Personal branding

A big huge warm welcome to the session today. Today we are focussing in on personal branding and positioning using LinkedIn. It’s a bit of a deep dive into LinkedIn but also around the strategy behind what you’re doing as well. I am Doctor Hannah Roberts. I have a degree, master’s, PhD and postdoc in chemistry. I then spent eight years managing large multi-million pound projects between academia and industry and commercialising that research. As part of one of those commercialisation projects I started a spin-out company with three other female academics. I was managing director of that company for two years. I did that phase of my life while also having three children. Yes, it is quite a crowd! Three is a crowd in our house, I have to say. It was on my third maternity leave where I decided to retrain to be a coach and a professional skills trainer. I’ve been doing that in my own business since 2019. So, it is a real pleasure to be here today but it’s also one of my all-time favourite topics as well. I will tell you why. What we’re doing in today’s session, I just want to put it into context for the kind of workflow of how career design works in my brain. I see it as six key stages to career design that we build and layer on top of. For me, it all starts with the foundations of time and energy management. If we’re so busy working in our careers – like head down – we forget to look up and work on it. I think that’s what Prosper is really helping us to do; to actually have a structure around working on our careers. The next part for me is really overcoming our limiting beliefs, emotions and behaviours that keep us small. If we’re trying to design a career and take those next steps in our career but we’re doing it from a position of not good enough, don’t know enough, not worthy enough, the outcome we’re going to get in terms of the next steps is not going to be as, let’s say, full of potential as what is actually available inside of you. That is my next layer. The third layer for me is defined flow; working through your natural talents in capabilities to really understand how you add the most value in the world and what brings you the most joy as well, because work should actually be fun, too. These two last ones – this elevate and network – is where we are going to be focussing in on today’s session. So, we’re going to look at how to elevate your position in the marketplace. We’re going to look at a mission statement as well as to how we can start to articulate our position in the world and the workplace. Then also how to start to network ourselves and market ourselves into those next steps and what’s the strategy behind that. Just to put into context there are a few foundational layers and we’re up here today. Okay, so why personal branding? Why is it actually important to have your own brand? Why can’t we sit behind, let’s say, a kind of company brand or something else? Why do we actually need to do it in the first place? I had a look at some of these stats for the number of followers between the people that run a business or own the business and the business itself or the brand itself. You’ll see here on Twitter we’ve got Richard Branson here and he has 12.6 million followers. But Virgin, that’s been around for goodness knows how long – probably decades – actually only has 250k followers on Twitter. You can see there’s a massive difference between people and the shopfront. It’s the same way, so this is Jessica Alba; she has a company called The Honest Company, which has one million followers on Instagram. Jessica herself has 19.4 million followers. People are interested in people, not companies – and they’re interested in you, too. So, there’s a final example here. We’ve got Apple, which is an absolutely huge brand: 7.4 million followers on Twitter but Tim Cook, the CEO – or CTO – has 13.2 million followers. Even when you think of the biggest brands, it’s the people behind the brands that they care about. I want you, even if you don’t feel like I’m the person that wants to be visible or out there, I still want you to have your own personal brand and put yourself in a position where people can really see what you’re about and really understand who you are. This is me. The reason why I am so passionate about this particular topic is because when I finished my scientific project manager role, I had decided I wanted to be trained to be a coach and a professional skills trainer. I had a 465 connections on LinkedIn. Thought I’d done pretty well. I’ve even drawn out my network. This is a great exercise to do; we’ll talk about it in a minute, but I drew out my network as I finished the end of my postdoc scientific project manager role. Yes, 465 connections on LinkedIn. Doing pretty well. It wasn’t until I thought, oh okay, I started this business but I don’t actually want to be in person. I want to use online networking as a way to start to build my business. We’ve also seen with the pandemic that online network has now become a critical part of everybody’s strategy. I started to really learn how to use online tools, in particular LinkedIn. You’ll see here as soon as I started to use LinkedIn my whole network blew up completely both in terms of the number of interactions I was having with people, but also the dynamism. It’s like interactivity and it’s an extended set of ties that changes over time. It’s huge and as a result of doing that, I really focussed on LinkedIn for the first six months and expanded my network to nine-thousand people in the first six months. Now, you might be saying, ‘It’s not really about the number of people.’ No, it’s not; it’s about the type of person that you want to talk to online. When you really get that, it’s then about the numbers after that because you are starting to talk to the right people. Then it’s the volume of people. Both things matter. Now my network stands at over 24,000 people on LinkedIn. As a result I get huge amounts of opportunities that I never could’ve imagined. I’ve been offered job opportunities, podcasting guest experts, people that have paid me to write articles. They actually pay you to write articles. I’ve been asked to be part of a network called the EDU network, which is all to do with enhancing higher education as well. I’ve met a huge number of people who I really feel like I know online. It makes a big difference to know that you have that kind of network online. So, with that in mind I will be applying today’s session to LinkedIn as the platform for our personal branding and positioning, but do note that you can use this on Twitter. You can apply this to Instagram, you can apply it to TikTok or YouTube. Wherever you’re going with this you can apply it to whatever platform works for you. For me, I feel like LinkedIn is a fantastic place to be for your professional network. So, if you haven’t given LinkedIn your full attention yet in terms of these strategies, give it a go. Be consistent and see what happens as a result. Just a final note on that. I’ve not put it in today’s session in terms of exercises but this is a great thing to do to put you at the centre and to draw out all the places that you’ve worked. Put your connections that you know in: their first name, last name, just the letters. Draw a line between contacts that know each other. That will start to give you a really clear indication as to if you had this dynamic network or not. If you find that you have lots of unconnected individuals like there, there – they don’t know anybody else in the network, these kind of ones – we want to minimise that. Also you might find that you get clustering where these people all know each other but they’re not connected to anyone else in the network. So, one thing that you can do to start to improve the dynamism of your network is to act as a broker. A broker is someone who connects two people together and the research shows that when you do this it’s a benefit obviously to them because you’ll think, oh, this person and this person should really talk and know each other. But also it benefits you in your network because it extends those ties and that dynamic part of it. Now, interconnectivity really makes a difference as you go along. So, you can give to others, you can be a gift to others by connecting them in the broker sense, and it gives a gift back to you, too. I routinely do this on a monthly basis. I will at least connect a few different people a month and really think about doing that whenever I possibly can. Do please take the time to do that. For today’s session – and in fact for the LinkedIn strategy we’re going to use – I need you to set some intentions behind why on earth you might even show up online to do some kind of positioning or networking in the first place. It’s a one in the chat box if you’re looking for a job opportunity in the next six months. If there are some of you here or those watching a replay who’ve decided, yes, I’ve decided to stay in academia and give it all I’ve got for X number of time – and I say this to my postdocs – you need to have a trigger point as to what is going to trigger you into a different pathway. If you do choose academia, what’s that moment of, ‘I’ve done three fellowship applications. I’m not getting anywhere where I want to get to. I’m not getting feedback that I’m looking for. I’m in my second postdoc, been going for five years now.’ What is your actual trigger point as to what’s going to move you on? But if you have decided, ‘I’m going to give it what I’ve got and I need to do that for myself, it is my next step’, or you’ve strategically taken another postdoc to do whatever it is that you need to do, a set of skills or qualification of some sort, you might then be looking at improving your collaborations. Whether that is collaborations with other academics or industry. So, if that’s you, put a number two in the chat box for me. Then number three is if you’re not sure what you’re doing – whether it’s a job opportunity, a collaboration and you don’t know yet – put number three in the chat box for increased impact and visibility with the work you’re doing currently. By default, job opportunities and collaborations will also increase your impact and visibility. So, you’ve not missed out if you put a one or a two in the chat box. Thank you. Keep that in mind when we’re doing the exercises today. Perfect, so I want you to take 30 seconds to a minute to think through now: what are your barriers to networking online? Why don’t you do it, or if you do, is there any barrier to you extending your network further? What is going on for you around networking online? Okay, so what I hear the most is that the problem is not knowing how impactful online tools really are, what to say or how to use them efficiently are some of the major reasons social media presence underperforms; because no one wants to lose focus, wasting time being sucked into consuming social media – oh, I feel the pain – with leaving a permanent trace and juggling between so many different platforms without the evidence it produce tangible results. That is why for me it’s really important to measure, to