Are Your Personality And Professional Brand Out Of Alignment? It Could Be Hurting Your Business
If you’re too scared to show your true colors, you can’t attract them in turn
I’ve aired a few thoughts here over the years about some of the content that I enjoy less on LinkedIn.
Being the grumpy artistic type (I’ll stick with a ‘creative temperament’ thank you very much), I find some of it so downright annoying that it’s driven me off the network for days at a time (I always come back in a huff).
For instance: I hate seeing pictures from employees of the gift hampers that their companies send them.
Not because I have anything against gift hampers — if you like them, knock yourselves out eating those peanuts! — but rather because I don’t see any value in sharing this kind of information with the world. Who cares about the gift box your company sent you? I certainly don’t! My life is no richer for knowing that your company send you confectionery.
More than that, I think it’s transparently self-serving. Corporate comms sends you gift hampers with perfect branding hoping that employees will share them in a fawning post on LinkedIn. Sorry, but that kind of thing makes my stomach turn.
Yes, Holden Caulfield and I would have a lot to talk about, I think.
I haven’t left LinkedIn both because I pick up the odd InMail there which sometimes helps to pay my rent; I love the idea of a social network that connects professionals; and, among the sky-high pile of virtue-signalling and gift hamper pics are nuggets of gold from genuinely smart and thoughtful people who have good thoughts to share on the network.
People like Anna Furmanov who hosts the Modern Startup podcast and runs a marketing consultancy dedicated to helping VC-funded startups drive revenue (Anna gives credit to Kate Bradley Chernis for “sparking the conversation” so I probably should too.)
Because I don’t like plagiarizing people, here’s Anna’s thoughts about brand voice in her own words:
Playing It Safe Bores People To Inattention
I loved the thoughts that Anna shared for two reasons:
- It’s the kind of advice that I know will bring value to some people in my orbit
- It’s the kind of advice that I needed to hear myself
Like Anna, I work in marketing consulting. Unlike Anna — I’m feeling … ah, actually I know — I do a pretty lousy job at communicating what I’m actually about to the world.
My go-to reasons for this has traditionally been shyness. I’ll plug a brand even if it’s just my own one and pitch it to podcasts (for instance). No problem.
And who I am to lie — I’ve gone so far as to create a fake email address to pitch the media with because it meant not having to … you know … actually directly promote myself to other humans.
To simplify this down a little:
When there’s the distance of a brand between me and my professional image I go all out on the promo tactics. You wouldn’t know it (maybe you’d get an idea from the above), but I’m a big fan of guerilla marketing.
The problem is that the moment it comes to actually promoting myself, the imposter syndrome kicks in.
To spin this positively, at least I do put myself out there. You wouldn’t be reading this if I didn’t, although I do so mostly because I find joy in the writing process.
But there’s also a negative aspect to it.
I don’t tell the world — or my clients — what I’m really about. What makes me tick as a person. So I do what Anna cautioned others not to do and project a buttoned-up image of myself. It’s stilted. It’s stuffy. And it’s uninspiring. I doubt that anybody who has visited my business website has had their heart rate lift a notch as they read about the thought leadership packages I offer.
The good news is that it’s a decent enough professional image to win me business. I spend a lot of time helping companies with thought leadership marketing and my background aligns mostly with what you’d expect from that kind of person: somebody with a background in journalism who writes somewhat dry and serious stuff.
But it’s not exactly the real me. And that presents a problem.
Some Things I Don’t Tell My Clients
Let me roll with a few more examples:
I wouldn’t dream of telling clients that one of the most significant things happening in my life right now is starting medicine for ADHD because I worry they’ll think that I’m crazy and unreliable and fire me in short order. (That’s not exactly true, I’ve written about ADHD recently, but would probably have done so years ago if I hadn’t been so worried about that.)
Sometimes, it would be great to be able to share something like that because it’s something I’m quite excited about.
I doubt, also, that most clients would guess that behind the person writing their thought leadership articles for trade media publications is somebody who immaturely delights in practical jokes and (on occasion) orders stuffed animals from the internet because he grew up with one and sort of misses their presence in his life.
On a more professional level: there are times I don’t share with my clients why I’m skeptical about some of the things they’re paying me to do because they didn’t ask, I feel like it’s not my place to do so, and I’m not sure they want to hear a contrary opinion either way.
At the same time, I’m an enormous believer in both the power of inbound marketing and authenticity and spend a good deal of chunk here telling anybody who cares to read these pieces what’s going on in my life.
There’s a contradiction there. And this post did a nice job at highlighting it.
Whether you’re building up a company brand, your own, or both at the same time, I think that there’s a lot of wisdom in what Anna shared on LinkedIn.
B2B buyers or whoever else you’re trying to sell to are just B2C buyers dressed up in a suit and on the clock.
The exact same rules about authenticity and attraction works for them just as it does at the person-to -person level. If you think that they’re not noticing that you’re holding back from sharing what your brand is truly about then … there’s a good chance that you’re flat out wrong.
If you want to increase the interest in your marketing messaging, it’s probably worth ensuring that who you are and the personal professional brand you project are in some kind of alignment.
Authenticity, after all, is a powerful thing.
