Tim Berners-Lee invented the worldwide web 27 years ago. With the average age of first time moms hovering between 26 and 30 years in most developed countries, that’s about one generation in real-life terms.
Pause. Reflect. My lord, we have experienced a lot of change since then. A hilarious touchstone is this 1994 NBC Today segment on “What is the Internet?”.
This nearly three-decade “wrinkle in time” is overwhelming when you consider that digital has gone from a passing fancy that we watched with bemusement like Bryant Gumbel to a technology architecture that we are wholly and completely reliant on in 2016.
Chunking it out, you realize that every five-six years, the main reason we engage digitally changes. These shifts are creating bigger ripples in how we live, work and play and are progressively turning us into a digital species. Here’s my forensics on the six changes that have already happened and our collective need to have us enter digital’s sixth era – The Impact Age:
Stage I – The Surfing Age (Mid ’90s) – represented by Yahoo, Netscape and Internet Explorer
We were amazed things even worked in the dial up era, but for the first time we could access information, news and messages that used to require a library, a newspaper or letter mail.
Stage II – The Commerce Age (Late ’90s) – represented by eBay, Google and Paypal
Business got connected to the internet and as frenzied capitalists, we started looking at how the web can make us money, which continues to both amaze and frustrate us today. Everybody needed a dot.com and rushed in with $125 billion of capital and web investment…until they didn’t.
Stage III – The Blogging and Posting Age (Early 2000s) – represented by Wikipedia, Craigslist and WordPress
The power is now in the every person’s hands as we learn how to generate content, arguments, transactions and our personal brands without a business or intermediary between us and the audience, culminating in this Time Person of The Year cover in 2006
Stage IV – The Sharing & Social Age (Late 2000s) – represented by Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube
Whether you are a college student, business executive, marketeer, crafty mom or amateur camera guy with a visual joke, billions of us all start posting and interacting with each other’s daily news and passion projects.
Stage V – The Mobile & Impact Age (Early 2010s) – represented by Netflix, Instagram and iPhone
The internet starts looking a lot prettier, more visual and less words, context-aware and always-on (they say 81% of Millennials now sleep with their phone). About 80% of the developed world is now connected to the web and nearly half of the developing world is also there too.
Introducing Stage VI – The Impact Age (the Late 2010s) – represented by Internet of Things, Big Data, Wearables, and Virtual/Augmented Reality
We want something more out of digital now, it’s no longer our play thing – in a world with a crushing pace of change, time demands and drive for personal fulfillment and immediate efficiency, we are now demanding it to become more personalized to our needs, more immersive to our desired experiences and smarter to give us exactly what we want and when we want it. Who will be the winners? and losers? how quick will it happen? and what will be want by 2020 as our next phase? We’ll chat this in an upcoming post.
Yeah that’s right, I’m just another blonde guy with a cause…
Here is my tale. After I left corporate life in 2005 and decided to take a full bite out of the digital apple, the daily grind of business networking, producing content, sharing ideas and getting your name out there actually seemed pretty easy to me. There were fewer channels to cover off. The real authorities in this digital space numbered in the tens, if not hundreds – you could connect to them without the slightest suspicion. And the blogging age allowed even the independent underdog to look big.
Given how seamless it was to connect myself with people and prospects on these nascent spaces of LinkedIn, blogs and Facebook (once it opened up to us now graduated types), it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I thrived. It made sense to spend only a bit of time on my personal brand and a lot of time, working on my various startup and business endeavours. After all, I am a business person and value creator, not a social media ninja (shiver).
Dial forward 10 years, and it is so much more murky. As much as I feel so much smarter about the broader palette of the digital environment, there is always more, more, more. I check out for a month on client projects, and it feels like I’m already out of date.
The personal brand pin dropped for me a few years ago, almost by accident. I started getting weird messages in my inbox and misdirected tweets. It was about this guy Sean Moffett.
Damn! I thought I had been blessed with a distinct name (Sean Moffitt) and yet Sean Moffett, born in the same town as me, had just rocked up the personal brand Moff- charts with a radio show, a can’t miss, global sales training model and a Twitter account that had zoomed up past 100,000 followers in less than a year.
