Personal Branding: Don’t Do it Yourself

“If you cannot beat them, join us” Broderick Turner © 2023, Mixed Media on Pressboard

Hey, you might have attended my talk today on Personal Branding (and why you shouldn’t do it alone). Here is the full talk:

Here are the highlights:

1. Spend less time building a brand, and much more time building your community.
2. In terms of community, you can start with two types, a community of trust and a professional community. A community of trust includes people who you can share with and who you trust to provide you good insights and not to share your concerns outside of the community. A community of trust will keep you sane (this is important when you’re trying to do incredibly hard things in incredibly competitive spaces). A professional community are those people who share the same goals and interest. A good example of this is the TRAP lab. A crew of pirates, who moor their boats together in safe harbor.
3. Invite yourself. You have something vital and important to share. Share that with more people. I have used the following email template to invite myself to academic talks. I do not have a 100% success rate. But importantly, I do not have a 0% success rate:

Subject line: Strange Question, Fall Talk?

Dear [Prof. Name],

[We met (name the place you met)] or [I love the work you’re doing on XYZ]. I am in-town from X/X/XXXX until X/X/XXX. I recently published a paper on XXXX (link to the paper), and I have some exciting projects in this stream. I would love to share this work and new directions with the faculty in your department. Moreover, as I’ve heard, your department is very intellectually curious, and thus will probably provide some good insight on this work as my team pushes it forward. Do you have any available space in your Fall talk schedule, during the dates I’ll be around?

(For an expanded version of this strategy see my post about reaching any CEO.)

4. Professionalize the enterprise. You can buy better powerpoint templates. You can use better fonts. You should contact your university’s press office and ask for media training and help when you publish papers. If you want earned media, hire for it.

5. If you promote yourself and others, there will be haters. Ignore them. They are harder to hear at the top of the mountain.

6. Someone asked, “what if people don’t like the moves you’re making?” I have two really good responses. The first is everything Tyler Perry says in this scene from BLACK AF:

The second is a song I wrote and produced: