Switch to Mac and you will become instantly cool, you will have fun while you work, and the blue screen of death will never appear again. Ever.

That’s the Apple promise.

The corporate world had this figured out decades ago. Often, it’s not about the physical value of a product or service, it’s about the strength of a promise; it’s about the strength of a brand.

After all, it’s a ‘brand’ new world where colors are trademarked and words are copyrighted. Bad publicity is more powerful than law. Reputations and perceptions are carefully controlled, professionally crafted, and monitored with military-like precision. Five lousy seconds of an unfortunate accident can end up in the news, or worse, on YouTube.

Welcome to 2010, where nothing is what it seems. Most businesses, large or small, practice corporate branding to some extent. Hollywood stars and business tycoons spend billions of dollars each year on brand strategists and publicists. And with the Internet, Google, and social media, the branding bug has marked its latest territory: You.

Your laundry, shining white or stained and dirty, no longer needs to be exciting (or embarrassing) enough to become public. All it takes is your name, typed into a search box, followed by an “Enter”.

There are many possible scenarios that follow that “Enter”. The searcher, whether a prospective business connection, employer, or simply a curious individual, may find a few random results; a newspaper article, a Facebook profile, and a comment on some site that you would rather not have people see. Or they could find results that have nothing to do with you at all, and rather, with a person who shares the same name. The ideal scenario would be having the searcher see a collection of links that you deem appropriate, and that you carefully control.

Professional branding on the Web is vital to today’s business ecosystem. If you are working on building your career, you need to make sure that employers access information that showcases your talent as well as clearly differentiates you from competition. If you are past the beginning of your career, and need to build business connections instead, you have to ensure that the first few pages of search results are expressive of your accomplishments and strong enough to hide the not-so-good stuff on Google.

As with corporate branding, the first thing you need to do before you start building your professional brand is make a few decisions. What is your professional promise? This is how you want people to think of you — it could be a promise of work of the highest quality or it could be innovative thinking. How would you like to portray yourself online? Do you want to be proactive in your branding and actually share your thoughts and ideas or simply make sure that your name is consistently associated with your image?

What follows is the fun stuff. The Holy Grail of personal branding on the web is social networking — the good ones have such high search ranks that they will definitely show up on the first page of search results. Create accounts of as many networks as you can, including LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, and even Facebook, which is becoming increasingly important for businesses. If you enjoy writing, you might want to consider starting a blog as it is one of the best ways to showcase your professional experience and knowledge.

The important thing to keep in mind regardless of the tool though is consistency. Use the same variation of your name across everything you want to be associate with you and a pseudonym with everything you don’t. Always use the same photograph of yourself, and make sure it reflects how you want to be portrayed. Update the social networks you’re a part of at least once a month with carefully crafted messages that reflect your professional side.

It’s simple: You are a brand. It all matters. Build and own your online brand and don’t let others define it for you.

What does Google have to say about you? If you have no idea, well, you better’d find out.

Originally published in Venture magazine, August 2010

More Hyperlink articles:
It’s Time to Learn How to Surf
It’s Real Time
Start a Blog is NOT a Social Media Strategy
Advertising on the Information Highway
Social is the Word
The iPad Will Change the World
Does the Internet Now Speak Arabic?

A family sitting in the garden on a hot summer night, eating cold watermelon and drinking hot mint tea. An old woman waiting impatiently in a governmental building for his paperwork to be complete. A man resting downtown in front of the Al-Husseini Mosque, watching the hustle and bustle of the heart of the city. A collection of random men paying their respects over death.

Different settings. Different people. Different occasions.

The one constant: the white plastic chair.

This is an ode to this design disaster, function heaven.

I hate the way you look. I hate the way you instantly cheapify even the most beautiful scene. Yet, I gotta give you this, my dear white plastic chair: without you, the world wouldn’t be the same.

I’m glad you exist.

I’m pretty late for the July photo round up, but it’s been a crazy few weeks.

July has always been one of my favorite months of the year, and not just because it’s full of family celebrations. I really am a summer girl; I love the mid-year energy, the excitement, and even the tiredness that is a result from the heat.

