Most of you have only met the superficial version of me. I've been thinking a lot about my personal brand in the recent weeks, and I've come to a few major decisions as to how I want people to perceive me. Through my blog, I have complete discrepancy as to how and what I write about myself. Until lately, it's been completely overdone. For some silly reason, half the people who have heard of me perceive me as a child prodigy. The other half either think I'm arrogant or don't care. The purpose of this blog post is to tell you that I'm more of the normal teenage girl than you probably think.

Firstly, I don't deserve the credibility that I have. I'm out there in the tech world and I'm sometimes mentioned on people's blogs. Big deal! I haven't sold a successful startup and I don't have a product that I've launched this year. Yet somehow, I get invited to speaking engagements and other fancy elitist groups. Instead, you should see me for and only for my enthusiasm and potential. I'm off to an early start, but in a few years, that won't matter. Nobody will care in 10 years that I went to college early and failed at a few startups when I was 16 years old. I guess I'm slightly worried that I've been spending too much time talking to you guys and not enough time doing something great. Until I find amazing success, none of you should have the right to call me smart.

Next, I much rather you guys view me as a child prodigy than as a whore. Sure, my personal branding has been overdone, but at least it was overdone in a somewhat positive direction. Unlike Paris Hilton, people have a slight clue as to what I want to do with my life. Smarts are sustainable, looks are not. As one of my friends said, "if you're going to be famous, at least have a business model." People associate my name to business and technology. As for Paris Hilton, well, people look at her as a hot girl with an empty brain. No matter how hard she tries to change her personal brand, people will be stuck in their old ways of thinking. So, if you overdo your personal branding, "do it with a business model" :)

Internet celebrity Julia Allison wrote on her Tumblr yesterday:

I’m in the midst of a transformation right now. Actually, it’s not so much an internal transformation (although there’s that, too) but a realignment - so my outside matches my inside, so the perception matches the reality.

The quote just comes to show that people don't understand who she is. They read about her in Valleywag, but they don't know how fun, enthusiastic, and smart she is in real life. I've been told so many times by my blog readers that I'm different from how they thought I'd be. Some thought that I'd be formal, proper, intelligent and well-spoken, whereas others thought I'd be a snotty-arrogant-uptight-child-prodigy-bitch. One reader suggested that I overdid my professional brand, whereas Julia blurred her personal and professional brands together.

In real life, I'm just an adventurous teenager. I like to do something called having fun. I have something called friends. I go to class, I do my homework, I play instruments, I play sports, and do all the things you'd expect a normal 17 year old kid to do. (minus the many fun business/tech trips I've been on). Sure, I'm in college, but that doesn't mean much about my personality. Instead, try to see through the fog: all of the random bloggers you stalk are real human beings and have lives outside of the internet. Their personal brand may be completely deceiving for all you know.

Like many girls, I've had that desire to have the spotlight on me. And I've gotten quite a lot of spotlight for a girl my age, but I've come to realize that it's nothing more than a distraction. I'm dedicating too much effort to building up my personal brand and not enough in a) leading a normal teenage life and b) working on doing something amazing, whether it be save the world or build a hot startup. As one of my friends Charlie mentioned, the most brilliant people he knows prefer to keep in the shadows. They don't have much of a personal brand, but their smarts and successes create the true credibility one needs to be known. I guess as of late, this idea has been much more appealing to me.

So what does all of this mean for you, me, and my future in blogging?

1) The blog lives on. I'll always continue to blog because I love you guys so much!

2) I've decided to cut wayy back on my conference going. I have many connections as it stands and I don't need to waste more time networking with 50 year olds.

3) You hopefully won't have to see me on Valleywag again. As I've mentioned in other posts, the influx of press gives you a temporary high.

4) It's soo easy to get drawn into the fun culture of Silicon Valley. It's so easy that you sometimes forget to create something of value.

So for now, I'll try to stay in the shadows. I have no problem speaking at conferences or doing interviews or whatever, but I'll remain honest and true to myself: I'm a kid who's yet to succeed in business.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup and the managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. Big thanks to my friends Jacob Locke, Patricia Handschiegel, and Charlie O'Donnell for having helped me gather my thoughts on this.

Wow. Once again, I'm disappointed with Ask. They're still spending millions of dollars on these stupid advertisements! I'll give them some credit because their decent ads that show some benefits Ask has over others, but in reference to my post about Super Bowl ads, why do they waste money on this?

Ask is an internet company, yet they choose to advertise via billboard and TV. People aren't likely to change their normal way of doing things just because they saw this advertisement. And even if they did, how is Ask supposed to measure the success, demographics, etc... of the visitors coming from these ads? They can't.

