It’s weird when people know you from your blog.

Conversations get strange. You’ve never met a person, yet you think you know them. You associate them with the agile crowd, the lean posse, the social media gurus or any other label in existence. And presto, you have a whole set of assumptions about your conversation partner.

It’s strange, but also very powerful. You can skip the obvious stuff and dive directly into some interesting topics to discuss. You connect faster.

If you are involved on the internet, you can nurture the labels put on you. At least, so we think.

Yeah, yeah, this is about personal branding.

Years ago when I started blogging, I decided to cover “projects and humans”. There is no way I can pronounce “The Project Sociologist” (my first option). So it became “Project Shrink”.

People remember that name. Not my real name. But they remember “Project Shrink”. Because it’s funny. It’s short. But in general, people have no real topic associated with that name other than “something with humans”.

I am not the Kanban-guy, the Scrum guru, the Monte Carlo Simulator or SharePoint-man.

That’s a Personal Branding sin. People have to know “what you’re about”.

I started out writing about “Project Management”. But under that label humans don’t play a role. (At least, that’s what I’m told.) In “general management”: yes. In “human resourcing”: yes.

So I adopted “Project Leadership”. Now that is a lovely area in which you can throw any human topic you can imagine. The drawback is, nobody really knows what it is exactly. It may be a safe label, but it’s not an effective one.

I like discussing how you can combine different project approaches effectively. Dave Prior came up with “Project Mashups”. I tried “Freestyling“. I liked “Project Management 2.0″, but that has “Project Management” in it, and, as I explained, “Project Management” doesn’t do humans. Besides, it’s been taken.

And don’t get me started about the responses you get when you use the word “Social Media”!

Currently “Project Shrink” stands for “Project Leadership/Social Media” – guy. That’s my view on the matter.

At a recent PM congress I found out that I am “the video guy”. Just because I am weird enough to walk around in a suit with a cheap flip cam (ha! there are more of us!).

300 thought provoking posts about projects could not do what walking around with a $100 electronic gadget established.

So, it seems: weird is good.

Or perhaps: more distinctive is good.

With a gazillion PMPs and agilistas, it doesn’t make any sense to use that label as a differentiator.

You have to be in a party of one. Or two. Max.

You have to make up your own words, otherwise you end up in some kind of turf war, yapping about semantics.

And than, hope it sticks.

And that’s the great thing when people know you from your blog. You get a glimpse of what you are really about.

Do you know what you’re about? And do you know how people view you?