I stopped trying to build a personal brand

I used to struggle with the idea of a personal brand, partly because I never really felt I had one.

I’m not a CEO. I’m not a founder. I’m not a big product leader with a ready-made audience waiting for my view on things.

I’ve never been especially comfortable becoming a mouthpiece for the company I work for either. Of course I’ll talk about work when it’s relevant, but repeating someone else’s messaging under my own name has never felt natural.

And I’ve been criticised before for being too personal on LinkedIn. Talking about work, how it feels, what I’m struggling with, what I’m thinking about.

So for a while there was an awkward question sitting underneath all of it. What exactly am I supposed to talk about here?

The other platforms had already answered themselves. I barely use Facebook beyond keeping in touch with people I’d otherwise lose. Instagram has never suited me at all — I don’t particularly like how I look in photographs and I don’t naturally think visually, so the pressure to present a polished version of myself makes me want to share less rather than more. That isn’t a criticism of anybody who enjoys it. It’s a format that asks for the thing I have least of.

LinkedIn should have been the obvious fit, since most of what I notice comes out of work. It just came with two identities on offer and neither of them was mine.

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The answer turned out to be my own thinking

Editorial Intelligence gave me one, unexpectedly.

Not confidential work. Not somebody else’s strategy. Not pretending to be an executive spokesperson. And not turning LinkedIn into a diary of everything happening in my life.

There’s a middle ground, and it took me a long time to find it.

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Thought turns out to be the more exposing thing to share

There’s something I got wrong about this at the start, and it’s worth saying because it inverts how the choice looks.

I assumed that not posting photographs made me the more private one. It doesn’t.

A picture of a holiday tells you where somebody was. It doesn’t tell you what they were thinking about while they were there, or which detail they couldn’t stop turning over afterwards. Publish the second and you’ve told people what your attention is drawn to, what irritates you, what you find interesting enough to spend an evening on, and how you reason when you aren’t being careful.

That’s a fairly complete portrait. It just arrives through thought rather than appearance.

So this isn’t reticence. It’s sharing a different and probably more revealing part of myself, in the format that happens to suit me — which is a stranger choice than it first looked, and one I’d have made anyway.

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Two editorial spaces

I’ve started thinking about it as two spaces with different jobs.

My field notes are mine. That’s where I can be messier, more personal and more exploratory. I can follow an idea because it interests me, change my mind halfway through, and connect work to films, games, ageing, Thailand or whatever else happens to be in my head. It’s closer to a living notebook.

LinkedIn is different. That’s where I take something out of that thinking and offer it to somebody else. It still has to sound like me, but there has to be a reason for another person to care. A useful argument. A tension. An observation they can recognise in their own work, or disagree with.

That distinction has helped me more than any advice about personal branding.

I don’t have to choose between being completely personal and becoming a polished corporate mouthpiece. I can think privately, develop publicly, and decide separately what deserves to travel further.

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The questions I start with

I’m also increasingly not that bothered about engagement. It’s nice when people read something, comment or disagree, and it tells me something — I’ve written about what a year of LinkedIn data actually showed, and the short version is that reach and response are different outcomes, and the bigger number is rarely the more useful one.

What I don’t want is for every idea to begin with: will this perform? Will the algorithm like it? Is this what people expect me to post about?

I’d rather start with two questions:

• Do I actually think this?
• Is there something here worth developing?

And then, only for the things that leave the notebook:

• Is there something in it for someone else?

That third question is the one doing the work. It’s the difference between publishing and broadcasting.

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My website is the place I control most directly. My field notes are my own working space. LinkedIn is where I choose what to put in front of other people. They can read it, disagree with it, ignore it, or follow along.

Strangely, that’s the first point at which “personal brand” started to make any sense to me.

I stopped trying to build one. I started publishing what I actually think, and got more deliberate about what I ask other people to spend their time reading.