Leveraging Social Media To Enhance Your Personal Brand

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today, we're speaking with Brian Reich, who is the managing director of little m media, a firm that provides strategic guidance and support to organizations around the use of the internet and technology to facilitate communication, education, engagement, and mobilization. He is the author of Media Rules! Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience, and he contributes as a Fast Company expert.

Previously, Brian was a principal of EchoDitto, one of the most successful online communication agencies. He's also currently teaching a course on consumer behavior and marketing at Columbia University in New York, where he's a graduate.

Brian, thank you so much for making the time. All the things that you've done in a way lead us to this conversation, because consumer marketing and online media apply, of course, to product brands, but also apply to our personal and professional brands. And it seems like a really confusing space right now.

And there are a lot of questions. The response was really super high, and I think what I took away from the questions in general is: where do I start? What do I do? How do I not assume tons of risk? And so if someone is just starting out, what's step number one in gaining a professional presence online and especially using social media?

Brian Reich: Two answers that I would give. The first is something less tangible: you need to think differently. You need to embrace what the internet and technology are offering, the new opportunities they're creating, the challenges that they're presenting, and really have a mindset coming into your approach to using technology, the internet and social media specifically, sort of in all the ways and all the different possibilities that exist.

And part of that is really recognizing that everything is changing. Social media isn't or can't be a tactic. It can't be a specialization. It can't be, in many cases, something that's explicitly learned. It's a worldview. It's an approach. It's an understanding that people want to be in conversations and relationships. And the tools now support that. Information is widely available.

It's a commodity, and the things that are valued are context and relevance and timeliness. We're not in a product-driven world or a service-driven world exclusively, that the lines between the departments within a company or an organization are now blurring and fragmenting, and the ways that we do our jobs and the ways that we shop and interact and get information and, you know, share things are impacted.

So the first part is you really have to go in there with the right mindset, because if you go in there thinking the first thing that I need to do is launch a blog or get on Twitter or read a certain book, you're going to run out of options more quickly. But if you come in with the right mindset, then really anything is possible.

The more tactical answer is you really need to just start doing things. There is no right answer, right? There isn't an expert at Twitter, or a right way to blog, or a set of features on Facebook that if you understand them, you'll be successful every time. There are, you know, lots and lots of different options.

And until you start to really almost get a feel for it, you know, understand what's needed, you're not going to find an expertise or a comfort that allows you to to grow and morph into whatever you need to do.

Anita Brick: That's a really good perspective to understand, but it seems like you have to come with something. Do you have to figure out what your message is and who the audience is so that you can then figure out what tools or avenues could be relevant, or do you just go out and play? I'm not really sure I understand.

Brian Reich: You can go at it from either direction and you'll probably end up in the same place. My suggestion is certainly to start with obviously clear goals and appropriate strategies for whatever it is you're trying to do. Whatever you're trying to accomplish, your goals and your strategies are not to have a mobile strategy or to be on Twitter. That is a tactical response to whatever … your goal has to be selling something or raising money, or being a thought leader, or improving the size of your audience and things like that.

So when you have the goals, you can start to understand different strategies to get there. A big first part, which you mentioned rightly, is you need to understand who you're talking to. So you need to take a snapshot, if you will, right now of who your audience is. You know—how they're getting and sharing information, how they're spending their time, what their expectations are—and then start to figure out what are the best tools, what is the best content?

What are the best opportunities for you to start to develop that relationship? Or just start to put information in front of them that's going to allow them to make decisions and pull the trigger on something.

Anita Brick: So it sounds like if I'm an individual wanting to be a thought leader or I want to enhance my positioning for a career move either now or later or an entrepreneur, the approach initially is the same. Just like you would create all of the internet social media, I need to understand who I am right and what I want to portray, and then I can jump in and try things and see how they work.

Brian Reich: Yes, although I think it would be a misrepresentation of the world before social media to suggest that entrepreneurs and people who were going into business spent a whole lot of time listening to and appreciating what the audience wanted.

Anita Brick: Good point. Very good point.

Brian Reich: In the old model—and frankly, still to this day, there's a lot of “I have an idea, I'm going to shape it, keep it close to the vest, figure out all the answers on my own because I'm smart, or I have advisors, or I have friends or whatever, and then I'm going to come up with a strategy to to roll it out and to put it out into the world to be successful.”

And that worked in the past because we had controls over the information that was going out there. The audience tuned in. We knew where they were. They were captive to a certain extent. Their options in terms of other alternatives or additional considerations were very limited. And now the genie's out of the bottle, right? So it's not so much a world where we can control or manipulate the ways that people get information and make decisions, choose to engage a company or purchase a product, whatever it is—it's much more about creating the ultimate choice environment for the customer, or building up trust and establishing a relationship that allows for a variety of different outcomes, some more transactional and specific than others.

