Branding Beyond the Office

Welcome. Welcome to this podcast episode. Today we're talking about job search, career branding, and what that means, because Allie is a queen in branding herself and getting jobs that way. And today we're going to go over how you can do the same thing. So welcome to the Ally from corporate podcast.

This is Allie and Rico, and we're talking about personal branding because, honestly, that's how I've been able to catapult my career, my entrepreneurship journey, my side business, my main business. Honestly, I am of the opinion that everybody should have a personal brand. No matter who you are, what you do, or what industry you're in or what age you are or where you live. I mean, everybody needs one.

Positive or negatively?

I mean, definitely positively. There's some people that have a very strong personal brand that some people think is negative. I mean, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson. Their personal brand has a very strong flavor. Some people love them, some people hate them. If it's for career purposes, I recommend you don't get super opinionated in the direction where people would think it's negative, which we can talk about how to do that, but hopefully in the positive direction.

Some marketers say there's no bad press.

You know, but as an actor, okay. As a celebrity, okay. I think as a career professional, there's definitely bad press. Wouldn't you agree?

Yeah. In the career field and even as actors, there's bad press. But I think it really matters how you look at things. Cancel culture is real. The Internet is. Has, like a low tolerance of forgiving, you know, and. Yeah. So how do you build a personal brand when you're working for a company? Because I feel like it's a fine line that you're walking because not each company, the companies here, Social media is here. And there's some word, there's an overlap, but it's like a gray area. And I feel like companies that embrace it are going to be coming out ahead, and I think so. I think that. But I also think that companies that don't want to have any social media presence will also be fine, because I just read two. Two days ago or something that if TikTok's gonna get banned, the generation that made it popular isn't too upset about it because then they said they're gonna spend less time on the app, so they don't think that it's gonna be that bad.

And I'm sure other social media platforms will pop up in its place. Like, have you heard of this new one that is kind of like MySpace, but it's called no Space? No, I heard there's like 350,000 people on the wait list for it. That could be fake news. I just. I just read a headline. I didn't even read the article, and I don't even know who wrote it.

But we should apply.

Yeah, no kidding. Okay, but let me go back to your first question. So how do you create a personal brand? So, first of all, if you're listening to this and you feel like you have no online presence, you have no personal brand, I want you to close your eyes right now and listen to my voice. I want you to imagine a room full of people who know you well, who are only acquaintances, who have never met you. And I want you to imagine that they're talking about you. What are they saying? What are they saying that would make you smile? What are they saying about you that would make you not smile and furrow your brow? I want you to think about the things that they could say that would make you smile and proud of yourself and be nodding your head like, yeah, that's me. What are those things? Are they saying, oh, Ally, she's a really generous person, or, Ally, she's got a great network and I know what she stands for? Or, oh, Rico, yeah, he saved a couple kids from a burning building. He's like, really altruistic. What are people saying about you in your ideal situation when you are not in the room and they're talking about you? That is your personal brand in the future. And the good news is you can carefully craft that using social media, and it can benefit your career. It can really boost a lot of things that you're doing or you want to do in the future.

You know, think looking at it like that, it can. It can definitely open doors, but it can also shut doors because you do speak out on line items that people or might not like that. You know, like once you get into a certain tier level, then your. Your brand is bigger than the company's outreach. And I can see where exactly. Like, if you're an executive leadership role and your personal brand is so big and you have such a polarizing audience that they might not like that because you can overshadow the company's reach with your audience. And that might scare people, but that's.

A very extreme corner case example. I'd rather bring it back to somebody who's just starting out with personal branding, who doesn't have that much experience posting, and maybe they want to start a personal brand. They're not an executive yet. They're nowhere near there. And let's talk a little bit more about that so that we can have it be more accessible for the person who doesn't have a personal brand yet. So do you remember. Do you remember when you and I lived at Lindsey Lindsay Lane and you. It was like the beginning of quarantine. And you were like, we need to do something with our time. We can't just be making sourdough in this Dutch oven. Like, let's do something with our time. And you came up with this idea. You were like, hey, you should start creating your personal brand. And I was like, what is that? And you were the first person to educate me on what that was. And you were like, hey, I think you should start posting on LinkedIn every day. And I'm like, you are psycho. But you told me your vision. You told me the doors that could open for me, the opportunities that could become available to me if I had a strong personal brand. And I was like, all right, I'll bite. So I remember every night, starting in early 2020, you would tell me it would be like 9:30 at night. And you'd be like, did you post yet? And I'm like, no, I'm tired. Let's go to bed. And you'd be like, we're not going to bed until you post on social media. And you'd give me a topic. What were some of the topics that you advised me to start posting about when I was just starting out?

