The Brand Called URL

Andy Warhol said that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Tom Peters said that in the new world of work, everyone will be responsible for "The Brand Called You." Nathan Shedroff says that in the new economy, everyone will be famous for 15 pages. The combination of Warhol and Peters, in other words, yields a new maxim for an economy in which business is migrating to the Web and people are migrating to Free Agent Nation.

"Almost everyone will have a personal Web site, just as almost everyone has a phone number -- at least in the developed world," predicts Shedroff, 34, cofounder and chief creative officer of Vivid Studios. There are already plenty of ways to promote yourself, from informal networking to paid advertising. But a personal Web site -- a 24x7 storefront devoted exclusively to the Brand Called You -- may become the mother of all self-promotion tools. "It's going to eclipse everything that came before it," says Shedroff.

Shedroff knows a bit about eclipsing the past. He and a partner founded Vivid Studios during the Internet's Pleistocene Era -- back in 1990, before the World Wide Web took off -- and built Vivid into one of the online world's premier branding firms. Today, about 85 "Vividians" work out of the company's warehouse headquarters, in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch. There, they design Web sites and craft digital strategies for such clients as Nike, Charles Schwab, AltaVista, and Arthur Andersen.

It wasn't all that long ago that techno-elitists turned up their noses at personal Web sites. Then, earlier this year, Yahoo! bought GeoCities for a cool $3.5 billion -- and the sniffing abruptly stopped. "Personal publishing represents the next big paradigm shift on the Web," Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang has said. And, according to Shedroff, personal publishing represents the next big thing in branding: Witness former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's recent Web-site IPO, which instantly transformed the 82-year-old public-policy figure from a wise doctor with worthwhile advice into a hip Webpreneur worth millions.

Shedroff has given this emerging techno-zone -- a zone where the Web meets personal branding -- a great deal of thought. (He's the kind of guy who takes along his laptop on a Hawaiian vacation, so that he can write essays on the beach.) On his Web site (www.nathan.com), you'll find a friendly greeting -- "Welcome to my world . . ." -- followed by a series of choices that allow you to experience what's going on in "My Current Headspace." Among the offerings in "Newest Things" are articles and presentations on seduction, the online industry, online branding, and personal Web sites. Go to his essay on personal Web sites, and you'll discover Shedroff's Web-site taxonomy -- personal, professional, and communal -- and his answer to the question, "Why would someone want a personal Web site, anyway?" "As is usual with new media and technology," writes Shedroff, "we tend to wrongly view the new as different than what has come before merely because it is unusual. However, personal Web sites are close cousins to journals, photo albums, diaries, and holiday letters. In all the important ways, they are not new at all, but merely the latest evolution of personal expression."

For people who have misgivings about personal Web sites, Shedroff is quick to offer reassurance. "I know several people who are extremely successful, who are well known in their industries, and who don't have their own Web sites," he says. "They don't even have their resumes online. It's not a necessity."

But there's a reason why so many people are creating personal Web sites. "It's a good tool," Shedroff says. "What better way to describe yourself repeatedly, concisely, and maybe even completely? For a professional who's worried about the Brand Called You, a personal Web site is probably the best tool ever created."

In an interview with Net Company, Shedroff offered principles for creating a Web site that will electrify your personal brand.

1. Know thyself.

Designing your personal Web site is only the second step. Before you do anything else, you've got to figure out who you are, and then you've got to embrace that. Everything else flows from there. People outside the mainstream -- gays and lesbians, women, ethnic minorities -- have always had to confront this issue. There's a point in their lives when they have to say, "This is who I am. If you can't handle it, move on." Before you begin designing a Web site, think about what kind of life you want to lead and what kind of career you want to design. The secret to having a compelling Brand Called You is to know thyself. Otherwise, you're promoting someone else's brand with your name on it.