In his book Information doesn’t want to be free, Cory Doctorow says:

Fame won’t make you rich, but you can’t get paid without it.

Doctorow’s Second Law

His point is, that for anyone trying to make a living in the creative arts their career has to start with being known. No matter how good their art, writing or performance, no one will be willing to pay them for it if they are not ‘known’. Fame is not a by-product of being successful: it’s actually the catalyst that sets the process in motion.

Away from the context of the Arts, success in most fields works in a similar way – it’s just not usually called ‘fame’. It’s possible to get a job and be obscure – but it’s very unlikely that you’ll be promoted if you remain below the radar of management, even if you do excellent work.

You can argue that you’d like your work to speak for you – and you may have built up a reputation for being reliable, putting in the hours – but you will be competing with all the others who are making more of themselves. You can be the best artist in the world, but if you only ever hang your pictures in your own house your audience is limited and you’re unlikely to get your work known outside of your close family and friends.

Building a personal brand

Yes, we’re talking about personal branding. (Or reputation, or image, if you prefer.) Personal branding matters because it gives you an edge which can be the difference between getting promoted or being overlooked.

It can be difficult to even consider working on a personal brand, especially if you grew up being told not to show off or push yourself forward. There are also some terrible, cringe-worthy examples of self-promotion out there which can also be off-putting.

The good news is that 90% of the work that goes into building a strong personal brand takes place behind the scenes. Just as with defining and developing a company brand, it starts with working out the basics:

• What are your values? What really matters to you?
• What do you offer that is unique to you? How do you stand out from your peers?
• How do you want to be known? How do you need to be known?

Once you’re clear on these ask yourself if there are any gaps in how you might be perceived now and how you want to be perceived. Then decide what you need to do to fill in the gap: just as you change over time, so should your ‘brand’. But it might take a little work to shift people’s opinions and you will have to work on your signalling the right message about yourself.

The way you are perceived depends on these things:

• What you do and say
• How you do it and say it
• What you look like
• How all of the above filter through the perceptions of the people round you.

(You can control the first three: there will never be anything you can do about the fourth – although the rolling momentum of others’ opinions may eventually help.)

Be consistent

The key is consistency: its not enough to post thought leadership articles on LinkedIn. Your values have to come across in all your actions and interactions with your colleagues and other professional contacts.

You need to be authentic and congruent with any personal branding. This is why it’s called ‘building’ a brand: it takes time and is a process not a single action. Just as company brands can be damaged by ill-judged communications so can a personal brand.

As an example. Say you want to be know and respected as a leader who combines balanced judgement with an inclusive outlook. Your core values might be fairness, reliability, patience. Now it doesn’t matter if your LinkedIn profile is full of posts demonstrating these attributes if the people you work with know you as a peevish, irritable control freak. Your brand is weakened because there is no consistency.  

This can be why some people who use LinkedIn or other social media outlets purely to promote themselves come across as pretentious because that’s just what they’re doing. They haven’t stopped to think about the substance behind what they are trying to promote. No amount of branding or promotion will help you (or your company) make a success of being something you are not .