So to do that, you have to now spend as much time, frankly, as a part of your audience. It's not even listening and kind of observing. It's really about being in the mix and understanding and appreciating what they're going through, so that then you can find ways to either develop products or position whatever your products and services are so that they resonate.

Anita Brick: OK, so if I am thinking about it in terms of personal branding, I need to follow the hiring managers and recruiters and thought leaders within a certain function industry company.

Brian Reich: The concept of expertise is very much changing. OK, there are certainly people out there—bestselling authors, CEOs, innovative people, what have you—that put out information that more people kind of gravitate toward. And you can start to look at those people for guides and trends. You can try to become one of those people by connecting yourself to an organization that puts out good research or similar.

In reality, the audience is going to make its own decisions today, and the variety of sources that they're going to get information from are wide and varied. I actually think to a certain extent this almost comes down to gut feeling and common sense in a lot of ways. Which is to say, if you are truly engaged with your audience, if you are a member of your audience, if you are participating actively in conversation with your audience, you don't need an expert.

You don't need a published author. You don't need a research study to tell you whether or not the conversations that you're putting out there are going to resonate well. In fact, I think to a certain extent, we put too much weight and stock into research and expertise and those types of things because we're looking for answers. We're looking for someone to tell us this is how it will work. This is the model to follow. This is the path that if you go down, you'll be successful.

And it's much squishier today than it used to be. My assumption is always that people are smart, and if they're paying attention and they are in it for the right reasons, or they're clear on the goals that they're trying to achieve, the answers actually start to become relatively easy to find. It's not that difficult to look out there and know whether or not you need to be on X platform, or talking about Y thing, or taking advantage of Z activity. When you're in it, it becomes a much more natural flow.

Anita Brick: OK, so let's talk about this. One of the Executive MBA students was asking about this. And, you know, how much time to spend and all of that. But also—and I think this is a really relevant part—but again, this whole squishy thing, how does a person know—an individual who is enhancing or making a career change—if the time spent via social media, blogging, all that stuff is actually paying off?

Brian Reich: On one level, it ties directly to your goal. So if your goal is to sell something ….

Anita Brick: Let’s not talk about selling something. But let's say I'm a professional in a particular field, and I want to enhance my positioning and presence to help me open up opportunities in the future. How do I, as an individual trying to leverage my personal brand, how do I know if it's working?

Brian Reich: I think it's still the same general approach: you need a clear, measurable set of goals, right? If you believe that the path to thought leadership and globally positioning yourself as someone that is desirable and should be hired or should be paid to do X, Y, or Z, you're going to come up with a strategy that you think is appropriate to do that.

My personal view is one of openness and collaboration. So my goal is always to find the people who I think are smart, who really get it, who are involved in interesting things, and to find ways to work alongside them on projects that I think are doing interesting and innovative stuff. So whether that is co-writing something or creating a podcast or having a Twitter conversation back and forth with them, the interaction and the association with those people, I think, elevates both my credibility and my ability to push my ideas out into an audience that I might not have reached previously.

Anita Brick: Very good point.

Brian Reich: In thinking about how do I want to elevate my personal standing, or how do I want to create a pathway through which I can push ideas out? This is my personal view, but the best opportunity is through collaboration and openness—to just keep producing content and keep sharing it with people who I think are smart and get into those conversations, and the rest is going to start to take care of itself.

And I can tell you, having been doing this type of stuff in addition to a lot of other things for years and years, it is true: the people that you develop those relationships with who believe that you're smart and committed and that you challenge them intellectually or whatever, are going to give you a call. They're going to invite you to participate in something.

They're going to refer you to someone when they're looking for a person who has your expertise and things like that. There are, of course, more direct, measurable approaches. You could use Google advertising to push information out, to promote your blog, or to sell a white paper, or to promote an event that you decide to put together, or just to increase the number of Twitter followers or Facebook friends that you have or what have you.

And there is a quantifiable measure of success in that. Which is to say, when you started, you had zero friends, and now you have more. And OK, but there are not more friends or more people reading your stuff equals the goal of establishing yourself as a credible thought leader. Those two things are not necessarily on the same page.

Anita Brick: True. I mean, especially when you think about some places like Twitter, you can get tons of people following you. And then there are also sort of like semi bogus and then they all fall off.

Brian Reich: Right. Well, and I think there is a big misconception that size matters. If you look at traditional open rates, just on email lists, you know, they hover in the high teens, maybe the low 20 percent, which suggests that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of the people who at some point signed on to get information from you are no longer finding whatever it is you're doing sufficiently valuable.

Right? So, you know, in my mind, you would be much better served having a smaller list of people who are more deeply invested in whatever you're doing. And obviously if those are, you know, quote unquote, the right people, the multiplier effect that we know exists within communities and networks has a greater likelihood of being realized. You're able to focus and have better conversations and put more valuable insights into that mix.

