Among others, I teach a well-subscribed class at UCLA Extension titled, "Strategies for Effective Self-Promotion."

Helping people to achieve visibility and more before their intended audiences is central to my mission, as a teacher, author, speaker, and consultant. I'm also an avid student of self-promotion.

One clear point I'd like to make is this: There is a grand misconception about promoting your interests and career. Simply put, it is the notion that you can choose to NOT self-promote, that there is a message strategy available that disables the hype button, rendering you pure and outside of the cacophony of the self-promotional marketplace.

I see this delusion in online discussions that tout the sanctity of social networking. There are a number of groups that try to discourage people from self-promoting, which, frankly, is impossible.

In communication theory, which I have studied extensively, there is no such thing as solely "informational" discourse that doesn't cross a purported boundary into "persuasion." Likewise, persuasion inevitably incorporates informational elements, as well.

The second you open your mouth, meet and greet someone else, blog or comment in one, or begin your self-narrative in any way, you're persuading and promoting. Some folks are simply better at, more aware of its tools and impacts, than others.

For instance, you're at an event and someone asks, "What do you do?"

This is an inescapable invitation to self-promote.

Your reply will move a listener's impression of you across a scale of acceptance, rejection, or non-commitment.

You'll become more or less attractive and credible across a matrix of dimensions.

They'll calculate, if only unconsciously:

"Is this person friendship or career material?"

"How does he rate, compared to me?"

"Does he know something I need to learn?"

"Is he traveling my way in life, or somewhere else?"

Any or all of these questions are triggered and to an extent addressed by the elevator speech you recite in response to that query about what it is that you do.

If you care to stage-manage the impressions people form about you, you'll seek techniques for promoting, as sociologist Erving Goffman put it, a suitable "definition of the situation," and you'll recite a "line" consistent with achieving your interests.

On the other hand, if you prefer to entertain the fiction that you have no control of other people's impressions of you, you'll reply with a stock, dull answer or improvise, to some extent.

And in the process, you'll discard the potential self-promotional promise of the occasion.

This essay will promote my interests in several ways of which I am aware, and in others of which I am not.

I expect it will find its way into multiple formats from which I will derive web traffic, distinctiveness, competitive advantage, and compensation. When publishers search my name they'll see approximately one million "hits," individual web sites that carry articles, sell my books and speeches, consulting and electronic presentations.

This article is intended to edify, of course. But it is also marketing and it is a product with futurity.

It will generate "heat" by being discussed and seen, widely.

I hope it will create light as well, demonstrating that self-promotion never stops. And as light seems to behave as a wave or a particle on any given day, no matter what label we assign, it is still illuminating.