Are you using Facebook and Twitter to promote your business?  If so, one of the questions you’ve already, or will face is whether to promote yourself personally or your company. For example, should your Twitter address be @JoeBlow or @JoesLawnCare? Likewise, should you use a personal Facebook profile to promote your business or create a Facebook “fan page”?

As trivial as the question may seem at first, I think the brand yourself-vs-your-company decision has real economic implications. According to Forbes Magazine, Oprah has a net worth of $2.4 billion largely because of the personal platform she has built.  The Oprah Winfrey Show has 75,000 followers on Twitter, O magazine has 106,000 followers, Oprah Radio has 25,000 followers. Oprah herself has more than four million followers.  I wonder how the Forbes researchers valued the power of her personal brand? Is Harpo (her holding company) worth much without Oprah as its chief pitch person?

Tim Ferriss on why you should stop wasting time on branding yourself

For answers I spoke with Tim Ferriss this week who, as the author of The Four Hour Work Week, has a six figure Twitter following and one of the best-read blogs on the internet. I asked Ferriss whose new book The Four Hour Body comes out later this year, why he never used his personal brand to promote his business BrainQUICKEN, which he sold last year:

WARRILLOW: You have one of the best-read blogs in business with hundreds of thousands of followers yet you rarely used your personal platform to promote your business.  Why not?

FERRISS: Unless you’re in one of a handful of businesses like public speaking, I think managing and growing a personal brand can be a huge distraction for company founders. I see all of these entrepreneurs trying to collect Twitter followers and it reminds me of a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull.  In this case, the founders are the bull. The bull fighter moves away the flag and the bull comes up with nothing but air.

Steve Jobs has a personal brand but it is Apple’s product design that makes it such a valuable company.  He isn’t jumping on FourSquare to develop his “personal brand”.

I’ll use my Twitter feed (@JohnWarrillow) to let you know when the full article with Tim comes out but in the mean time, it’s interesting to see how Gary Vaynerchuk approaches personal vs. business branding differently.

Could Oprah and Gary Vaynerchuk both be wrong?

Vaynerchuk is the guy who wrote Crush It! Which chronicles how he took his father’s corner liquor store and transformed it into a global wine retailing business leveraging tools like Twitter and Facebook.  In our interview, Vaynerchuk explained how he took the opposite approach from Ferriss and branded himself ahead of his company:

WARRILLOW: You’ve built an amazing personal brand, but was it a mistake to promote yourself over your company?

VAYNERCHUK: I know if I stopped hosting Wine Library TV, we’d probably lose 75 per cent of our audience, but the remaining 25 per cent is still a big number.

WARRILLOW: I think business owners reading this would be horrified at the thought of losing 75 per cent of their customers.

VAYNERCHUK: I understand, but look at the numbers. The average liquor retailer in the United States sells for 30 cents for every dollar in revenue, so a $10-million liquor retailer is worth around $3.5-million. I’ve been offered $2 per dollar of revenue for my business, so I’m confident the value of my personal brand is accruing to my business as well.

If people are worried about undermining their business value by promoting their personal brand, they are not thinking big enough. Look at Oprah or Martha Stewart or even Martha Stewart’s chef, Emeril Lagasse, whose business interests she (Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia) just acquired for $70-million.

My Opinion: decide how you want to spend the next 20 years

Vaynerchuk and Ferriss are two wildly successful guys with two very different approaches to marketing themselves personally vs. their business interests.  So what’s the right answer?

I think it comes down to how you want to spend your time in the next chapter of your life. If, like Vaynerchuk and Oprah, you like bringing your personal brand to a variety of different businesses projects and philanthropic causes, then cultivating a personal brand ahead of any one business gives each new project you undertake a head start.

In contrast, if your goal is to sell your business and ride off into the sunset or do some anonymous angel investing where your contribution is your brain not your brand, then pouring your marketing resources into promoting your company will likely get you a higher price for your business.

What do you think? If your goal is to sell your business one day, should you brand yourself or your company?

As you ponder that, here are two new article I wrote this week on selling a business…

Don’t be boring, follow Jeremy Gutsche’s advice

~ published September 28, 2010 the Globe and Mail

Predictability is one of the most important attributes of any business. Owners, investors and acquirers all want a reliable stream of profits well into the future.

But almost by definition, predictability can be boring, and those same owners, investors and acquirers want to see growth, which usually comes from selling new products and services, and winning new customers. »more

Why You Need to Sell Less Stuff to More People

~ published September 23, 2010 BNET

Are you trying to grow by selling a lot of stuff to a few people or one thing to a lot of people?

If you want to sell your business one day, I’d encourage you to consider selling one thing to lots of people. In fact, if any one of your customers represents more than 15 percent of your revenue, it may be time to diversify.  Being overly reliant on one customer is not just risky now, but it will also discount the value of your business when you’re ready to sell it down the road. »more

(photo of Timothy Ferriss courtesy of UK Telegraph)

(photo of Gary courtesy of Gary’s Facebook page)