Juggling personal brands

January 20, 2011 Jan Schultink

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.