Your Granddaddy Built This Brand With His Bare Hands.

Son, I reckon it's about time I told ye how I come up. Where ye come from. The story of your people, 'cause son, blood is all ye really got in the end. Sit yerself down for a spell. Y'see, it all started with your granddaddy. My daddy. He was the hardest-working man I ever knowed. Earliest memory I got is him wakin' up before daybreak every mornin' to curate his social media presence.

Them was lean days, boy. Ye could hardly imagine it, even if I told ye. Why, all we had was your granddaddy's personal brand. Some weeks we'd go days on end without him gettin' a proper Favstar trophy or retumbl. But I s'pose it didn't much matter to us. We all had a roof over our heads, our daddy's viral strategy, and, well, don't let me get too sappy on ye here, but each other.

That's right, your granddaddy was a social influencer. One of the true-blue originals. Reckon they don't make 'em from the same mold no more. Why, he'd put in 14 hours generating organic growth using SEO best practices, and then he'd come home and fix us up some grub—franks 'n' beans 'n' such, mostly—and tell us stories or take us for a ride or help us with our homework or jes' sit us down and teach us somethin' we ain't knowed afore. We was just young bucks, your Uncle Joe 'n' me, but it wasn't but so long before we was already a-fishin' for karma and upvotes on Reddit and a-buildin' our brand. Guess we jes' had too much of our daddy's blood in us.

And wouldn't ye know it, by and by, your granddaddy built up his presence, by God he did. He done carefully crafted highly relevant social content with nothin' but his two hands, a few Apple devices, and a commitment to robust engagement with his audience—Twitter followers, rebloggers, Quora readers, 'n' all. That was the man he was. That's what ye got coursin' through yer veins, son. A real brand. Klout for miles.

Y'know, I laugh to think of it now, but I remember like it was yesterday the day the revenuers showed up. Daddy was always right with God, but Uncle Sam? Well that was another story. Seems he hadn't rendered unto Caesar, as the good book says, the taxes on the Bitcoins he was haulin' in on his sponsored tweets. I tell ye, as sure as I'm alive, he looked that revenuer right in the face and told 'im he'd either have to take it up with the courts or Jesus Christ himself come Judgment Day, but that he wasn't writin' the Internal Revenue Service no blank check. Revenuers never did come back. Reckon they either never could figure out the conversion rate 'twixt Bitcoins and a union dollar, or they knew tanglin' with 'im was like tanglin' with a boar-hog what got its hackles up. But then, that was your granddaddy. A meme unto himself.

So that's where ye come from, son. The man who built the personal brand ye see before ye from nothin' and then handed it on to me. The brand that'll be yours one day, when I join your granddaddy in that sweet by 'n' by. And ye know who ye'll have to thank for it all? I reckon you know who. An aggregator. A vlogger. A crazy-as-a-coonhound viral growther. Some folks, well, they called him a damn fool. I just called him my daddy.