About the LinkedIn experience nowadays…

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Do you feel that contents have multiplied? Are more companies and people appearing on this network or your inbox selling something, little/nothing related to your work? Can you count three colleagues creating digital channels to present their analysis of an industry? Are your contacts posting more about their work experiences than personal ones? or bringing personal experience to work conversations? Have events and speakers multiplied in your business?

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You’re not the only one… according to a study developed by MIT with ten thousand participants, 62% feels ‘fatigued’ about professional social networks, based on a mix between frustration, boredom, overselling, and skepticism.

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Because today corporations, executives, startups, entrepreneurs, experts, opinion leaders, media, job seekers, and the networks themselves from their content platforms simultaneously share achievements, reflections, and initiatives.

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Just the case of LinkedIn implies 830 million users creating eight million daily content by 2022, which in 2019 were 645 sharing half.

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This leap, where users grew by 30% while interaction doubled, far from resembling the cases of Instagram or TikTok (where a similar phenomenon happens based on Centennials appropriation), will be related to five facts from 2020’s labor evolution:

1. ‘Strategic Likes’: Corporate communications departments and public relations agencies began to include the interaction in professional social networks of leading executives and leaders within their effectiveness indicators, with implementation plans to publish in peak days/hours/contexts.
1. ‘Keep Your Job’: An ongoing sense of job instability that began with pandemic cutbacks continued with the ‘great resignation’ and influenced by the recession today confirms that half of US corporate workers expect staff adjustments again in less than a year, according to PWC.

1. ‘Labor Humanization’: Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editorial VP, confirms it ‘beginning of the pandemic, we start to get content that we had not seen before, people faced with digitalization and work isolation decided to share more about their personal lives, motivational improvement, and political opinions forever transforming the network’s feed.’
1. ‘Professional Popularity’: As confirmed by psychiatry, there’s dopamine behind the ‘Like’ sensation exacerbated by the ‘measuring who is better/bigger’ habit explained by Freud, Piaget, or Buddha. Ego cannot resist being admired and recognized for having an exciting and prosperous job.

1. ‘Commercial Ignorance’: Within the supplier/client relationship, in many cases its evident that some actors do not fully understand profile’s context or functions, with some people receiving hundreds of daily requests, duplicities, groups invites, in addition to contacts relevant, which in the end manage to exasperate.

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In this context, the majority realized that having a Personal Brand went from something pertinent for businesses where the owner’s name is also the brand to being almost mandatory to climb positions or close contracts, at least within the white collar market.

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However, presenting this headline as an absolute truth is also inaccurate… many executives base their career growth on discretion. I consider myself one of them.

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These active personal brand builders follow a strategy that mixes the best practices of top FMCGs with the tone and format of the ‘Non-Fiction Best Sellers’ authors and the ‘Publishing Power Houses’ from Condé Nast or Forbes to The Economist Harvard Business Review.

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However, something’s going wrong -otherwise, ‘LinkedIn Fatigue’ would not exist- which seems to be related to giving a B2C character to Personal Brands when it could generate greater scope and results if it’s thought and implemented from the B2B perspective creating a place where billions of massive brands speak at the same time.

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Sounds familiar and exhausting for producers and consumers, creating a fertile market for a new group of experts, where a few months ago I had the opportunity to meet Priscilla McKinney from Little Bird marketing, who managed to show me some ways to achieve a successful Personal Brand. Some tips she shared with me include:

• It is well known that ‘networking’ is central to success in B2B, making it crucial to carry your Personal Brand with the right contact. If you do not have the social capital to achieve it, it is never wrong to resort to a third party that gives credibility and an effective approach.
• To ‘stand out from the crowd’ you should compare the marketing and communication execution of your Personal Brand with the exercise of inviting a cocktail party at your house. Not being the center of the conversation, creating an experience for all the guests, the empathic tone…
• There is a fundamental principle: most people do not like to be sold something on the first interaction, so Personal Branding exercise should create a series of ‘milestones’ that make you a valid and relevant interlocutor.
• Take a moment to think about the ideal profile of your Personal Brand target and why; the desire to sell makes the vast majority execute it indiscriminately, knowing that even something as massive as Coca-Cola has specific market segments.
• You have to show the human side, but not by publishing aspects of it disguised as work situations. It would be best to create a Personal Brand profile that speaks to your work from a look at why your personality is made for what you do. Passion.
• Your Personal Brand is not only about talking about yourself, your life, the company where you work, or your work team because it can easily be confused with narcissism, which ends up alienating relevant contacts… human interaction is a multiple exercise.
• Be consistent with a Personal Brand that manages a unique value proposition that is easy to understand because there are many competitors and digital algorithms that orders them. It’s mandatory that when your potential client searches for what you do, you be part of that list.

In conclusion, and continuing with analogies from the digital universe, I confirmed to Priscilla that I understood that in terms of Personal Branding, to be successful, you have to be more eHarmony and less Grindr. Inevitable to laugh and get serious.

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