test what is actually going on. That’s why I know how many connections I had when I started and how many I have now and what the impact is. When I do something online what are the measures of success there as well? The four stages to this strategy – and again we’re applying it to LinkedIn but it could be applied to Twitter or elsewhere – the first stage is the define stage. We’re going to be focussing in here on today’s session on the defined stage. Grabbing your baseline statistics, making sure that we have a profile that really talks to your ideal person – we’ll call it an ICA; ideal client avatar. Could be ideal employee avatar or ideal collaborator avatar; whatever is the context for you. We’re going to look specifically at the headline on LinkedIn and this is the most important part of the whole profile. So, we’re going to get that nailed today. If we get time we’ll dig into the summary section, too. We’re then going to look at the attract phase. This is all about how to connect with other people online in a way that is authentic and what the etiquette is behind that. Now, there is also some stuff to do on strategy around the media that you put on your profile, and in particular how to do a talk and what design tools to use. There is the connect and develop phase so we will look at some of the connect phase in terms of the daily actions you can take on LinkedIn in under 15 minutes. There are content pillars and scaffolding for that, it’s probably four… This would probably take us at least four to five session to complete. Then the develop phase is how do we take all that and start to convert it into opportunities? We’re going to start at the very beginning today. What I want you to do for exercise number one is to grab your baseline statistics. Over to LinkedIn. If you’ve just set up your profile and you’ve never had one before, the answer is going to be zero; you don’t have any connections yet. I want you to come down and look here. So, you’ve got your name, your headline and here you will have either the number of followers or the number of connections. I want you to type it in the chat box. If it’s not there, you will find it in the activity section here. This is just about having a starting point so if it’s zero, it’s zero. If it’s 5000 it’s 5000. It doesn’t really matter because the strategy I’m going to show you is going to absolutely eclipse all these numbers in a very short space of time. It doesn’t really matter the starting point; just that you know where you’ve started from so you can see how far you grow. So, exercise number two is our ideal person. I want you to think about who specifically you want to be networking and connecting with when you’re doing this online networking. If you type number one in the chat box – so it was the job opportunities – the people that you want to be connecting with are going to be the people that are going to ultimately hire you. Say for example you’re a postdoc and you’ve been doing a data analytics, data science-type postdoc. You’re looking to move into industry and you don’t mind if it’s pharma, agri-tech, bio industries. You don’t mind as long as you get to do data analysis, data scientist. You might want to connect with directors of data science or directors of data analytics – whatever the job title is – in one of those three different industries. So, you’ll start to go, ‘Okay.’ If you typed in number two in the chat box and you’re looking for collaborations, whether that is in industry or in academia, I want you to think about who specifically those people are. So, are they researchers in quantum dots? Who are they specifically? Then the third one was getting more visibility with the work that you’re doing. So, who gets impacted the most by your work? Is it other academics or are there other key stakeholders? Is there an end user that might be interested in your work? Or is there, say you do some research and it impacts Parkinson’s disease sufferers, but actually you want to get visibility for your work with clinicians so that they can go and take your research and maybe be interested in implementing it in the future for those patients. So, yes, your visibility might be around the end user but probably it’s going to be about the intermediary stakeholder here. Who cares about the work that you do? Who is this ideal person? Recruiters are fantastic people to connect with alongside your ideal people. They’re very well networked, they have a lot of people in their networks and they also post job opportunities. If you get really aligned to them and talk to them, they can be really helpful. They’re also the people that know the market value of a particular position. So, if you’re unsure how much you’d get paid to do a job and it doesn’t specify it or the job has said, ‘Well, what would you like to get paid’, go and ask your recruiter because they will know the answer. So, how do we start to attract these ideal people to us so that they can bring us the opportunity, or we’ve got a really clearly-positioned self in the marketplace and that when we put ourselves out there, they’re going to understand who we are and give us the opportunity. Okay, so the way that we start this process of attracting people to us like a magnet is through your headline. Your headline is the most important thing on LinkedIn because it follows you around LinkedIn wherever you go. As an example, when you connect with someone – so when you send them a connection request – they get your name, your headline. Yes, they get your name, your picture and your LinkedIn