And those people will know what to do with them if they, in fact, find them valuable. But if you're pushing out information to try and satisfy a broad, diverse, very large audience, you're inevitably going to sort of underwhelm everybody.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right, and the same thing is true when someone does a job search and they have seven different targets. I mean, they come across fuzzy and not very effective across the board. So the focus is really important. Could we talk about some of the tools out there? Because there were questions around—I wouldn't even call them strategies, but different tactical ways of putting your foot into social media.

Brian Reich: Just to set up that part of the conversation, one of the things I would say is if you do have seven different audience groups or seven different discrete goals or approaches that you need to take, you very well might need seven different teams, seven different approaches, seven different tool sets. The internet and technology allow you to speed and scale your communications in ways that we wouldn't have been able to do before, but it doesn't lower the requirement to have a good conversation, to produce a good product, to create a valuable service that people want.

And increasingly, we're able to customize their information, experiences. So you need to not be thinking about how can one thing satisfy all seven audiences, but maybe what are the seven things that satisfy the seven audiences, and then look for the efficiencies and the connections that may exist, because technology has the ability to share and use the same platform and so on and so forth.

Anita Brick: It's a really good point, and there's so many possibilities. I know last year, this time, maybe even sooner, there was so much content and so much buzz, not that it's going away completely, around Twitter. And so one of the questions from an alum, what role can Twitter play in advancing one's career, and what are some of the best practices with Twitter that you would recommend?

Brian Reich: Well, I mean, I think you have to start by recognizing who's on Twitter and what it's really good for. So most of the people who are on Twitter are thought leaders, people who have content channels across other platforms and are looking for a way to amplify or curate cross conversations, you know, call attention to things that they find interesting.

There are plenty of people out there who are on Twitter—organizations and individuals alike—who are looking at Twitter as another kind of broadcast, you know, and they're putting out their press releases, or they're trying to build up the largest possible list. So when they have an event or an announcement, they can just put a note out there and people will automatically click through and follow. What people want from Twitter and what works really well is they want the opportunity to get access to a diverse set of insights or people.

They want to use it as a way to quickly, and in a focused way, tap into a community of people that you wouldn't necessarily be able to tap into or get access to—information that you wouldn't necessarily be able to keep up all on your own, so that you can kind of make sense of whatever part of the world you want to make sense of.

You're a marketer. There are lots of marketers out there who are not only promoting their own things, but, you know, highlighting things you should read, or asking questions and having conversations about what project works or not. If you are a nonprofit organization, you know there are groups out there who are using Twitter to keep track of crises and issues and responses to things.

Conference organizers are using Twitter to provide both feedback to participants live, to have essentially a new back channel or a side channel to a conversation, but also obviously to connect people who aren't able to attend in person without doing other things. The key across all of those things, though, is being interesting, being relevant, being conversational, and not being shamelessly self-promoting.

There's room for self-promotion. We all know people do it. One of the things, just as an example, when someone follows me on Twitter and I go to look if I should follow them back, if I don't recognize their name, one of the important things I look at is do they respond to anything? You'll click through and you'll see post after post after post after post and never and at message.

In response, you'll follow someone on Twitter and you'll get an auto direct message back that says something like, thank you so much for following me. You can learn more at my website dot, whatever.

Anita Brick: Yeah.

Brian Reich: Because in most cases, I actually follow someone because I'm interested in their perspective on what I'm working on. Or I have a perspective to offer to what they're working on. I'm hopeful that the conversations that essentially I get to eavesdrop into will yield some kind of value or insight to me, and so on and so forth. You have to kind of figure out what you want and what you're going to do with Twitter.

Personally, my Twitter stream, and it's connected to Facebook and whatnot, is a mix of business insights and personal observations. If you follow my Twitter feed, you'll see a lot about the time I spend with my two-year-old.

Anita Brick: I saw that today. You had a tweet that you sent out earlier this morning. Yeah, that was about school, right?

Brian Reich: I was joking about a competition that was happening between two nannies at my son's school, where they were trying to show that their charge, you know, the kid they were responsible for, knew their colors best.

Anita Brick: Pretty funny.

Brian Reich: It was a bit of a social observation that was probably cheaper than therapy for me to put it there than to try and find someone to appreciate and explain it to. And you know what my Twitter feed is for me? People who do follow me know what they're getting and appreciate the balance between the two. But I also know that there are plenty of people out there who only want to be on Twitter for business reasons and want to separate their streams, and that's fine.

That's great. But, you know, you should probably find another way to connect with me, because that's the way that I see Twitter integrating with my life. To be successful, you have to do what's interesting. But first and foremost, you have to do sort of what's interesting and true to yourself. Don't try to be a super expert, funny guy if you're not funny.

