Your personal brand is like your writing style: you have one even if you don’t know it. So you might as well figure out how to develop your brand to your advantage.

Personal branding was the focus of a November 17 Medill Alumni Club meeting in Chicago, where local pundits spent an evening swapping ideas on a panel. The panelists consisted of Hope Bertram, founder of Windy City Social; Adrienne Samuels Gibbs, senior editor, Ebony; Leah Jones, director of customer experience, SpotOn; Kyra Kyles, reporter, Tribune RedEye; Robert Mark, Northwestern University adjunct faculty member and editor, Jetwhine.com; and Cassandra West, social media specialist, Urban Gardener. Here are some take-aways:

• Before you consider the tools for building your brand, have a strategy (a point stressed repeatedly by Robert Mark). When your co-workers see you in the office and you bump into colleagues at conferences, what do you want to be remembered for? A passion for music? An expert in wine? Expertise in PR? All of the above? And what is your goal? Are you looking for a job? Seeking to raise your profile to get a promotion? Then figure out how to share that brand.

• Once you sort out your strategy, then share your brand across multiple platforms consistently — and this is where social media tools can be so useful. The content you post on Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twitter, etc., should consistently build your brand. In particular, LinkedIn has exploded in popularity for professional networking and content sharing. Haven’t updated your LinkedIn contacts lately? Do so now. (However, Hope Bertram offered a caution on using multiple platforms. In her view, you need to cultivate different voices on different platforms — for instance, your Twitter voice should be distinct from the style of writing you use on your blog if you have one because by its nature Twitter rewards short, punchy bursts of information.)

• Know the relationship between your professional brand and personal life. If you’ve decided to let professional colleagues have access to a Facebook page your family and friends see, then you’re going to need to post only information that supports your brand — or else divide your professional from your personal lists of friends. For the professional list, post only information that supports your brand. For your personal lists, share whatever you want to share.

• Contrary to popular wisdom, there is a time and place for anonymity in the social world. For instance, what if you want to branch out into a category of interest that conflicts with your personal brand? The panelists agreed that it makes sense to create a separate Twitter account with an identity completely divorced from yours — akin to a pen name. Adrienne Samuels Gibbs indicated that she enjoys following @blackinformant on Twitter, an anonymous account that shares news about blacks. She speculated that whoever runs @blackinformant must have a good reason to remain anonymous. Perhaps the author or authors are not black. Perhaps the account conflicts with someone’s personal brand otherwise. But the account is useful to her just the same.

• Don’t lock yourself into a brand that prevents you from growing, in the words of Leah Jones. And  if you do, have the courage to reinvent your brand. Leah discussed how she once killed her Twitter account (not easy to do since it had 7,500 followers) and revived her account as @ChicagoLeah because her old account was confining her brand. (More about her story here.) Two ways to avoid getting “boxed in”: define your strategy first and be discerning about what you want the professional world to know about you.

• The personal website is far from dead. Use a tool like WordPress to build one — but only if you can do it right. As Leah Jones pointed out, the advantage to your website is that you own it. You don’t have to worry about Twitter failing or Facebook changing its privacy policies. She suggests you view your website as a hub connecting all the places where your brand lives (Facebook, SlideShare, etc.). But a word of caution from Kyra Kyles: “Don’t make a personal website that looks like a MySpace page that ran away from MySpace. Do it right or not at all.”

• Social media tools should support your brand — not take over your life. If you spend more time maintaining your Twitter account than meeting people in the offline world, something is wrong. If you attend conferences, blog about what you hear, and have no time to network with people who are in the room with you, then something is wrong. Manage the technology, not the other way around.

I found the event to be useful for many reasons, the most important being that I met some cool people. Remembering to put social media in perspective, I took notes for my blog, but I avoided doing a real-time blog (live blogging is difficult when you want to set aside time to talk). And I did not do any live Tweeting (too distracting in this smaller, interactive setting). I stayed focused on the people around me.

Other random tidbits:

• “Email is useful as a virtual business card but not much more.” (Kyra Kyles)

• “On your website you can control the story that you want told about you.” (Leah Jones)

• “Personal recommendations from bosses on LinkedIn is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.” (Robert Mark)

• “LinkedIn recommendations from bosses are not credible. Get your coworkers to write recommendations on LinkedIn.” (Hope Bertram)

• “Personal branding has its limits. I do not want to see myself defined as a product.” (Cassandra West)

• “Please put away your personal devices when you are with other people. There’s nothing more rude than looking at your phone when you’re supposed to be making eye contact with someone. That’s bad for your brand.” (Adrienne Samuels Gibbs)

• “You can kill your brand with social media if you mindlessly Tweet about anything that comes to mind.” (Robert Mark)

Of all the points I heard, the one that resonates the most is the anonymity of social media. Most every social media pundit I know advises against being anonymous in the social world. This is the first panel I’ve attended where anonymity was not only accepted but advocated. What do you think about anonymity in the social world– agree or disagree with the panelists?