headline. So, if that makes sense even if you don’t know them, they will connect with you. Also as you’ll see in a moment, when you make a comment – and it’s important to comment on posts because it brings visibility without needing to make your own content. So, when people comment on a post it’s not just enough to emoji a post. When people comment – let’s find someone with a comment, here we go – you’ll see that people get their name, their picture and their LinkedIn headline. So, if that makes sense people will click through and read the rest of your profile so it’s a way to start the conversation. It’s like attracting them to learn more. If you don’t call out the people who should care, the people who should employ you, the people who should collaborate with you or whatever it is upfront, you’ve lost them because you’ve only got probably one-and-a-half seconds to really catch people’s attention to know whether or not they want to learn more from you. That’s all we have, not much more. Super important to get this right. Once you’ve nailed this, it can also act as your elevator pitch so you’ll be able to talk about what you do in under a minute for the first time in your life, maybe. People like your mum, your dad, siblings, partners, colleagues, friends, might know what on earth you actually do – or want to do in the future once you get this right. It’s super helpful. I’ve split the LinkedIn headline into four different parts, and we’ll talk about why these are important in a moment and what happens when they’re not present. What I see the most is, people will repeat what their job is. They will say – and again it’s not shaming here; I did this myself – I’m a PhD researcher in carbohydrate chemistry at Manchester University. We say what we do and where we are, but we’re missing a trick because underneath that headline it tells people where we work or where we’ve last studied. Again we’ve missed the opportunity to maybe speak to what we can actually do. I also want to draw the attention to the fact that it changes over time. Right now you might be applying for a job and it might be a specific headline. Once you’ve got the job, you might go to strategy number three, which is getting more visibility for the work that you do. As you’ll see, mine has changed over time, too, as you get more information and more input into what impact you’re making in the world. The four different components are as follows. Number one, we always start with the ideal person and reaching them upfront. I like to use doing words like helping, enabling, supporting, teaching. If you want a collaborator, collaborating with and then the person. The next part is: what is the big impact of the work you do, or what do they get after they’ve interacted with you? What is that higher-level impact? We then – and this is the easy part for all you out there – the thing that we often leave with when we are in the research field is: how do you do that? What is your method? Is it mass spectrometry? Is it NMR? Is it data policies, something? What is your particular method? Then we use some keywords separated by fenceposts which are sector or subject specific, which I have down here. I have coaching workshops. Or it could be accomplishments so now I’ve got some things like my coaching certification in those brackets. Those help people to find you in search terms because you start coming to the top of the search list when you have those keywords in your headline. Okay, so this is when the four-part strategy is not used and why it’s important. What happens when we don’t include all of those different components? Again this isn’t about saying these people here did it wrong; it’s about just learning from what we can do with the strategy. The first one is: discover the fabulous world of insects, their chemical interactions and contribute to sustainable pest management. So, I’m not quite sure who should care. I know the outcome is sustainable pest management and the method is something around fabulous insects, chemical interactions. It’s a little bit unclear for me because I don’t know upfront if it’s for me or not. The next one says; helping to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs from Scotland’s universities. So, who does she help? The next generation of entrepreneurs. Do they see themselves as that or not? That is debatable. What specific outcome they get? I don’t know. How does she do it? She nurtures them. Do they want nurturing? Who knows. The next one is: helping innovative companies – great – protect their ideas – fantastic. But what is the method? What she’s done here is just repeated her job title and where she works. It says it underneath so it’s a missed opportunity to really land the point. We know it’s patent war but it would be nice for it to just be short and succinct. The final one says, enabling researchers – great, I’m on board – make faster, more predictive outcomes – great, fantastic. But in what context? Will it work for me? Will it work for my research? What on earth is this thing? You can see why all three parts are important and the fourth part of those search terms just helps us be more visible, too. Here are some examples of some beautifully written headlines and people that I have worked personally with. For example, Rajesh here at GSK was looking to align the next position for himself, like a job opportunity. So, he calls out his people: helping C-suite leaders. What is the big outcome? Deliver shared services and outsourcing, transformation savings. I have no clue what that is but his people will. What