With that said, this is the hottest Ammani summer I remember. It is even hotter than the summer of 2006, which was also a World Cup July. The Riyadh-bred girl? Long gone. My tolerance for heat is now: zero. Yet, what I enjoy about such uncharacteristically weird weather is that it’s always easier to start conversations about it with even the most random strangers.

I’m going to attempt to do something a little different with my monthly images this time, and caption them. I know that many of you guys enjoy the anonymity of the shot minus the caption, but this would be a different way and it’s about time for change.

My brother Omar, after we spent an hour blowing up ballons for my mother’s birthday party. It was an awesome three-day celebration of her birthday, and this is day two. We got her a phone, and about time too, as hers was probably the oldest cellphone still in use in this city.

Day one of mama’s birthday celebrations. See the weird watermelon looking things on the table? We discovered this new breed of vegetable this summer during my mother’s daily work in Irbid. They’re called 7aroosh, and they taste like cucumbers but look like baby watermelons.

Yanone, designer of the Amman typeface, dressed in his workman jumpsuit because making typefaces is “hard work” during The New (Type)face of Amman lecture held in Masrah al Balad.

During a family screening of one of the World Cup games. It was a hot, hot night.

Playing scrabble with my brothers and friends. I love playing scrabble; I have never lost a game. 

My brothers and friends sitting on our balcony during early July. This week has been too hot to even sit outside! :)

The guy in the middle is 3aha, who is my Super Mario buddy.

A little cousin taking shots for one of our upcoming Ramadan family quiz nights.

Ma famile, actual + adopted. Clockwise from left; 3aha, Rand, Hisham, Kafer, Abu 7abeh, Abed, Nase7, Moose, Soori, Fas, Mama and myself.

This picture includes some of my favorite people in the world :)

Can you really archive time?

2007: On March | On April | On May | On June | On July | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

2008: On January | On February | On March | On April | On May | On June | On August On September | On October | On November

2009: On July  | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

2010: On January | On February | On March | On April | On May | On June

My RSS feed hasn’t been working for the past couple of weeks.

I have exhausted the solutions that I myself can handle, including database repair, deleting of posts, and waiting.

Anyone has any idea what the problem might be?

Originally written for Gulf Life

Rain pounded the car’s windshield on an especially cold night, even for Amman’s blistery winters, and I sank further into the passenger seat, trying and failing to avoid my friend Hal’s onslaught of words.

“Are you crazy?” she raged in frustration, not even waiting for me to respond. “You’re marrying a guy you met online?”

I shrugged, reminding her that I had met her on the Internet, too.

“Not the same thing,” she said, unfazed. “I’m different. And we’re just friends.”

Fast forward three years, and I’m browsing Hal’s wedding website while laughing at the irony of fate. “A long time ago,” read the ‘Our Story’ page. “Mr T poked Hal, in an online, Facebook world. It was instantaneous. Sparks flew left and right. Many months later, on a random night, he asked her to marry him. She said Yes.”

A simple ‘Yes’. Confirm friend. Accept connection. Approve request. Add as friend.

Little magic phrases with the power to completely alter a life, as they did for myself, Hal and multitudes of my friends, who also lead vivaciously wired lives in Arabia.

Maybe it’s the small, real-life communities in the Arab world. Or the often excessive “closedness” of Arab culture. Maybe the novelty of a new medium with a non-existant learning curve is too much to resist. Or it just might be a global trend that is impossible to avoid. Regardless of the reasons, social networks have managed to change the way we communicate, get information and, for the most part, fall in love.

Facebook is my aunt, a digital illiterate who moved straight from thinking that the only use for a personal computer is to play Solitaire, to communicating daily with her son in Saudi Arabia. Twitter is #AmmanTT, a grassroot technology initiative that manages to gather crowds of hundreds by digital word of mouth. YouTube is Mashrou’ Leila, a brilliant Lebanese band that received over 50,000 views through the video-sharing site in a mere, few months. LinkedIn is Mona, who proceeded to dump her old career, pack her bags and move to Dubai after being headhunted on the professional network.

This summer day is surprisingly nice for July in Amman, and my Twitter and Facebook streams are abuzz with conversations, observations and mental wanderings. It may be too early to tell, but mark my words: Social media will one day be heralded as one of the catalysts that changed communication in the Arab world.