I’ve never met him before, but i have to say I was a bit envious and frustrated by the misattribution of our work. C’mon – I had written hundreds of blog posts, invested in daily media channels, wrote some serious thought leader content, spoke on many stages and even wrote a very weighty book. Was I destined to be the second most popular Sean Moff— in my very own town?
Now thankfully, it appears Sean Moffett’s bubble burst quickly, his Twitter account was suspended for some presumably nefarious practices and his international sales training business came to a close. His LinkedIn account suggests he has gone back to being a financial services manger for a local Honda dealer. I wish hime well. Personal brand identity crisis averted!
It did give me pause for consideration, if fame was so fleeting in a socially connected, always-consuming Snapchat age, what was I to do? 2016 marks a turning point for me. The industry around me has matured and so have I. I can’t just be present, need to invest in my personal brand and it starts here.
I have decided on seven future directions to burnish my SeanMoffitt brand that have crystallized in the post you are reading here (hopefully some of the takeaways resonate with your own personal brand):
1.Welcome to SeanMoffitt.com – All my content, all my services, all my recent thinking in one place – people may doubt that websites are important anymore, but they are when you need a hub for people to more deeply chew on your stuff or get a full sense of what a generalist like myself does. And the themes and software are so much easier to look good and stay updated. Welcome to my personal brand home – please kick off your shoes and stay awhile.
2.Personal Brand Takes Centre Stage – I have never been comfortable with being the self-promoting carnie act that is represented by the worst of my social media peers (you know them, I won’t name them). Perhaps it’s my awshucks Canadian-ness. Or I’d rather have merit versus bluster shine through. So I promise I will never become the Klout-chasing, spamming, douchey blowhard, but my pendulum does need to swing back. I undersell myself and shed the spotlight too often to others. I am going to climb out from behind Wikibrands, CSW and a host of other corporate brands I am affiliated with and spend time on promoting my own.
3. The Sean Moffitt Brand Proposition – hopefully this new focus brings some clarity to the age old question “what is it you do?”. The great thing about producing your very own personal brand site is that it pauses you to think what value do I bring to people. These are my six:4. Sean Moffitt – The Global Thought Leader and Stage Act – I have been blessed with the benefit of speaking at as many as 45+ keynotes per year in some exciting locales, alongside some truly great thinkers and performers. All of these bookings happened through word of mouth – no peddling myself and no use of speaker’s bureaus. Being that loosey goosey has its advantages, but definite downsides. My personal brand move aims for better clarity, nimbleness, globalness and selectivity in my future consulting and stage gigs. Contact my publciist here.
5. New Business Chapter and Innovation Focus – after a recent trip to sunny part of our world (sidebar: I really should have used more SPF), I asked myself the question “what do I really want to do over the next 5 years?”. The mores? I will be doing more global work with impact, working with more teams and partners with more dedicated clients, delivering more C-suite innovation, emerging technology and strategic planning work, becoming a bigger bridge between digital and marketing – see my post on “the Rise of the CDO”. The lesses? I will be spending less time on new media tactical work, fewer pie in the sky projects and less energy pulling out my hair with crappy clients and valueless administration. More exciting news on all this later.
6.The rise of Content-driven Personal Brand Success – I am going to be more regimented in getting the content wheel moving again and keeping it moving. If I have promulgated the rise of inbound marketing, wide content syndication, smart content curation and partner affiliations, i should probably live the part, right? SeanMoffitt.com shall be my HQ. Check out my posts, the 4+ research projects I coordinate each year, the 12+ topics I consult on and the 40+ topics I speak about.
7. Purpose and Passion …together – this new direction and new site will act as lightning rod for people who think like me and more easily help link people who want to work together and think collaboratively. if you are heavily invested in customers, brands, technology, innovation and the future, we are aligned. Let’s have a conversation.
Introducing Stage VI – The Impact Age (the Late 2010s) – represented by Internet of Things, Big Data, Wearables, and Virtual/Augmented Reality
