Gary Vaynerchuk may have proudly declared that you are your own brand, but it is important to realize this is a double-edged sword. Use your personal image for your brand, and you can get a lot of attention and be recognized personally for your business accomplishments. But if you find yourself sacrificing quality for money, as many companies need to do at one time or another, your own image and reputation could be at stake.

Glenn Wolsey is a young blogger from New Zealand who has gained quite a following with his own blog and web show, as well as Desktop Vibes and various projects he works on. I have personally worked with him. But lately, his reputation on the internet is slowly being chipped away at, due to the very dilemma many of us have — mixing your personal life with business.

Already having public relations issues thanks to a failed practical joke and the absence of good content on his site (a problem I myself battle, I will admit), now would be the correct time for him to take a look at his image — his brand — and take the measures necessary to restore it.

How has he done this? Well, after spending a couple months writing relatively off-topic blog entries to keep his content stream flowing, he has used his personal blog to plug a celebrity website he now works for.

It’s by far the longest entry he’s written in a while. The worst part about it is that it is misleading. Rather than explaining that he works for them, he makes the post sound as if he just “stumbled upon” this celebrity website and loves it. Only after his readers [rightfully] get upset about this does he admit it and address the fact that he is now employed by them. (He does quite a lot there, it seems.)

There’s a lesson here, folks, and that’s what I’m attempting to get at. We’ve all been in situations where we need money or a career advancement, and it requires doing some… interesting jobs. Hell, I work in Hollywood, I know a thing or two about working less-than-noble jobs for less-than-noble people.

The problem with Glenn’s situation is that his company and his persona are one and the same. If his personal blog becomes known for garbage, then Glenn himself becomes known for garbage. And since that reputation is personal, it transcends the blog itself. Any new endeavor that Glenn might undertake or become apart of will be painted with the same brush. It is a situation from which a person might never recover.

Of course, the celebrity website knew this before hiring him. They probably said to themselves, “Hmm, this kid already has people watching him. Instead of building our brand from scratch, why not get a leg-up by buying this kid’s audience?” It can be a smart business move. It’s just not good for the potential employee.

The moral failure occurred when Glenn accepted, and allowed himself — and all his projects — to become the face of something that his readers and fans don’t give a damn about.

The problem is not that he works for a celebrity site. I certainly would if they paid me enough. The problem is that he was willing to sacrifice the online persona that we know of him — his website, his Twitter account — in order to become the public face of this new endeavor. He is not merely working for them. He is transforming his image into theirs.

Please, Glenn, fix this before it’s too late.

And to those of you getting into the new media world, don’t sacrifice your own image. Because in a world where your business, your image, and your persona can essentially be the same thing, you only have to destroy one to destroy them all.