About projects that you successfully completed, about great how to master college, how to master any project where you had difficult co workers, where you, you know, where you took leadership roles. And it can be easy of just posting about how you feel, how, you know, how. Not in a negative way, obviously. Right. I mean, when I talk about how I. How you feel, it's like, oh, I just, I just, I just submitted this FDA thing and it went great and the whole team was great. And these are the two steps that, you know, helped it push it to the finish line and stuff like that. And accomplishments. Right. I think that that is no controversy there and it makes you and your company look good. Right. So people should kind of start off there and then, you know, move it, move on and try to level up and try to do better posts and all that. But you know, just start off there or.

And do you remember that I was. So what?

Wait a second. And if you're not, and if that is too much for you to start off to come with your own post, you can just like comment and reshare with a two liner and yeah, yeah.

That'S a good way to start out. So what would you tell somebody who's nervous about starting to post online? Maybe they're an introvert. They don't really like talking out loud or posting. Like, what advice would you give them?

You know, great things take time and everything worth having is you got to fight for it and you got to jump over fear. You got to do it the same thing like college. You know, when you graduate high school and you're like, I don't. You know, college is going to be brutal, college is going to be rough, but you just got to do it. And so you just do it. You put in the effort, you put in the time, you deal with the negativity that comes with it, but the outcome is going to be greater.

Yeah. And I remember when I first started posting, we learned very quickly that if you post things that are safe, you know, really watered down ideas, things that are very. That most people would agree with, not very strong opinions, just general beliefs that maybe the most of the population has, those aren't going to do very well on social media. They're good for starting to create a very weak flavor of personal brand, which is fine, it's safe. But for somebody who wants to go viral, I recommend posting about something that is a little more risky and controversial. I usually stay away from topics like religion, war, finance, politics, politics, gender, things like that. But there are certain things you can post about that are a little more controversial. And I remember one of my first videos started getting a lot of hate comments. What advice would you give somebody? You talked me through this in such a nice, objective way. If somebody came to you and they were like, rico, I'm getting so many hate comments. What do I do? Should I delete my video a hundred percent? Nuh. You never tell me to do that.

No, it depends what the video is. So there's videos that are rightfully so are false. So let's say you say that the sky is red or the sky is some, you know, like not when sundown, you just say that the grass isn't green. It's some, it's purple. All grass is purple. That's clearly not a correct statement. It might be true if you're colorblind and that's how you see the world, but in most cases it's not. So what you need to do is you either need to then just deal with the hate comments and maybe say, that's how I perceive the world and, you know, clarify that that's how you see the world. But in most cases, if you say something that that is not true and comes to find out that it's not correct, you need to delete that video. We've also had posts that were, that were copied from somebody. Then we had to delete it because it wasn't our original idea. So we had to take those down. Every, every person that's going to grow on social media is going to make mistakes. So you're going to, and especially once you're trying to get make a business out of it, you're going to make mistakes. There's no way around making a viral video that you have interpreted the wrong way. You took an hour long conversations, you cut it down to bite size pieces and it was, the interpretation went off the rocker. So same goes for your video that you made like, you know, come early, stay late type of deal. So many people that were hourly and that had no business of actually showing up early and leaving late actually applied to it. But those were the videos that it got shown to because it might also show it to the wrong audience. So if you think that, oh my gosh, I'm going to make the best pizza and it's going to show it to only Italians that are pizza experts, it's going to be like, this is garbage. But your, your, your pizza is a vegan pizza and it was going to be for la, how to make the best, you know, like vegan dairy free pizza. But it showed it in Italy and everybody's like, oh, this is horrible. Yeah. Because it's not the right audience that that was meant for.

Yeah. So I would advise people, if you want to create a personal brand, think about who you want to see your stuff. Do you want recruiters to see your stuff and comment? Do you want job seekers to see your stuff and comment? Do you want other people in product development to see your stuff and comment?

Wouldn't even go there. Wouldn't even go there. I would just.

You wouldn't go there?

No. I would make content that actually you're passionate about and that you are, that you're passionate about and that you actually know a lot about. Because passion is very hard to be. If you're passionate about something, you can stay up till 11 o' clock at night and debate somebody.

Yeah.

And know almost everything there is about it. And I feel like passion as you and I are growing into business. Passion is something that you can't teach. Either you have it or you don't. And you should just make stuff that you're passionate about and then there will be. And then an algorithm like YouTube is going to pair you with the correct audience that it thinks that it's going to resonate with.