And don't try to be very personal and emotional and deep and caring if you're just not interested in having that kind of relationship with people online. It’s OK to have multiple platforms and essentially multiple personalities depending on how you engage people.

Anita Brick: Yeah, that's a very good point because I think that you can tell when someone is, whatever venue they're using, being, for lack of a better word, authentic, I'm much more interested than if I feel like I'm being sold, even if the thing being sold is ideas, not products.

Brian Reich: Yeah, there's always the question of how often should you post, right? And you post as often as whatever you're posting is valuable. So some days I don't post at all. I don't tweet at all. It's been two weeks since I was able to throw a blog post together that I considered to be good enough to put up, and that's fine, because what I want to be known for is the quality of the ideas in the conversation, right?

So I don't use Twitter as much to sort of announce where I am. Right? I'm going to Boston today, or I just landed in Texas. I may use that as a piece of information, you know, to qualify a comment that I think is socially relevant or related to work or just snarky and personality oriented or similar. So I didn't say—to use the tweet about being at my son's school this morning, I didn't say “just dropped my son off for his preschool program.”

I made a comment about this subtle battle going on between the two nannies. And obviously embedded within that was a comment about the fact that I was taking my son to preschool.

Anita Brick: Well, I think it goes back to it's important to know who you are, what your goals are, and do that accordingly. Quality is obviously very important to you. And you mentioned your blog. There was a question from a weekend student who was asking about what's the best place to start with a blog to help you, again, develop or expand your personal brand?

Brian Reich: You should only start a blog or any content production if you have something to say. It can be anything, right? You could write fiction. You could write poetry. You could share pictures. You could simply highlight the things that other people have written or created. You could share your television-watching habits. Whatever it is that you think is important to defining your personality, that's where you need to start.

So I'm a big believer in the creation of content for my needs around two things. One is I try to do original thought, truly original commentary. I don't write posts that are heavy on references to other posts and similar. I try to take an idea, and I have lots of ideas that pop into my head at random times during the day, and I try to flesh them out, and I try to apply them to the issues or the work that I'm doing, directly or indirectly.

But I'm not as much about commentary on what other people are doing in blog format, certainly, as I am about pushing original thought. That's my channel. That's my platform. And then the other thing that I'm into is I'm a big believer that there is just, frankly, a ton of really valuable media out there: newspapers, magazines, television shows, podcasts, radio programs, photographs, things that you see on the street, YouTube videos, whatever it is.

And when I come across those, I use my blog to share them because I think sort of a rising tide lifts all boats strategy. If I can share good information with people, whether I created it or not, it's going to enhance the conversation that I want to be a part of. And so part of my brand is that I try to find good information and experiences and stuff that people might benefit from or have insights from, and I try to provide it so that even when I don't have time or brainpower to come up with a really good original thought, the fact that I've chosen three or four or five articles out of the multitude of things that are available in the world suggests some editorial value that I'm adding, and that's equivalent to original content in a lot of ways.

Anita Brick: It's a good point. Again, I think this all goes back to knowing who you are and knowing what kinds of conversations you want to have and with whom. Some people get stuck on the infrastructure piece, but there's lots of stuff out there. I mean, there's WordPress, there is Blogger, I mean, and there are other infrastructures you can almost plug and play as long as you understand, again, the message, because just putting it out there doesn't mean that anyone's going to read it.

Brian Reich: Absolutely. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with having a small audience if it's the right audience. There's nothing wrong with, you know, using a blog or a Twitter feed or a Facebook account or YouTube or whatever, you want to push your thoughts without any concern or desire for an audience to build and for that information to go viral or similar.

I don't have a huge readership of my blog. As much as I might like to, some days I don't ... I often put the thoughts down because it gives me discipline and an excuse to start developing and refining those thoughts over time. And then as I get involved with other projects, or as I start to meet people around a certain conversation, I have a repository of that content.

I don't have to go and try to create everything new every time. The blog is a rolling representation of the things that I'm thinking and reading and working on at any given time. It's a reflection of the evolution of my thinking. It's a refinement of the language that I use to describe things. If I was really organized, if I could blog more, I would probably self-promote the projects that I'm working on more, or I would create more content to ask questions and engage in deeper conversations.

You know what I really want to do is have kind of a sounding board there until it's down and until I can send someone a link. I don't have something that someone can respond to easily. So that's what I use my blog for. There are certainly other people out there who blog because it is part of their sales strategy, right?

And I believe in that. Right? I mean, I'm much more likely to buy from someone who has demonstrated in some form of content that they know what they're talking about. You know, the blog is a great tool for that.

Anita Brick: Well, and especially if your goal—like this alum’s goal is to have greater presence. But again, you need to know what you stand for before doing that. Looking at another piece of the social media pie out there, there are two related questions to LinkedIn. Oh, actually there were three. But let's start with the first two. One was what are the key elements of a good summary and profile?