Everybody says that Ask's goal in advertising is to bring traffic to their site. I've spoken to a few Ask employees about this, and they claim that the ads are actually meant to build up brand value. Traffic isn't their first priority. My personal concern - they've been running these ads forever! When will they actually get something accomplished? A 4-5% profit decrease per year doesn't justify the millions spent on this form of marketing.

My personal take? Build a product that doesn't directly compete with Google. It doesn't matter if your algorithm or website is better or easier because Google already has recognition as being the market leader. Find a specific audience to target and a new niche/market to go after. It doesn't matter that bloggers like me are writing them up if they can't manage to convert it to dollars and cents.

For your entertainment, here's an advertisement:

In response to a comment #9 on TechCrunch, I agree - The money spent on advertising could have been spent on database storage or pay for research/development in a better product.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

AT&T made the fake and *smart* move to allow everyone in Southern California free Wi-Fi access. Kieran Nolan, AT&T vice president and general manager wants to help the community during this rough time and recovery. If for whatever reason you don't know, Southern Cali was affected by pretty bad fires.

Everybody hates AT&T, including three unnamed employees I've spoken to who work there. The obvious thing to do is for me to question their true motives behind offering free Wi-Fi to SoCal. First off, their brand image has been terrible in the recent years. They gobbled up Cingular (which for some reason, people liked better) and decided to drop the name in favor of AT&T. There's been a management change, logo change, marketing attitude change, and it seems to be working... sorta.

AT&T gets a new logo. PayPal recently changed the graphics on their website too. Why? To help eliminate the bad rap associated with their old (and current) brand. Notice the change in graphic and shift to lowercase letters...

Then the move to work with Apple's iPhone. All of a sudden, AT&T is associated with iPhone. iPhone = Cool, AT&T = Still lame.

Recently, AT&T started posting up internet ads and city billboards advertising how their cell service works in more places than before. Notice the advertisement I saw on Gizmodo the other day:

Fail. And now, they're trying to be nice by offering SoCal residents free Wi-Fi. Does it make them look like a kind and caring company? To be honest, to me, it came off as being a fake way to gain more loyal customers for when things settled down and Wi-Fi costs money again.

I'll give these AT&T people some credit. The change in branding is good. The change in management still sucks, but better than before. The agreement with Apple was brilliant. The advertisement campaign was a pathetic attempt to look like a cool, young, hip company. The decision to allow SoCal residents free Wi-Fi was also a smart move.

All in all, AT&T is improving. Their numbers are up. (probably because of the Apple agreement) However, I still thing they have a lot they need to improve on. Inner-company efficiency is terrible. Their branding still looks lame. I'll continue to critique them until they get it right.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I've been an AT&T customer since the iPhone came out and I despise them. The support sucks, the service sucks, and the company sucks. My connections from AT&T are basically living versions of Dilbert.

AT&T decided to be dumber than they already are. They recently created the above advertisement - I've seen it on quite a few websites and even on billboards in San Francisco. What a huge waste of time and money. I mean, who the hell makes up a city with a terrible name to advertise their product? Why would I want to pay for bad cell phone service if their advertising staff is drooling enough to decide that this is a great idea?

There's much more at stake than wasting time and money. Bad advertising is destroying the brand. eBay screwed up with their windorphins ad campaign. Ask.com also had meaningless billboards and TV ads that didn't get anybody to use the search engine. At the Searchnomics conference, everybody was coming up to the Ask.com employees, asking them why they had such dumb forms of marketing. Point being, this is a botched attempt to make AT&T look like a "fun" company.

If you see any of these ads on the highway, please let me know!

[Credit to Drew Levin for his collaboration] Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I've always thought about how teenagers are dieing for attention. Kids have aspirations to be movie stars and singers. Teenagers spend all of their time modding up their myspaces and facebooks. Web 2.0 geeks are doing publicity stunts, trying to get themselves onto valleywag, and some are doing the lifecasting thing. (Justin Kan, Justine Ezarik, ZoomrTV, etc...)

Everybody wants to feel important. Everybody has a different way of doing this. There are no true exceptions to this rule that I could think of. Let's look at the goth crowd. They brag about being able to slit their wrists everyday. But even that can be considered "being an attention whore" because it certainly gets attention!