Yeah. And if you are listening to this and you're thinking, I really want to start a personal brand, but I don't even know what to post about. I don't know where to start. There's an exercise you can do with your favorite AI platform. I use ChatGPT, but you can enter a prompt like this. You are a marketing expert. I want to start posting online to do a personal brand. These are some things I'm passionate about. List them. These are some things that I. These are some topics I want to talk about. Or these are some topics I want to stay away from. Give me 25 ideas for what I could post about. Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like that's a great start. Um, but if you're too scared of doing that, I would just say start off with engaging commenting and liking. And if you're listening to this and you're in the career space, you can comment, like, reshare our posts, Ali's post. And you will automatically get one or two comments from Ali and my team.

Yeah.

Because you engaged with us. So that will give you the confidence that somebody at least is watching it and actually, you know, is here to, like, support you when you first start posting. I'm not talking about TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. I'm talking about LinkedIn. When you reshare our posts or something, then we would go in and like, and tag you and give you a comment because it can also be devastating. You spend hours. I know it. Sometimes you're going to spend hours on a post and it gets no likes, no views, and so then you like, oh, my gosh, this absolutely sucks. So. And once you're in the network, you will then grow and get more people to engage and all that kind of good stuff. So it's like a snowball.

And I would say personal branding is not done in a vacuum. You definitely need other people to engage with your stuff, which is what helps elevate your personal brand and helps grow your network, your image online. And so you give. You get what you give. So be the kind of friend, be the kind of professional who engages with other people's content that resonates with you and they will reciprocate and you can even DM them and say, hey, thanks so much for engaging with my content. Let's follow each other. Let's keep engaging with each other's content. I love your stuff. I love getting messages like that. And I send messages like that all the time. You do, too.

Yeah. It's a humble way of telling people, hey, you engage in my stuff, I'll engage in your stuff. And that's where a community aspect, your day ones kind of start coming in. And those day ones will be with you through the good, the bad, and the ugly. Rather than somebody comes along, sees your video, says you're a phony, this video is garbage, or this post is garbage. I'm not going to subscribe, I'm going to unfollow. But your day ones are going to be there and hype you up. And you have those people like Hershal on YouTube that's always like, great video, you know? So those day ones, you'll remember. And those are the originals, you know?

Yeah. Hershel, if you're listening to this, you're my number one fan. Love you, man. I don't know where you live in the world. Let us know. But you comment on all my stuff. I see you everywhere on every platform, and I appreciate you. So thank you. Be that kind of person. I have a friend.

You even know it?

Yeah.

You even know it.

I have a friend who works at LinkedIn and she works in the LinkedIn Learning marketing department. And when I made my LinkedIn Learning courses, I asked her, hey, how do you really grow on LinkedIn? How do you get followers? Like, what's the secret? Is it, do you have to post a lot? And she said, and this is insider knowledge. She said, no, it doesn't matter how often you post, but it matters that you post consistently. She said it could be twice a week, but she said that the algorithm favors profiles who engage with other content. So comment 3 Share Like 3 POST. She said that the algorithm specifically has elements in it that reward profiles who are, and I quote, putting the social back in social media.

Yeah.

So be a person who comments. Be a person who likes posts. I have wondered sometimes, like, I get a lot of likes and comments on my posts, but I have a feeling that might be 10% of the people who are viewing it. Right. Like, don't be just a watcher.

2%. Probably 2%. I think LinkedIn is mostly spectators. I think on Instagram, they're more out there. They're more. Yeah, yeah. I think it's, you know. Yeah. You don't have so many hours a day to show posts, so. Yeah. Interesting.

True. But if you're trying to create a personal brand, good on you. If you're not trying to create a personal brand, you should. And it's. It's the long game. It's definitely a marathon, not a sprint. It has taken me years. And so if you want to create one, there's no better time to start than today. And just know that whatever your posting frequency is, whatever your commenting frequency is, make it sustainable so that you can do it long term. Because personal brands, really good, solid personal brands with a good foundation that can't just blow over in the wind are not created overnight. They take a while. And so get started today.

Yep. And I think we're gonna cap it with this episode. We appreciate everybody listening. If you have questions, questions, shoot us an Instagram DM or something like it. We will then see if we can make a podcast episode about it. If you know great guests, message us on LinkedIn. See like, hey, this guest. Be great for your podcast and any last words.

Have a good rest of your day.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening and watching.

Yeah. Thank you.