And then how often should you post a status or update on LinkedIn? You could answer that question in many different ways. But if we started out, again, knowing who you are and who your audience is, what are the key things that you would recommend including in a LinkedIn profile?

Brian Reich: Well, the first thing I would say is that when I get a LinkedIn friend request or similar from someone, it's because, I'm assuming, they're looking for a job. And I think that is a prevailing assumption, despite what LinkedIn has tried to do in terms of becoming kind of an active work tool and sort of social engagement extension of the workplace, sort of the Facebook for work, if you will.

Right. Assuming that, the first thing that I think is very important is to basically acknowledge, warts and all, what it is you're trying to do. Don't friend me on LinkedIn and just use the standard language. Right? I'll probably friend you back, but I'm not going to remember you.

Anita Brick: Right? Oh, I mean, I think it's just so lazy. Yeah.

Brian Reich: Use the dialogue box. Use the opportunity to send me a message because there is a reason you contacted me, right? What is that reason? What is that question? What is that idea? You want to pitch my commitment. And again, this is my personal commitment, not everyone is. I will respond at some point. Right? I mean, it cannot be instantaneous and it may not be helpful to you, but I will certainly respond because someone took the time out to write me a little personal note, or ask me a question, or say they heard me somewhere.

Not only is it the least I can do, but my perspective is that there's likely something that I will at some point get out of that as well. They'll teach me something. They'll introduce me to something that I wouldn't have been introduced to before. So there's a selfish strategy in using LinkedIn to build the network. But if you aren't transparent about your purpose in using it, you're going to run into problems.

If you're looking for a job, your whole profile should be about what it is you think you can do for a company. If your goal is to have a sort of thought network with your gainfully employed or self-employed … or you're an entrepreneur and you're launching a startup, then use your profile as a way to demonstrate your insights or how your project and experiences apply to the conversations that are happening.

The groups and things like that. And again, you know, it's the same with Twitter and everything else. Update as often as it's valuable. I don't look at LinkedIn and say, oh well, this person has a great resume. I don't necessarily care who you worked for. I don't necessarily care what your title is. I care whether or not you can do the things that I want you to do in my project.

Whatever information I'm sending back to you is going to be relevant to what you're doing. So I look at who's in your network and who do I know in your network, because I have certain mental profiles of all the people that I know. Oh, this person's good for that. This person is not good for that. When you put in a description, and this is true on a resume as well, because LinkedIn, part of it is just not my resume.

Don't tell me all of the platitudes and basic stuff that you did for an organization. Describe the challenge that you had in your job. Describe the value you provided. Describe the position you were put in and the response that you provided and why. Use the descriptions as best you can. If you want to actively use LinkedIn to get a job or advance your career, or advance your initiative or similar, use it as another way of essentially having a conversation, because that may be the only conversation that I have with you, or that may be the place that I go to check.

And if I'm bored or unimpressed, I'll move on. If I'm intrigued, we'll go to the next level.

Anita Brick: That's a good point. Our whole conversation, you've been using that word conversation again and again, and I think it sounds like that is probably the most important perspective to have when engaging in any form of social media.

Brian Reich: Well, yeah. And I think there are a lot of things in social media that have become tactics. So a lot of people look at listening as a tactic and conversation as a tactic, as if it's something you have to do. But everybody knows the difference between a good conversation, a bad conversation, right?

Anita Brick: Oh for sure.

Brian Reich: You want to know whether that person on the other side of the conversation is genuinely interested or not? The conversation can't be just something you do. It has to be something that you do well. Regardless of platform, regardless of tool, you can have a good conversation. You just have to figure out the opportunities that exist within the platform.

And obviously, the audience on Facebook and the audience on LinkedIn—they may be the same people, but they're there for different reasons, right? The ways people use Twitter and the ways that they use their blog, in many cases now are very different. The thing driving all of those ultimately, you know, ends up being the same. They want to be a person who does X, Y, or Z professionally or is known for A, B, and C personally.

And this is their way of communicating it. Some people blur the lines much more, like I do. Other people have. This is my LinkedIn profile. This is my business experience. What I do at home and what I do with my family and what I'm interested in beyond my work doesn't matter. That's what you get when you hire me for business.

Great. That's the approach you want to take.

Anita Brick: And it sounds like a lot of this really starts with … we did a program on Saturday on self-assessment. It really sounds like you have to know who you are and how you want to be viewed in the world, and not make it up the way you think somebody wants it, but to be real about it. Because if you're not real about it, there's so much transparency, everybody's going to know anyway, right?

Brian Reich: Or at least be open about the fact that you don't know. I have a lot …

Anita Brick: That's fair.

Brian Reich: … people will hear me speak or read my book or whatever, and they'll shoot me a note and say, I think I want to do X, Y, and Z. Or I worked in an agency and I didn't really like it, and I don't know if it was where I worked or what I was doing or similar, or trying to figure out what I want to do and how I want to do it.

