Juggling personal brands

No presentation insight today, but some musings about my personal branding. Skip if you are not interested.

The URL www.stickyslides.com might be down today as a result of scary shifting and moving of my online properties. Things should propagate over the next 24 hours back to normal. It is all the result of a personal branding project. I am a strategy consultant, so here are the recommendations:

• Jan Schultink, used as my Twitter handle. I do not have a name like Steve Jobs, so chances are that if you do not happen to be a native Dutch speaker you will find it hard to remember, spell, and pronounce my name.
• Axiom One, the name of my company. This name was picked without much thought from a dictionary (I was still in the "A" section). Axiom was trade marked in Israel I think, so we added the "One". There are thousands of companies called Axiom in the world (even a few are called "Axiom One", and the connection with what I actually try to achieve in the world is zero.
• Sticky Slides, the name of this blog (renamed already once from "Slides that Stick"). I like the name, it covers what I do, still it comes across more as the title of a high school newspaper rather than a serious presentation design firm in discussions with CFOs of publicly traded companies. BUT I have built a lot of equity with the 1,000 or so blog posts in the archive
• Idea Transplant, the name of my shiny new company web site. It covers what I do (better than Sticky Slides), unique, serious, and fun at the same time. No brand equity what so ever.

So I am biting the bullet and shifting gradually to Idea Transplant. The longer I wait, the more difficult it will become. Yesterday I followed a crash course in HTML 301 redirects and Blogger custom domains to avoid minimal disruption and to make sure that all links and RSS continue to work. I even managed to swap the user names of 2 Twitter accounts without affecting follower bases (@janschultink became @ideatransplant, and @ideatransplant became @janschultink).

Sticky Slides is moving to blog.ideatransplant.com and at some time I will change the name as well. I will keep the Blogger blog engine to preserve the archive of posts.