Seth Godin puts it bluntly—and correctly:

Yes, it's true. People judge you.
They judge you especially harshly online.
They judge you by your teeny picture on Facebook (named, after all, after the original quick judgment document) and they judge you by your email sig file and your domain (Hotmail?!) and by the look of your bio on Squidoo or Linkedin or the number of typos in your instant messages. They even judge you by the typeface and ads on your blog.

While we can all agree that this superficiality is a rather unfortunate—in a way, it’s high school all over again—it’s what we get when we move the bulk of our interaction with people to a two-dimensional medium. In a world where you communicate with prospects and clients solely through web pages and email messages, your clients and prospects will use every bit of information they can glean from the digital realm—your image; homepage; email signature; email address; spelling and grammar; greeting and sign off; font style, size and color. And then they’ll think about what you’ve written.

Seth Godin’s response to this state of affairs is to ask a rather apt question:

So, are you getting good feedback on your brand presentation?

Are you getting any feedback?

This is a tricky thing, because there is a fine line between crafting an effective personal brand and becoming a total phony. The internet is like the wild west in that sense—conducive to creating smooth surfaces with hollow underneaths (please don't judge me for inventing words).

The challenge is in having a certain awareness and a willingness to ask some tough questions, recognize good feedback and put the effort into burnishing your brand. But it’s also about avoiding becoming an overly glossy simulacrum of your true, organic self.