With an involuntary guest appearance from Chris Brogan (thanks Chris!)

In Monday’s post, I  critiqued the term “Personal Branding” which generated a fairly lively discussion – including input from the patron saint of “Personal Brand Experts” Dan Schawbel. But it got me thinking about some basic terminology I use all the time – in particular the difference between “Identity” (Andrew Mueller called me out on this one)  ”Branding” (David Sandusky thinks we should abandon the term), and “Brand” (Rob Frankel doesn’t think this word ever belongs with “personal”).

Then I got to thinking about how these things could be expressed using the Twitter universe as a metaphor.

Here's my first attempt. Does it make sense to you?

Why Chris Brogan? Well, duh…

Originally, I was going to use my own Twitter account as an example, but who am I kidding? There just aren’t enough people out there talking about me to make my own little corner of the Twittiverse a very good example.

So who could I use that has great Twitter karma, a well-known identity, is widely discussed, re-tweeted faithfully, and generally respected as a decent fellow? Why, social media rock star and überblogger  Chris Brogan of course. And if you don’t know who he is, immediately check out his blog Chrisbrogan.com, his Twitter account, and his latest book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.

It ain’t perfect, but I’m looking for help here

I know that it’s not the perfect metaphor, particularly since in corporate branding terminology, “identity” means name+logo+design standards – all of which overlap with the “branding” category above. But it’s working for me for now.

How about you? Is there a way I can make this stronger?