand around and upon is that I would be able to start from scratch; I already have a Facebook profile, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, so my personal brand has already begun to develop.
As it stands now, I am leaning toward doing it all; I will create a brand new identity to play around with in the world of virtual branding as well as amending my existing social media profiles to support the brand I hope to create. The question now becomes, how do I want to be perceived? Who do I want to be?