Many people have multiple personas. I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate, but let's look at our good buddy Robert Scoble. He gets a LOT of attention from everywhere, but I'm sure that he acts differently around different people depending on the situation. Around his wife and son, he's probably much more low key. He probably takes the role of being a responsible father and husband. Cool. Now when he's walking out of the Apple store with the first sold iPhone at that store, he's going to come off as an attention whore. I don't blame him one little bit :)

And all of this attention is good. Bad press is good press. (to some extent) Robert (Guy) Kawasaki, a prominent angel investor and author of many good books, welcomes and encourages all bad press. Guy wants bloggers to tell readers about his stupid lame website, truemors.com . He doesn't care about the review! (or so he claims)

As for personal branding, I think being the right type of attention whore is important. Let's take a more accurate example of an attention whore - ME! For one, I have a blog. For two, I have a ustream. For three, I just act like an attention whore, period. I'll occasionally get emails from my blog readers telling me that I'm turning into an arrogant attention whore, and I tone it down a bit. This is the same with my friends.

I'll be honest - I act differently when I'm in the Bay Area. I try to be more polite and professional when I'm networking. This isn't to say that I do a really good job at it, but I'm not the same me that I am in college. When I'm in San Francisco, I pretend to know everybody and I pretend that everybody knows me. Whether or not this is true, I'll leave to you.

Back in college, I'm a tad different. Actually, I'm very different. I don't try to act professional, because I'm not. I'm an immature, supposedly down-to-earth, Abercrombie teenager college kid. When I'm with my friends, I pretend that my business doesn't exist. I keep my friends in college separate from my friends in San Francisco. For personal branding purposes, I'm going to keep my two personas separated from each other.

I hang out with a friend named Poncho. He walks around campus in nothing but a thong. If someone was to get an award for being the best attention whore on earth, Poncho would win. By being friends with an attention whore, I'm turning into one myself. When I hang out with attention whores in the web 2.0 scene, I'm turn more into an attention whore too.

Now all of this is fine, but it really screws with first impressions and expectations. I've had people read my blog, think of me as an arrogant attention whore, then email me only to think of me as a totally different person. Some people think I'm too cool to talk to them because I'm an attention whore. I hate that. Just as bad is when someone only wants to make friends with me because they label me as an attention whore. Now if I make friends with other attention whores, I know that we're all good to go.

There's so much more I want to write. I love you guys, but I really really want to go to lunch and be an attention whore around my college buddies. More to come...

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I've always loved JetBlue for its amazing service, low-cost airfare, and in-flight TV. I've spent thousands on them, but I'm now looking forward to flying on Virgin America for its cheaper fares and cool-looking entertainment system. Richard Branson from the Virgin Group has a very interesting story - he was a terrible student and failed at his first few entrepreneurial ventures, but he's now a successful serial entrepreneur who's worth billions. Let's take a look at his company:

I was looking at the Virgin Group's wikipedia entry and counted over 80 companies operating under the Virgin brand. That's just sick! The companies sell everything from music to travel to cosmetics. Most of them fit into the category of "leisure and entertainment" to some degree, but how can this be good for their branding? I remember reading books on company name branding, and all of them would say that Virgin's brand extensions are doing them no good. But I love Virgin. I associate the name with low cost and good quality. Could it be that they're going against the textbook rules and are actually succeeding?

Richard Branson is the brainchild of the new airline, Virgin America. To outsiders, it may seem like he randomly decided to open up an airline. The press may make it seem as if opening the company was effortless. But that's definitely not the case with Virgin America. Because Richard's a British citizen, there's no way that he can have majority controlling interest in the new company. They had a lot of trouble finding investors because airlines just can't manage to make a buck. With $177 million dollars at hand, the US Department of Transportation rejected the company's application to become an airline. Bummer. I don't think I'll plan on starting my own airline anytime soon...

Picture of Virgin America's super cool looking plane cabins

It's now 3.5 years later and they're finally flying out of their hub in San Francisco! They're unlike ANY airline - not even like JetBlue. But of course, we know this in advanced, because it's under the Virgin brand. They take JetBlue's concept of blue ocean strategy and extend it much, much further. Every seat is armed with a power socket, USB power plug-in, and even an ethernet plug-in for internet! If you want to order fresh food, just buy it on your TV screen. Everything can be paid for via credit card without leaving your seat. How amazing is that? (and no, Virgin is not paying me to write this)

I'll be keeping a close eye on the Virgin Group. Its an amazing holding company with a super powerful brand. But having such a powerful brand means that if any of its 80 companies fails miserably at providing grade A innovation and service, the brand will lose its value. I doubt this will happen anytime soon. Keep it up, Sir Branson!

8/29 10:17 AM: OH, also: A few of my readers have been telling me that Richard Branson’s autobiography, “Losing My Virginity” is a good read. I have the book on my bookshelf in my Berkeley apartment, but I'm yet to read it!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.