Branding and Personal Branding Is There A Difference?

Well let's start off with the basics.  What is branding?

Here is what wikipedia has to say: The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.

Now you might want to know what is personal branding?
Once again here's what Wikipedia has to say:  Personal branding is, for some people, a description of the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands.

There has been a lot of discussion on the Internet lately of why it has become so popular to Personally Brand pages that are being shown or advertised on Traffic Exchanges.

Know rap your head around this,  user name job123, is advertising a long drawn out page that happens to be very popular. OK you have seen this page half a thousand times now and have no way to distinguish between job123's page or anyone Else's.  Reflect upon the results of the advertising,
job123=0 Program owner =100%. Here's the next fact, you
have now either read the page or were to bored by the long drawn out page to actually look at it, but somehow you have decided you are going to join. So you either type in the site address or click the link the next time you see the page.

Final results are the program owner just got another sign up and poor job123 did all the work with nothing to show!

Let's look at the same situation but this time use Personal Branding and Social Marketing.

Job123 has made a splash page for the same opportunity, He has made it so that it stands out and stops you from clicking away to the next page and it has interested you to find out more. Now Job123 has also added his real picture and Name!  Joe is in a traffic exchange and you have recognised him from his picture and you ask him about that page and the opportunity, Why you were already interested in it but the difference is you know who Joe is! Joe has now accomplished generating a referral for the opp, but more importantly he has associated himself to the promotion....

So what we have is setting himself out as being different from everyone else promoting that opportunity. This is the power behind Personal Branding and Social Marketing.