Staring out my window at another beautiful Tennessee morning, I am reminded that I still have a long way to go before I can call the first year of my MBA a wrap. When I started out in August, I did have some realization of how much of an impact being here would have on my brand, as a professional, but I never thought I would still be reinventing that brand five weeks before the end of classes.

I guess you can call the last month or so an “existential personal branding crisis;” a series of events, decisions and perspectives that have made me question my own brand and how effective it really is. This was, in part, thanks to my struggle to fit my interest in new media into a competitive edge in my MBA internship search. It was also a function of my neurotic, over-caffinated ambition but then again, that’s really not new to most people that know me.

Here’s the crux of the issue: When you’re dealing with brands that have to be competitive in new media, you are always balancing professionalism with personalities.

Take, for example, a recent attempt we tried out at OwenBloggers.com to get students engaged with the mission of the site. His name is Little Ralphie Owen and originally, he was going to serve as the snarky voice of the student body, saying all of the things we wanted to, but never fit within the professional context of our blogs. Instead of drawing swarms of MBA students to the site, what ended up happening was Little Ralphie just didn’t fit within the context of the brand.

You can put the same thing into the context of competing for a job opportunity. For most of the interviews that I’ve been on, the conversations go really well but I was still trying to fit my passion for new media marketing into brands that weren’t set up for it. So, that’s really why I’ve spent the last week or so working over my vision for my own brand and how it’s going to get me to the finish line.

The epilogue of Little Ralphie is that in the failure of the experiment, we were able to more clearly develop the framework of the brand. In other words; by creating a brand that didn’t fit, we found new clarity around what it was we were trying to accomplish. More importantly, with OwenBloggers and my own professional life, the reinvention of the brands because of a failure has made the new brands even stronger.

The lesson is to examine failed brands closely because it is in their failures that you can find the key to better, more effective brands.

Technorati Tags: OwenBloggers, personal brand, reinventing brands