is his method? By alignment on a clear strategy and proven approaches to implementation. So, that will speak to his people. You’ll see here again Linda was looking for a job opportunity. She worked in the energy sector and she wanted to move back into life sciences. She says, ‘Helping senior directors and key stakeholders achieve opportunities and innovation – and that’s the big outcome. The method is through competitive intelligence, commercial strategy and true – put my teeth in – proven traction success. Again here we have, let’s do another example; we’ve got Catherine. Collaborating. She’s not been so specific about who, but collaborating across scientific disciplines – I’ll have a word with her about that – to discover the next generation of crop protection; outcome. Method; by design and synthesis of small molecules and multiparameter data analysis. It works whether you’re in industry – like Catherine and Rajesh and Reyna – or whether you have a professional services role – like Rachel – or whether you are already in work, as Linda, and looking for the next job. Whether you are a scientist and you’re looking for other collaborators or other stakeholders, it works in all sectors and it’s going to work for you, too. So, let’s do it. I want you to create your four-part LinkedIn headline. Remember: your ideal person, helping, enabling, supporting. Give a good starting point, who that is. What is the big impact? How do you do it, and some key words. I’ve given another example here of my GSK workshop. Enabling GSK’s senior leadership team to get clarity on decisions by managing the interactions of key workstream experts, because she’s a chief of staff. So, I will go back to this slide. We had a sneak preview and I want you to create your LinkedIn headline now. I’m going to leave these examples on the screen because it’s always helpful to have other people’s examples. Okay, so I want you to pause on an exercise and know that you can come back to it at any time, and that the best thing to do really is to try it out. Try it out on your PI, try it out on your colleagues, friends. Ask them, ‘Can you understand these four key components of my headline? Did you hear all the parts in it?’ So, get some bounce back between – get some feedback. The more feedback points we have, the better it’s going to become. Remember that it’s just for now; it’s not forever because you change, your strategy changes and your headline changes. What is super important is that when it comes to job opportunities, networking and referrals are critical. This was a piece of research that I saw at a Jobvite. I don’t know how to say it, but I’ve put the link below. It was all about how people were hired. By what source type did they originate? Whether that was a notification email, a job board, a career site, an agency, a recruitment agency, they found a whopping 39.9 per cent came from employee referrals. So, this is the critical piece. You know when you’re writing your cover letter? The very first sentence should say something like: I was alerted to the position of X, Y, Z by such-and-such a person at your company, or in what position at the company. That first sentence should always name drop the referral that you got. Now, in order to get more referrals we need to have a really great network and actually start to connect and reach out to that network. So, let’s have a look at how to actually do that. I believe that there are three elegant strategies that you can take in under 15 minutes to make this a reality. When I say 15 minutes, I took these actions daily but for you it’s your choice. If you’re looking for jobs, I daresay that daily would be best. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But it’s entirely your choice. You could do Tuesday, Thursday. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It could be 9:00 am, it could be midday. Pick a frequency, be consistent and block it in your calendar to make it reality, or alert yourself on your phone, ‘Now is my time to do my thing.’ Then if there’s time left over you can consume social media up to your eyeballs. So, you have permission. Okay, so the three different parts are 1) we want to expand your network first of all full of the ideal people, relevant people. So, we need ten new people every time we come and do this strategy. 2) We are then going to increase the interconnectivity between our network. Doing that will also increase your visibility without needing to create any social media. So, you’re going to comment on five posts – not just enough to emoji – but you’re going to comment. I’ll show you how to do it, and there are two different ways you’ll do it in a moment. The third piece is to get visible. Between one-to-three per cent of users of LinkedIn actually curate content for LinkedIn. So, any time you put something out, you post a post or an article, by default you’re going to be super visible. The great news about LinkedIn is that content hangs around a lot longer. So, Twitter, it might be gone within an hour or two hours max. You want to see what happened this morning on Twitter; it’s gone, but with LinkedIn it can hang around for weeks. I still get comments on a post I put out there the middle of last year about CV of failures. People still find it. It’s unbelievable, so it hangs around. Sharing your ideas is literally you could reshare something that’s already out there; that’s the easiest way to do it if you’re not going to have a content strategy. You just share a post and include a quote or some kind of text to say why you thought