A presentation at Incubator 13 Webinar - April 21st in April 2021 in Ottawa, ON, Canada by Jason St-Cyr
One of the tricky parts of building out a professional social presence is how to do so and be comfortable with how much you are sharing about yourself. How do we balance being vulnerable, honest, and real so that we can build up a professional persona, but still protect our private identities.
My name I Jason, and I want to share some of the things that I’ve tried to do to create more of an online presence for myself professionally, without giving away all the personal details of my life.
In my role at Sitecore, I act as a sort of public face for the company with our technical audience. So I’m heavily active out there, constantly trying to share things and connect with people. I try to share what I can about myself, but in a recent Twitter outreach I did, almost nobody was able to say anything about my personal life when trying to describe me.
When is my birthday? What are my middle names? What is my wife’s name? How many kids do I have? What do they look like? Where do I shop or eat? What type of vehicle do I drive?
My professional profiles seem like they are sharing a lot, and they tease at these details, but it takes a lot of digging to try to find these things, and some of them can’t be found at all online.
So today, we’ll talk through the basics of the benefits of building out that social brand, as well as the benefits of protecting your privacy, and ultimately look at how do we balance both of these.
To close things off, I’d like to show some specific details about LinkedIn and steps you can take on that specific platform, since it’s used by a lot of folks for doing professional social media.
So let’s set some of the benefits up for why you should leverage social media for your professional self. Not everybody wants to do this, and even I didn’t start in on building this out until later in my career as I started to take on a more external persona.
The primary benefit is to create a brand. This means having a representation of yourself that you show off to the rest of the world. Brands can be small, they can be huge, the goal here is not to have the biggest brand (unless that is what you are trying to do) but to have an accurate brand so that when people interview you or work with you, that it seems like a logical extension of what they have already experienced.
One of the first things you need to know about building out your professional brand is that it doesn’t have to be “professional” in the way you might think. There are a lot of successful individuals whose public personas have nothing to do with the work they do, they don’t even necessarily sanitize how they speak online or what they share.
Ultimately, it’ about creating a persona that somebody wants to connect with. It’s your digital business card and as long as you are comfortable with what is there being the first impression somebody has before meeting you, then it’s all good.
As an example, when I go into a big meeting with people I don’t know, I visit as many of the profiles as I can on LinkedIn to get an idea of who I’m meeting with. What type of role they have, get a general idea of experience level, maybe what interests them if I have the time. If I’m interviewing somebody, I’ll dig a little deeper into their work history and what activity they are sharing, and see if they have any linked identities like a Twitter or a website. So this combination of online presences provides somebody else a view into who you are, and you get to control that and build that out.
There’s a social media influencer, Tamara McCleary, who has stated that you want think about what the three adjectives are that somebody would say about you, behind your back. And then think about that when you are building out your platform. You can choose those three adjectives, and then start building that out purposefully.
Social media in particular provides an easy way to reach an audience. There are numerous ways and tools to leverage to build out your brand, and you should use them, but with social media you can tap into existing communities and audiences that are actively looking to connect with others.
In my own case, I wasn’t trying to build out the largest audience possible. I’ve been trying to create a pretty closed network of followers as part of a community around the software that we build. I have either met, or interacted with, in some way most of the people who follow me. There are obviously exceptions as some of my content and messages has permeated out into the social sphere, but for the most part I’ve tried to avoid “playing the follower game” and connected into existing communities.
I participated in the community, I connected with other folks who were also active, I used hashtags used by that community. It grew slowly, but I now have a pretty loyal audience that has stuck through some pretty awful dad puns and music recommendations.
Now, when I first started doing this, I didn’t know where I should be. I had a LinkedIn profile, and a personal Facebook account, but neither was very active. I was mostly in forums and Q&A boards like Stackoverflow.
Then I discovered Twitter and some very sarcastic folks that amused me. For me, Twitter became a fit. Later, I created a corporate Facebook persona for a few cross-posts, and I try to get some activity on LinkedIn, but I decided that Twitter would be my brand account. That is where I would create the ‘me’ that people should follow.
This is a great benefit of social media for brand building. There are a variety of platforms available, and they cater to different types of audiences and communities. I hate to quote the old “the medium is the message” thing, but part of your brand is actually the platform you choose.