And sometimes I'll ask him a question or I'll say, oh, you should read this because I thought it was really interesting or similar. And I'm not trying to turn everyone into me. I'm just trying to share the things that I think have been helpful in my journey, my figuring stuff out on the assumption that when presented with information, the same or different people are going to be triggered by that to figure out whatever it is they want.

The mistake that I see people make all the time is following the path that they're told they need to follow. “If you're going to do whatever, you have to have a blog.” If that's not a part of your DNA, you're not a writer, don't blog.

Anita Brick: No, I get it. And I think that ... But what you're saying, bottom line, even with that, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. That's a real question. As opposed to a fake question, just to create some exchange.

Brian Reich: The one core thing that I know that I have, I want to learn something every day. I don't want to be bored. I don't know where that comes from, but that's my thing. Other people want to have a lot of money. Nothing wrong with that. Other people want to travel a lot. Nothing wrong with that.

Anita Brick: But it's knowing what's right and true for you.

Brian Reich: And then the wonderful thing about the explosion of the internet and technology is that there are so many tools and so many options that there is a community for everyone. And in the absence of a community that exists, there are no barriers to creating your own. There are lots of different ways that whatever you create or put out is going to be taken and, you know, run with by other people, and that creates all sorts of potential.

I think a lot of people look at what's happening in the world and the way jobs are changing and the way information is changing and all the tools out there as very scary, because there isn't as much certainty; there isn't a clear path to getting a job or being successful or making money or similar. And they get scared and they start to demonize the changes.

And we are very early on in what is going to be just a tremendous opportunity- and innovation-driven culture, not just in business but in everything. And the tools that are available power it, speed it, scale it, it's going to be driven by people who want to do things that are interesting, and other people who are looking for interesting things to do are going to be able to find them now, like they haven't been able to do before.

Anita Brick: Totally true. Do you have time for a few more questions?

Brian Reich: Yeah, absolutely.

Anita Brick: OK. There are some questions around risk. One person said that they're looking to change jobs and change positions slightly, say from financial planner to financial coach. He doesn't want his current boss to see that he's looking to change jobs. When you think about it in the context of LinkedIn, what are some things that this person could do to maybe reduce that risk?

Brian Reich: I think a big thing about any job hunting, any kind of relationship development, is the more personal and direct it is, the better. There are plenty of tools and features within LinkedIn and all of these platforms, but particularly LinkedIn, that allow you to have a direct conversation with someone. So you don't need to post your …

Anita Brick: Good point.

Brian Reich: … status out there and say, hey, anyone looking for a bright 27-year-old with X, Y, and Z experience? Or make passive-aggressive comments about reading about jobs in the paper or what have you. You can find the people and do the research and listen in on the conversations among the people who you think you would want to work with and shoot them a private note and say, can we have coffee? People will respect that approach, not only because it's personal and direct, but also the confidentiality of it. Very few people out there, I think really, truly sort of want to screw someone else. So, right, part of the laziness of the internet kind of mistake that people make, thinking that it's a glorified broadcast medium is to say, you know, I need to be transparent and push everything out there to the world at all times.

I need to live completely openly. That's not true, right? There are conversations that you can have in social spaces, and there are conversations that you're not going to have in social spaces. Pick up the phone, have coffee, send a private note, etc., etc., while you look and explore what a job might be for you. Don't try to use some public tool thinking that you know the world's going to respond because you posted your resume or updated your status, you know, while simultaneously hoping your boss isn't one of those people who sees that you've done those things.

To go back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, I really think that is just a common sense thing. The tools that are widely available now that connect us and create this opportunity, they have not fundamentally changed what is successful about communications and engagement and sales and marketing and job hunting and relationship developing and dating and investing and all the other things that they impact.

Just because you can find more people, get connected to more options, explore more ideas, share more content, doesn't mean you can be a jerk or be stupid or similar. I've said all along, my background is in politics, and you know, people used to laugh at these politicians. Oh, they don't understand the internet, how could they not know that saying racist and whatever things is going to get you a YouTube video posted about you?

The rise of video on the web didn't make that politician stupid, didn't make them racist, didn’t cause them to take a bribe or whatever it is that they got nailed for, right? All it did was remove a lot of the barriers for the public in finding out. If anything, you know, these tools are going to make us better employees and better spouses and better friends and whatever, because the stuff that we maybe said behind people's back or didn't really commit our energy to is going to be known, and we're going to get called on, and we're going to have to figure out what we want to do with it.

It's the same in job hunting. You don't have to be open and out there on the web, LinkedIn or otherwise. If you're trying to find a new job, treat your job hunt the same way you would treat it if all you had was a newspaper and a telephone 20 years ago. You know, the only difference is now you can actually hunt for a job in California without having to go and pick up a newspaper in California and circle the want ads there.

