Personal Branding Tips

Here are a few notes about personal branding, and what to consider as you build a brand for your academic and public career. Put simply, a ‘personal brand’ is a conscious effort to represent yourself to others in a particular way, and align your projected public image with a set of goals.

Elements of this may feel ridiculous, disingenuous, or even synthetic/artificial, and you’re not wrong. But authenticity may be a core value for you, and you may not like the ‘professional’ vibe which this is written towards, in which case, you’ll adjust elements of this whole process to reflect that. There is not an inherently right or wrong way to build your brand (although some branding concepts may be wildly unpalatable to some employers), and ‘dismantling the historical trappings of professionalism’ may be a part of your brand.

Elements of a Personal Brand

As you think about the concept of a personal brand, there are several key elements which you’ll want to make clear to anybody who searches for you or examines your public-facing life. You don’t have to answer every question directly, but you need to have an answer for each, and build your image accordingly.

• Who are you?
  • What is your name?
  • What are your pronouns?
  • Is your legal name the same as your working name?
    • Choose one and stick with it. I am never William.
  • Is there potential for confusion with somebody else? With a past name you’ve used?
  • Ensure that your name is consistent across the many elements of your web presence and your documents
• What do you do?
  • Are you a linguist? A Data Scientist? An illustrator?
  • If you straddle many fields, explain the common thread in a simple-to-understand way
    • “I’m a linguist who uses computational methods to study speech science and speech technologies. This overlaps with phonetics, signal processing, natural language processing, AI, and psycholinguistics.”
  • This can feel like an oversimplification, but simple makes you easier to remember and understand
  • It’s fine to present yourself differently in different situations, but make sure it’s clear that you’re multifaceted, rather than them questioning whether (e.g.) Will Styler the Phonetician is the same person as Will Styler the Computational Linguist
• Why do you do this?
  • This may be the same thing as answering ‘What are your values?’
  • What is important to you about the work you’re doing?
  • What motivates you to do this work?
  • Do you have unique skill or background which makes this possible?
• What are your values?
  • What is important to you?
  • What goals (greater than your own career) do you want to work towards?
  • How does your work change the world in the way you want it to?
  • You should share values only when they specifically interact with your professional and public presence
    • There are many things you might value which are irrelevant to your work
    • Be conscious in sharing (e.g.) political or religious values which don’t intersect with your job at all, but might make a potential employer or colleague uncomfortable or feel unsafe
    • Similarly be conscious about specifically disavowing kinds of work (e.g. ‘I won’t work for faith-based organizations’), as again, that could be offputting to people even outside of those areas
    • Put differently, if sharing a belief could close doors, do so consciously and cautiously, and make sure the doors it’s closing are ones you want closed
• What can you provide?
  • In the corporate world…
    • What job titles can you fill?
    • What kinds of contracts can you successfully complete?
    • What problems can you solve?
    • What relevant experiences or domains are you familiar with (e.g. clinical records, social media)?
  • As an academic…
    • What do you bring to a potential department?
    • Why would a potential student seek you as an advisor?
    • What service roles would you be uniquely suited to?
  • Generally…
    • Why would somebody seek out your expertise?
    • What tools or techniques are you adept with?
• What makes you unique?
  • Why are you different from other likely candidates?
  • Why would they want you rather than anybody else?
  • For what task are you and only you the perfect tool?
  • What parts of your background and positionality (e.g. languages you speak, experiences you have, knowledge you have) are hard to find in other candidates?
• What is your ‘personal style’?
  • Are there certain aesthetic choices which are important to your identity?
  • Do you prefer to present yourself formally or informally?
    • “Dr. William Francis Styler IV, M.A, Ph.D is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California San Diego Department of Linguistics specializing in Computational Approaches to Acoustic and Articulatory Phonetics. Contact information below.”
    • “Hey! I’m Will, and I study speech, using computers, at UCSD. Shoot me an email if you wanna chat about that!”
  • Are there aesthetic elements you want to keep consistent across your materials because they meaningfully represent who you are?
    • Fonts, Colors, a Logo, a particular image?
  • Does your choice of clothing (or style of clothing) for a given context matter and express something important?

How to communicate your personal brand

Once you’ve chosen your personal brand, you’ll want to operationalize it across the many domains of your life. Put differently, you’ll want to make sure that anything public-facing is reflective of and consistent with your brand. Here are a few things to consider as you do this.

Your Website

It’s a good idea to have a ‘one stop shopping’ place which has all the information that an employer or student or colleague would need, and in 2024, that’s a website.

Your site doesn’t have to be your own domain, but it should be a site you control and can tune and edit easily and regularly. It’s likely wise to consider the perceptual effects of using (e.g.) a university website vs. a github page vs. linguistdude42.myfreewebsitelol.com, and you’ll want to make sure the style of the site matches your branding above.

Consider this to be your Only Official Site, containing authoritative information, and supplanting every other site. As such, it should be updated regularly as things change.

