The trouble with staying on your personal brand
Lately I’ve been researching how to build a personal brand. In reading a number of articles, many suggest picking a topic and talking about it consistently, with focus and without distraction. In other words, don’t talk about too many different topics and keep your brand simple.
A lot of this advice is very reminiscent of brand advice for companies and makes a lot of sense in that context. But people aren’t companies. They’re complex, have multiple different interests, and polymaths abound.
So this got me wondering: Should people keep those other sides of themselves hidden and focus on just one aspect of their life? If you’re wondering the same thing, I’ll walk you through my thinking about how to make that decision.
Who needs a personal brand anyway?
In my case, I’m currently exploring what to do next career-wise and I’m finding it taxing trying to convince and communicate to new people I meet that I have experience, know what I’m talking about, and can be trusted. Referrals can be great, but I’m also hoping to branch out from the networks I already have and diversify my contacts, so I can’t rely on these connections quite so much.
Thus I was curious about brand- and audience-building for the next stage of my career.
I’ve written a bit on Medium, I have an active Twitter account, and I’ve gotten to know a few folks via only my online presence, but the growth is relatively small. One of the recommended things that I don’t do (at least thus far) is stick to a single topic.
Drawing from my career and interests, I’ve written on a wide set of topics including mindfulness, diversity and inclusion in tech, web development, product management, content marketing pieces on real estate, ontology, empathy, recipes, and computer security.
In other words, my online presence is all over the map.
Some of these articles have tens of thousands of views too, but I worry my followers won’t stick around or engage in the other topics that didn’t draw them in initially.
(For fun, try searching for “sorry to all my new followers” on Twitter. This phenomenon is not unique.)
Blame the tools
Let me be a bad carpenter for a moment and blame my tools. I’m not sure if you noticed in the section above, but I wasn’t just talking about myself. I was talking about the tools I’m using to try to build a brand, e.g. Medium and Twitter.
Both Medium and Twitter, like most popular, general purpose services, don’t support following just certain types of posts from people. In other words, you can’t follow me just for Javascript or philosophy. If you follow me on one of these services, you’re following every bit of output I produce.
Twitter recently added the ability to mute certain words from your entire feed, but that can turn into a game of whack-a-mole for problematic people like me who talk about a number different topics. Just try keeping up with the latest political keywords… :)
(If you’ll allow me to suggest a startup idea: there’s opportunity here for a network that allows following only certain “channels” or topics of output of people. Pinterest does a nice job of this with its board system, but doesn’t quite meet my definition of general purpose.)
The options
So how do we work with these blunt instruments? Well some our choices are:
- Stick primarily to one subject on general purpose services, possibly using scheduling to target different audiences (business during the day, followed by “Night Twitter”)
- Promote your brand primarily on special purpose services like GitHub, Dribbble, etc.
- Develop your brand around a certain writing style (humor and vitriol seem to be working well at the moment) so people like how you say things rather than what you say
- Talk about whatever you want and wait for the world to change
Of course that last point is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I’d suggest that it’s not totally unreasonable. At this point, a lot of folks are getting used to following people who tweet or write about a variety of topics. What I criticized about Twitter, Medium, and others may actually be their saving grace — they force us to absorb the full range of thoughts of others. If the platforms themselves can maintain engagement, maybe it’ll mean we’re beginning to engage with each other.
Focus, focus
As for me, I’m still figuring out which of these strategies I’ll take. None of them seem great, but given my goal of moving my career forward, I’ll probably end up writing more technical topics during the weekdays and possibly moving other content to the weekends.
Let me know how you’re approaching your brand building and if I’ve missed any options!
Ok, I’m not going to post that annoying gif that asks to you 💚 and follow if you liked this post, so in return… Will you 💚 and follow if you liked this post? :D
