Anyone experienced with personal branding or thinking about trying it?

Anyone experienced with personal branding, or want to try it? I have talked to some recruiters and other IT professionals and personal branding seems to be the new way to finding a job. Although, I have also heard many recruiters and other IT and business professionals say that having someone vouch for you is a BIG plus too. I think having both would be a great combo!
I want to create a personal brand; does anyone have any tips or know of any ways to do it? I found some links I pasted below, but I’m looking for someone in IT that has done or is currently doing it. I get the feel you're really opening up you real life and online life and merging them together.

Ultimately I'm just looking for some guidance on this, because even though I love IT, I don’t have a lot of social media experience, not unless you count Linkedin and my posts on Tech Exam forums.

Also, I wish there was a do’s and don’t s guide for creating a personal brand.

The links I found for branding, that I found interesting:

4 Little Known Tools for Managing Your Online Brand
How to Build a (BIG) Personal Brand Online
The Point of Personal Branding
How to Build Your Authentic Personal Brand
Don't Follow in Twitter's Footsteps with Your Personal Brand

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Comments

xenodamus

Ok...took me some googling to wrap my head around this.

So, the main idea here is merging your offline and online selves, becoming totally transparent to anyone who would like to get to know you via the web.

Then you take this transparent, online presence and market yourself as if you were a product.

Am I close here? I keep trying to reconcile the "branding" part of the term, thinking people are coming up with catchy, copyrighted "brand" names in their self-marketing tactics.

ampersand

I created a LinkedIn profile and use my domain name (firstnamelastname.com) to display a brief resume, but that's the limit of my knowledge. Isn't personal branding more common in the creative fields, like graphic designers, photographers, etc.?