Personal Branding and the Marketing Revolution

I've read many informative books and articles over the last few years and still I am no marketing expert, but as an expert in building community spirit and collaborative working I thought it might be fun to share some thoughts about the developments and hopefully promote some challenging debate here about Social Networking's role as a supporting toolset for developing out own personal branding to support our marketing needs.  This is an update to an article first published on Ecademy in 2006.

When mankind first started trading he developed markets as a place to bring people together and allow them to demonstrate what they had and what they did and decide, there and then, whether to trade. Marketing was via experience of the product at the market, Of course they didn't have the means of communicating in the way we do today.