it was helpful for your network. Literally writing a quote or a piece of text is thought leadership. Having an opinion on something is your thought leadership. It’s that simple. It’s not some kind of only thing for gurus out there; it is for everybody. You can be a thought leader about your particular niche area. So, let’s have a look at how this works in reality. Okay, so we’re going to find ten relevant people first so let’s take the example of data science directors. Firstly you could type in a job title or you could just type in data science or you could type in a specific qualification that person must have to get there. There are loads of things you could do. You could find a company you’re super interested in and drill down the people. Say it’s pharma companies so you want to work at GSK and you want to be data science at GSK. You would type GSK, the company, data science here and you would find some directors. So, first of all we need people; loads of results here. Then we want to go to second-degree connections. Our first-degree connections are everyone who’s already in our network. Whenever we connect with someone they become a first degree connection. The second-degree connections are people we have in common who are not connected yet. Third degree means there is no one in common and that can be really hard to connect out to that kind of third sphere. I recommend not doing that. It doesn’t make so much sense. If you have a look at second-degree connections I’ve now got 22,000 results. When you first start this, if your network is small you might get one result. You might get five. As your network becomes bigger, so do the number of people that come up in these search results. Don’t worry about that. Then if location, say it’s a job you’re going for and the location is important, you might drill down further. Now I’ve got 7600 results. If there is a specific company that you want to work for, you can drill down further. You might have a goal list of companies and work through them. You can see here: Douglas, associate director, statistics, data, science innovation hub at GSK. Connect. Now, just literally click connect. If it’s someone super interesting – so I would say just connect with ten relevant people; no personalised connection requests because it takes time. If you find someone super aligned and you think, yes, they’re going to be my boss, make a note of the name first of all and the company. So, you can reach out to them behind the scenes later on and do a personalised connection request. So, we’ve not consumed any social media. We’ve come online. We’ve found ten relevant people and we’ve connected with them. Just in the same way that people connect with you and you make a judgement whether or not to accept them in your network, it’s the same way the other way round. So, you might get 40-to-60 per cent of people that say yes – and that’s okay, too, because we’re all making these decisions every day. Don’t take it personally. The next one that we do after that is we want to increase that dynamic part, the interconnectivity, and get visible without putting your own content out there. This is where we come to the home feed. Now, at first your home feed might not be so great, might not be seeing the things you want to see because quite frankly, you haven’t engaged with it. So, to teach LinkedIn what you want to see more of, you have to kind of search for it. Say I search for imposter syndrome and I look under posts, I will find some relevant posts in there that I can actually sort of comment under. Oh, it actually talks about me! He knew. If I have now started to get lots of things that I like to see in my home feed and I don’t have to actually search for the topic, then I can go down. Again you’ll see here name – I don’t know, name, not picture. Name, picture and LinkedIn headline. You make a comment. Two reasons you might make a comment. One, to be a supportive voice, an authentically supportive voice, in your community. That would mean, ‘Congratulations on this paper that you’ve written. How are you celebrating? Congratulations on the new job, the PhD thesis’ – whatever it is. Celebrate with your people in your network. The next thing is, you could add some unique value. As you saw, I searched for imposter syndrome. I could have a field day in the comments section, with all of those posts talking about what I know in imposter syndrome or sharing a link to something or adding value. In the same way, you’ve got a specific set of values that you can bring to post that you can share when relevant with your audience again. Just putting a comment in there, five comments and then you’re done. Super visible and you’ve connected with people in your network. Then finally after that, if you feel like you can take the next step, find a post that already exists, share it and add your thought leadership to it or comments. Just an opinion on something. Then over time you might find that you want to create your own content strategy as well, as I do. So, without consuming, take those three steps. You can get it done in under 15 minutes a day. Just commit right here and now as to how frequently you’re going to do that. So, finally this is how you can get in touch with me and keep in touch with me. Obviously connect with me on LinkedIn so you can tap into my network. I can’t wait to see your new headlines and tweaks. I can’t wait to actually see you visibly in my network, too, getting out there, commenting, engaging and really noticing what opportunities happen as a result.[END OF TRANSCRIPT]