The Personal Branding Boom

This article first appeared in esc. wire magazine in May 2023

You can’t seem to scroll LinkedIn recently without seeing post after post about personal brand. Everyone seems to be talking about them. And everyone’s telling you to get one. But what the hell is a personal brand?! And why should you care?! Capture the Talent CCO, ☀️ Amy Stokes-Waters , talks us through her views on it... 

The phrase ‘personal brand’ makes me cringe. I teach a course about how to define one, sure, but it doesn’t stop the phrase bringing to mind videos of people crying, stories about rescuing a dog that turned out to be the CEO, and unending virtue signalling and faux charitable acts all to ‘improve the brand’.

Let’s take a step back and look at what a personal brand actually means. As part of my Core Skills: Networking & Content course, we cover personal branding and I teach that it’s all about authenticity. Your personal brand is YOU. Who YOU are as a person. What YOUR skill set is. And YOUR experiences. It’s not some ethereal, made-up nonsense. It can’t be defined by a third party.

Your personal brand is you. The values you live and breathe. The things you’re interested in. Your perspective on the world. Whenever you see the phrase ‘personal brand’, replace it with ‘personality’.

‘Building’ your personal brand therefore isn’t really a thing. Building a network, sure. But building a personal brand? Do you ‘build’ your personality?

What’s your why?

When we’re looking at our own brand, we need to take a few steps back. Don’t just go out there all guns blazing, deciding you’re going to start posting a load of nonsense on LinkedIn. You might grow a following but there are plenty of idiots out there with a big following and no clue what they’re talking about or why.

Realistically, we first need to think about what our goal is. What’s the reason we’re thinking about starting to grow our network and putting ourselves out there? Job hunting? Sales? Social justice causes? Fame and glory?

Who gives a fuck?

Once we’ve nailed down our ‘why’, we can think about who it is that can help us achieve those goals. For example, if your goal is to sell pen testing to Heads of Cyber / CISOs, adding a load of junior SOC analysts isn’t going to help you.

We need to identify who it is that we want to talk to, and who will be interested in what we have to say. Hopefully, those two groups of people will have a significant overlap. We can then start to build our connections off the back of this.

To make sure we have an engaged audience to help direct how our ‘brand’ develops over time, we can curate our connections list. If we identify specific job roles that might be interested in what we have to say, we can search on LinkedIn for those people and hit the add button. I do it every week. Max out those connection requests. All 100 of them.

And then what?

Ok, so the next bit is where we can then do what we think of as the ‘brand’ bit. The bit where we start to share our thoughts and ideas and put some content out there into the world.

This is really where that ‘authenticity’ piece comes in too. If we start pretending to be someone we’re not, then we’ll lose interest. As in, we, ourselves, will lose interest because acting is really bloody hard. And our audience will lose interest because it’s easy to see through.

However, we should remember that being authentic does not necessarily mean being vulnerable. And it certainly does not equate to sharing everything about ourselves all the time. This is where we can curate our ‘brand’. Pick and choose the parts of our lives we want to share.

We should be sharing content that aligns with our goals. So if we’re selling pen testing, it’s probably useful to talk about why offensive security consulting is broken, why we do it better, and tell you all about the services we offer (*cough* talk to me *cough*). But to avoid sounding like an extension of our company profile, we should also look at sharing some content that shows we’re human.

Whether that content is about our hobbies, families, friends, etc. is totally at our discretion. Remember we don’t have to share everything.

Is it worth it?

Personally, I’ve had the most amazing opportunities given to me off the back of curating my brand, building my network and getting myself out there. I’ve never looked back.

I now own two (or maybe three) businesses, I found my boyfriend through networking, I’ve made countless friends, had speaking gigs and met the most amazing people. Our businesses run off our social network. We do not cold call.

You get out of it what you put in. Get those building blocks in place and you’ll not look back. You got this! ■

Want more guidance on developing your online presence? Of course you do! Amy's developed a Networking & Content course specifically for the Capture the Talent Academy. Head over to academy.capturethetalent.co.uk/p/networking-content to get yourself signed up!