Anita Brick: No, that's true. Would that answer change or get expanded at all, if there were two purposes right now … because this question came from a weekend student and two alumni who are saying, OK, they have a career right now. They want to continue to grow and expand in that career, but they have another passion that they're thinking about working on or beginning to work on in off-time, and they queue up in three to five years, but they want to get some understanding and traction around that too.

So they have these two personalities. Earlier you said, well, maybe you just have two different platforms and perhaps the one that is in the future, if you want to keep that more quiet, that maybe it's more individual dialogue, even if you are using things like LinkedIn. But is there anything different or special if you have really two different brands that you're trying to communicate at the same time? One for now and one that's kind of transitional?

Brian Reich: I think transparency is going to benefit you in the end, period. I think if you're working for somebody who doesn't like the thought that you're out there exploring some entrepreneurial idea and creating a startup, maybe on the prospects that someday you're going to leave your job, and they take offense to that and they fire you or whatever, my personal belief is that you were probably not working for the right person anyway.

If it's so important that you keep your job and do a great job at your existing job, whether you like it or not for financial or other reasons, then you know maybe it's not the right time for you to go out and explore a new venture or a new opportunity. I know that's sort of an unpopular answer. Great ideas and real life sometimes conflict with each other.

So the first part of the answer to that question is, if you can't willingly, knowingly share information about what it is you're trying to do for fear of reprisal, then you are probably not in sort of a safe environment for doing that anyways, and the internet doesn't change that.

Anita Brick: It could just make for visibility in a way that you don't want to have. It just could make it bigger.

Brian Reich: That said, I mean, I know lots of people who have essentially dual personalities who have, you know, a blog entirely devoted to their photography and the things that they spend their weekend time on, their fandom for a certain team, whatever. Their LinkedIn profile, their Twitter handle, their things that are more related to work are disciplined and directed and focused on that stuff.

I actually have a friend who works for the AARP. She has three or four Twitter handles: her personal Twitter handle—sometimes it talks about things that relate to work, but mostly it's about her obsession with food and restaurants and things she's cooking and recipes she's trying. And then, you know, the Twitter handle that she runs for her work is all about the initiatives of the AARP and similar.

Anita Brick: Right.

Brian Reich: She's able to manage those personalities. Obviously, the AARP is fully aware of the fact that she has a personality outside of work, and that she chooses to share it publicly for the reasons that she chooses to share it publicly. If you're not in an environment where you can have essentially a separate personality, then I wouldn't try to create and hide one online.

Anita Brick: It probably won't last. And for her, like if her passion was around insurance and looking at different insurance options for seniors, she probably couldn't do that personally.

Two final questions. One, and I think this is pretty straightforward: one of the alums, his name is Ben Foster. He said that he could not get his name because it's not a rare name—as he put it, it's a pretty common name. And so he went in and did Ben Foster with a p-h instead of an F. He said that he can't be Googled, and he's wondering if it's even professional, but his question is, what would you do if your name, which is a really important part of your brand, is unavailable?

Brian Reich: I'm not sure that your name is really an important part of your brand. I happen to think branding is now about experience, right? So I actually deliberately do not include my name in much of my branding, and much of the things that I put out—my company is little m media, my blog is thinking about media, the brand that I'm trying to create is about thinking and innovation and ideas and full investment of, you know, when you hire me, you get it all.

Everything. You get my kid, you get my wife, you get my time, you get my sports fandom, you get my great qualities and my flaws. I happen to think I'm good at what I do. So when you hire me, great. I don't care what you call me, though. I think it's totally fine to build a brand around whatever name you want to build it around.

What's important is to take Ben Foster, whether it's with an app or a page, and make it awesome. Right? Nobody knows how to pronounce my last name. We actually joked before we got on air about it.

Anita Brick: Yeah, we did.

Brian Reich: I don't really care if you mispronounce my last name, I care that you call me. There's a great site—the other day—www.horsepigcow.com right, which is the home site for a marketing whiz thought leader, you know, white paper writer, book author, speaker, and professional consultant type person. I don't know what her name is, but I know that she's good because I read her stuff and so the fact that she has “horse pig cow” as her URL is somewhat unimportant because she has made it memorable.

Branding to me is about experience. It's about the experience you create, the experience people have with you, directly and indirectly. Call it whatever you want. If you can come up with a brand that advances your cause, that sends a message, right? So “thinking about media,” my book is written about little m media—information, experiences, and stuff—the brand advances the conversation.

Anita Brick: Got it.

Brian Reich: It is about creating the experience that people want to have with you, and not necessarily trying to position your name. Positioning your name is old model stuff.

Anita Brick: Very, very good point. One final question, and I'll lead into it with something that an Exec MBA student had said. He said, you know, I would never approach a potential employer through social media without a proper in, but people do it all the time. I understand the sense of urgency, yet a Facebook friend feels too personal. But what if it's your only way to get in?