Think about your audience, the way you like to create, and how you want to connect. Choose a platform that feels right. You might have to try them out to see how it feels.
One of the best reasons to start using social media to build your brand is the opportunity to connect for open positions/job opportunities. You can build up connections with people over time, and they’ll already know you before you even start your interview. This can be a huge benefit to you in some cases.
This also allows you to break through the “old boys network” that has been created in a lot of industries. The physical boundaries of office life created a lot of closed networks for professionals, making it hard to break into these networks. Social media can help break out of this pattern by offering another way for people to connect beyond those physical connections people make.
However, while we’re out in the world building out these brands, we also need to recognize that there are a lot of benefits to staying private.
For example, a lot of the stories I can tell of my experience are also framed by the fact that I have a relatively privileged life experience as a middle-aged, white, straight male. I can do things like share my photo, without even thinking that this might impact somebody else’s impression of me. So there are benefits to keeping some things hidden.
When looking through a privacy-first lens, one of the things you can do is separate your professional life from your personal life. This makes it easier to create a consistent brand, especially when your personal life is very different from your professional life. Some folks prefer to create a single “whole view of a person” and others try to keep one account for their family pics and connecting with friends, and another alt for their corporate persona.
Another benefit of going privacy-first is the protection of your identity. Any steps you can take to reduce the amount of private information put into a social account makes it harder for you to be the victim of an identity or DOXX attack.
Another benefit to taking a privacy angle is about keeping control of your data. If you put it into a social media site, you can almost guarantee it’s being shared with somebody else, and that platform may not be disclosing to you where that data is going. More recent efforts around privacy laws have helped address this and make it easier to control, but the best control is keeping the data out of there.
Another thing to consider about taking a privacy-first approach is looking towards the future. You can’t know what yourself from 10 or 15 years down the road is going to need. The more you put out there, the more risk you take on. What you do here does depend on how much risk tolerance you have. The more private you are, the less risk.
Outside of digital safety and identity theft, there is also real-world physical safety that you need to be concerned about. Applying a privacy-first lens on your social media usage can make sure people don’t find out where you live, where your kids go to school, when are you away from your house regularly.
Okay… so there’s a benefit to be loud and build a brand and also a bunch of benefits to taking a privacy-first mindset… so what are some things we can do to balance those?
On alt accounts Earlier I mentioned that a privacy-first approach would separate your professional from personal life. An “alt” is a good way to make sure that potential employers, colleagues, etc. have a harder time finding out about your friends, family, and fun photos of that time you were in a band. To make this harder to tie the two together, you’ll likely have to keep your ‘personal’ account with an alternate nickname, or first name only, and have a profile picture that doesn’t immediately identify you as the same person so that folks searching for you don’t accidentally stumble upon your alt. Just note that every time you make it harder to find you, you are making it harder to find you. So that person that you went to high school with a decade ago is not going to be able to randomly reach out and friend you on Facebook, you’ll need to make those connections or have folks find you via one of your connections.
There are also numerous things you should probably make sure you are locking down. There are a lot of options to go through, but here are some big ones to look at:
Ultimately, this is a “it depends” type of scenario where you need to find out what works for you. There are some questions you can ask yourself as you start doing this. - What are you trying to do with your social presence? - Landing a job, growing your network, creating a following
For the last part of this presentation I want to take a look at one example of leveraging social for your professional career: LinkedIn. While I personally decided to do the majority of my social on Twitter, I do also use LinkedIn in a limited capacity to create a network, apply for jobs, share job positions to my network, etc. I don’t share much about myself as a person there, but I try to be regularly active there and engage with others.
We’re going to look at some of the things you can specifically do on LinkedIn to help balance your brand building and privacy.
On the privacy side of things, there are some things you can do to use LinkedIn without giving away much about yourself. Something that isn’t a setting, is your social behaviour. Try to have regular activity, not only when you are job hunting.
This doesn’t have to be everyday, but some people are only active on LinkedIn when they are job seeking. By having regular activity, you demonstrate some amount of involvement in your industry, but also make it more difficult to know when you are in ‘job hunt’ mode. Sometimes, the best security is obfuscation: make it so hard to find out by simply overloading with regular activity.
Let’s talk about brand building and boosting. There are a few easy things you can do that really help your profile be a better portfolio or business card to your network.
