What is your opinion of branding one’s own name as opposed to a company name when considering website creation, facebook pages, google+pages – especially for Social Media consulting.

I was toying around with a name not associated with my name, but then a friend suggested I just go with my name – since I’ve been branding on that the past year and a half.

@susanavello
I think it really depends on what your career goals are.  If you’re looking to be well-known, then you should probably try to brand your personal name.  A lot of popular bloggers (fill-in-the-blank here) have done this and they don’t care if you know the name of their business.   Personally, I like the idea of branding a company name that doesn’t require your complete dedication and involvement. You may want to start other companies down the line and need to shift your focus, while others help run your other business. 

Great topic and excited to see what others say here. 

@susanavello

Great question!

When I first started 15 years ago my company name was Stelzner Consulting.  It worked for me, but then I got kinda big.  I ended up changing it to WhitePaperSource Publishing and then finally Social Media Examiner.

Using my name at first was easy because I was a sole proprietorship.  But it got kinda crazy as I grew because everyone always wanted “me” because I was the man.

If you think you ever might want to sell your business, you may want to come up with a name that takes you out of the equation.

Of course you can do what I did and start easy and later change using a “Doing business as” and then eventually incorporate.

@susanavello, @mike-stelzner brings up one of the most important reasons to not use your name for the business. You don’t want to be doing this for the rest of your life, so what happens when you’re ready to get out? 

Selling Zuckerbook would be far more difficult than selling Facebook.

I do both because I’m in a very rural part of Wisconsin. I want the people I interact with to get to know me personally but I also want them to know my business. I decided to brand both so if they couldn’t remember either my name or my business name they could look up either one and find me.

@susanavello, @mike-stelzner @caseyvalianthas have very valid points. We had a client recently with a branding issue. He is a vocal coach so branding his name was important, but he had a new book coming out with a website named after it, so the book branding needed to also be pushed. We used both for obvious reasons already mentioned and since he had domain names for both, we just utilized them to promote his book website for better SEO. In our case, this person benefited from our expertise, but it really depends on your long-term goals.

Unless there is a very good reason to do so, I always suggest a formal (be sure it is unique, easy to spell and say) biz name and a DBA to start with and then expand from there. You want room for your biz to grow bigger than you ever anticipated so that others can help you run it, or sell it outright and start another biz.