So I know you've talked a lot about creating conversations and making them one on one. You know, whether it's on Facebook or on LinkedIn or something else. In addition to making it real and memorable and authentic and really creating these personal connections, just like you would if there was no internet, what are two or three other things that you would advise individuals to do as they're using social media as part of their brand building?

Brian Reich: I think one of the things I would say is this is why transparency is so important, right? There's no problem with friending someone on Facebook for the purpose of, you know, having a conversation and advancing a job prospect, if you are transparent about that's why you're doing it. So I cold call a lot of people, I cold email a lot of people.

And one of the first things that I'm saying in that email is essentially, you don't know me from a hole in the wall, but I'm writing because I have a favor to ask, or I'm writing because I have a question, or I'm writing because I read something you wrote, and I'm curious to pursue the conversation. And I have a really good response rate in those cold calls, because I'm transparent about the fact that I'm asking them for something and if they're interested in willing to respond, great.

And that is true across any platform. We talked earlier about the auto response on Twitter, for example. Presumably you want to be in conversation with me. That's why you sort of encouraged me to follow you on Twitter. Right? That's why you followed me. So then why are you automating your response? Yeah, that's disingenuous right now.

Anita Brick: You're right. And I just sort of ignore them.

Brian Reich: Right. And so I think the key is to be transparent about what it is and why you're trying to do it. And then you can adapt that to each platform. If you're interested in getting a job, you should be blogging and tweeting and Facebook updating and doing all those things to encourage people to think of you as someone who can get hired, or someone who is desirable, or who knows what they're talking about, or whatever you want to say.

If you really just want to be interesting and funny or share insights or whatever, then that's fine. Say that. I think a way to do that is in all of your profiles, right? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, you know, Google, whatever you want is when you write your bio, when you write your description, explain what it is you're there to do.

So there are a lot of people who say on their Twitter feed, mother first, marketing strategist second. And you know, right when you read that, that if you're looking for marketing insights only, you're going to get a mix of things probably.

Anita Brick: Like for you too.

Brian Reich: Yeah, yeah. There's a chance that you're going to, you know, write someone in. They're not going to write you back for two weeks because, you know, kids get sick or spring break happens or whatever. I don't know. Right? They're transparent about the fact that they are also a parent. There are other people out there who set an expectation in their profiles and in their work that, you know, they have no personal life.

They respond to you 24 hours a day, blah, blah, blah. Great. Then that’s the expectation that they're setting, and that's how they're going to be received. Looking at the ways that you use the different tools and the personality that you present is the key to kind of setting that conversation off in the first place. And then it all goes back to me with content.

Anita Brick: Scott, is there anything else that you want to share?

Brian Reich: The one thing that I would kind of summarize a lot of this up with is nobody knows what is going on. There are …

Anita Brick: That's encouraging.

Brian Reich: Oh no. But I mean …

Anita Brick: No, I understand.

Brian Reich: That should be taken as an opportunity—an occasion to go out there and do what you think is right and learn and make mistakes and get back up and dust yourself off and do it again and similar. Don't go and buy someone's book, mine or anyone else's, and follow everything to the letter of the law. Right?

You know, don't emulate someone else's case study, because the reason that case study was successful is because it happened at that point in time with those tools that were available, and you try and figure out why things are important and what you're trying to do. You know, what motivates it, what powers it, and then look at the platforms as facilitators for the conversations that you want to have.

The whole world is kind of shifting and changing and tweaking and whatnot. And just as you shouldn't follow anyone's book to the letter of the law, or look for the case studies alone as the way to use these tools or similar, you should be going out there and doing is figuring out what you want to do, figuring out the ways that you think are best, or that you know you've seen that work and that are comfortable to you, and then looking at the tools to power the activities that you want to do.

Anita Brick: And stay on top of it. Because what works and what doesn't is constantly shifting.

Brian Reich: Yeah. As are the tools. There are always going to be tools for something, you know, and some are going to be better than others, and there are going to be new ones. And every one of us in this business struggles with, should we be on that platform or not? Where do we find the time? And I think those who have a good North Star end up being more successful, however you want to define it, by being more successful than the people who, you know, simply are trying to take advantage of the short-term trends or opportunities that are created around technology and media and things like that.

Anita Brick: This is great, Brian. Thank you so much. Maybe you don't view yourself this way, but you are sort of a pioneer in this whole area. So having the historical perspective about this and having been in it since virtually the beginning has been incredibly helpful. So thank you for sharing all of your insights.

Brian Reich: Thank you. I think I was probably just born at the right time, but I appreciate it.

Anita Brick: There you go. I know you would reference your blog if you want to read what Brian is talking about, certainly, and go to Twitter. You can also go to ThinkingAboutMedia.com. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.