All this social media chatter about personal branding reminds me of the dot-com bubble-and-burst of the late ’90s and early double-nots, when entrepreneurs put marketing and advertising in front of anything resembling business fundamentals and watched their stock prices skyrocket … until someone said, “Hey, wait a minute …”

Fast forward to today. Social media is on fire with advice for staking out your little place in the spotlight and promoting your personal brand via personal websites, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. It’s not terrible advice if that’s your thing, but as was the case in the dot-com era, the focus too often is marketing and advertising, with fundamentals again getting short shrift.

If you need evidence, check out the Twitter widget at right. Read the personal branding tweets as they appear. You’ll see things like, “7 key ways to promote your personal brand,” “10 indispensable tools for personal branding,” “Building personal brand within the social media landscape,” and on and on.

Someone needs to say it, so it might as well be me: “Hey, wait a minute …” [More]