The challenge to be interesting in a noisy world

Many of my friends who are self-employed/freelancing in marketing and communications and I share one big pain point. We are champions and supporters of each other but we're all uncomfortable with how we're branding ourselves, largely, I think, because we're not comfortable with promoting ourselves.

With a bajillion blogs out there, I think a great reason for doing a personal blog is to give a bit of insight into what a person is like, show how we think, what sets us apart from the pack. Reveal a little of the underlying stories that make us more interesting than the resumé does. It's what I've been trying to do with my social presence.

And last week I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could be interesting without using any marketing jargon at all in my tweets and posts. My rule includes a list of prohibited words; labels like marketing, brand, social media, audience, consumers or customers. If I can't say why something's interesting without those words then the rule is, I can't post it. I'm sure this will be tough but I'm treating it like flossing or something I should be doing more of rather than just going cold turkey.

We'll see.
[update - this truly is challenging. It's going to be a work in progress!]