Your site should contain, at the very least…

• Basic information
  • Who are you? Where are you based?
• Brief Description
  • This is where you quickly answer the ‘What you do, why, and what can you provide?’
  • You can have pages which go into more detail, if you’d like.
• Contact information
  • How do I get ahold of you?
• Your resume or CV
  • Provided there’s nothing confidential, it’s a good idea for somebody to be able to instantly find a document detailing just how awesome you are.
• A Recent Photograph
  • See below!
• Relevant Links
  • Here’s where you’ll link to your YouTube page, your GitHub, your Instagram (for an artist, e.g.), and your lab’s website.
• Thoughtful Design
  • Make sure that the design fits your aesthetic and personal brand

A few other things to think about as you plan and design your site…

• Ease of Updating
  • If your site is difficult to update, you won’t keep it up to date
  • A website last updated in 2021 isn’t particularly useful to learn about a person’s hireablility or find their latest publications
• De-duplication
  • If you have the same information twice (e.g. listing your papers both on your CV and research page), you’ll need to update both, which increases friction. Consider just putting links into your CV, and sending people there.
  • There should be one place and only one place where a given piece of information should live
• Accessibility
  • Using text (or text-included PDF) is more accessible than images (or PDFs consisting only image data).
  • Make sure that color isn’t carrying important information which nothing else is.
• Open Access
  • Remember that one of the main reasons people might visit your website is to read your work, particularly when you publish in closed journals. So, if possible, include links to full text PDFs or pre-prints of any paywalled publications
  • It’s good practice to include links for each item in your CV
  • It’s also a kindness to include links to download posters and/or slides from past conference presentations, because often all people can access are abstracts or titles

Your Photograph

It’s not required to have a photograph or headshot on your website, but it’s often a good idea, if nothing else, so folks can say “Oh, I’ve seen this person at talks!” or to let people recognize you when meeting you in public. Having a high-quality, public-facing photograph also provides an easy place for people to ‘grab your photo’ for a guest talk poster, etc. In addition, many sites (e.g. LinkedIn) will require a photo, and many people might not trust a profile with (e.g.) a picture of your cat.

That said, posting a photo of yourself carries operational security risks. Remember that public facial recognition tools are a thing, and once labeled pictures are out there, with a smartphone picture, people could link you back to your identity, or, for folks in stigmatized communities, allowing people to link your professional and personal life. However, you’ll often find that you’ve already lost this privacy (e.g. thanks to a past employer’s newsletter on a website), and as such, there’s no risk of posting another.

Be mindful of the kind of message your picture sends. I am ridiculous, therefore I tend to have a ‘double thumbs up’ gesture such that there’s no confusion as to whether I take myself seriously. Others may have a professional headshot, or a picture of themselves with their family and/or pets, or of them surfing. Each of these choices sends a message, and is a decision you should make consciously.

Finally, please don’t be the person using a picture from 1995, such that people are looking for somebody with a full head of non-gray hair for a job interview.

Curation

Particularly for those of us who grew up on the internet before it was widely known just how archived our online lives would be, it’s common to have a very large ‘digital footprint’, including a lifetime of expressions, some of which might not reflect your current thinking.

So, a part of building your personal brand is ensuring that your online presence is consistent with it. As such, you might consider…

• Consciously remove or redirect out-of-date or unused profiles, websites, and social media sites, sending all traffic to your current website
• Googling yourself and then working to remove sites or information which aren’t consistent with your personal brand
• Remove old forum or social media accounts which aren’t relevant to your current life, just in case
• Find any online aliases or screen-names which can be linked back to your professional identity (e.g. You’ve used linguistdude42 across websites for years, and that’s linked to your real name via Twitter), and…
  • Change your username to something not linked to your professional life, if you’d like to continue using that account and the content is not on-brand
  • Ensure that all public-facing posts are consistent with your personal brand, and delete anything that doesn’t reflect your current perspective and needs
• If there are parts of your online existence you’d like to keep separate from your professional life, contemplate and mitigate ways that they could be linked to your professional identity, accidentally or maliciously
  • Also remember that all it takes is one student noticing your other username in a tab bar during a lecture to ‘pierce the veil’, so it’s worth being extra cautious

Social Media

Figure out how people in your field use social media, and use accordingly. If yours is a LinkedIn field, use LinkedIn. If Instagram is the norm, do that. Just make sure that your posts and approach are consistent with your brand.

Although ideally, we all have freedom of personal expression no matter our employer, it’s best to think carefully about the possible consequences (just or unjust, reasonable or unreasonable) of your online public speech, even in unofficial, personal venues and social media. People are regularly censured, fired, passed over for promotion, or even have job offers rescinded, based on controversial public speech on their personal accounts. Put differently, as you contemplate your social media presence, weigh the benefits of controversial speech relative to the risks carefully, and if you assume the worst about your organization’s approach to freedom of personal speech, you’re probably closer to correct.

Your Contact Information

First, make sure it’s clear how somebody should contact you. Whether that’s email, phone, LinkedIn, or otherwise, be directive about the best way to get in touch, and then check that regularly.

Be conscious of how your contact information will appear, and there’s a difference between ‘first.last@fastmail.com’ and ‘sk8erboy1985@hotmail.com’. Also ensure that the address is reliable, rather than (e.g.) your old university email which gets deactivated two years after graduation, in the middle of your job search.

Other Expressions of your Brand

Of course, there are other places where you express your brand. This could be in your CV or resume, statements of purpose, letters of recommendation, and even your office decor. Just make sure everything’s on brand for you.

Acknowledgements

This article was written based on my own experience, synthesis of the advice I’ve heard previously, and bits and pieces of small articles. One excellent article which informed my own thoughts is this one https://academicentrepreneur.org/personal-branding-for-the-academic-entrepreneur.