51 // Personal Brand With Brian Lovin

Metadata

• Author: Metamuse
• Full Title: 51 // Personal Brand With Brian Lovin
• URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/622099844fcf8f000e4eca64

Highlights

Speaker 1: medium is the message sort of thing, but right. You have a website that says you are a person that likes clean modern design, whereas you can imagine there’s this, what is it called? The Professor style website, which is these kind of like very bare bones. Html You know, not only is it not responsive design but it’s like barely even styled at all, but you come to associate it with often busy and successful professors who are very erudite and accomplished in their field and they do have a representation online but would almost be confusing or maybe feel wrong in some way if they had a sleek, well designed site, like a designer, would that conveys maybe the wrong idea? Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah. It would feel like they were trying to sell you something? (Time 0:13:50)review

Speaker 1: pros and cons to making yourself more or less accessible and be curious to hear how you think about that. Speaker 0: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question because my perspective is maybe changing a little bit over time, which is I’ve always just tried to be accessible because I’ve always been so thankful to other people who made themselves accessible. For example, I started the design details podcast because I wanted to meet other people and what we did is we created a spreadsheet of 100 people who we wanted to meet and just started going down the list and emailing them And everyone was super kind and most people were open to being on this brand new podcast with these young 20something designers trying to figure out what they (Time 0:17:24)review

Speaker 0: as a friendly person who responds quickly and thoughtfully and carefully. But then there is a little bit of a burden there I suppose. I mean a good burden to have. It’s awesome that people want to reach out and chat but sometimes it’s overwhelming. I’m curious if you both have experiences because you both are also quite public and put yourselves out there Speaker 2: in general. I’m very bullish on this channel that is cold contact over the public Speaker 0: internet in both Speaker 2: directions. I think people underestimate the opportunities that you can create by sending a good cold email or cold DM as it may be. And I think there’s also a lot of value potentially being open and I’ve always been open for a similar reason, I think to you is I was incredibly fortunate to have people help me out as I was entering Silicon Valley, basically. On the basis of cold emails, Speaker 1: Mark, I feel (Time 0:19:15)review

Speaker 1: or there’s the case that’s clear spam or something close to spam, let’s say not classic spam necessarily, but something where I don’t know, you know, the recruiter, the classic recruiter thing. Oh, I see you have a ruby on rails project. I’m working with a company that, you know, they clearly just didn’t look at my profile for more than five seconds. The middle ground I think is the harder thing where someone does know me personally in my work, they are writing to me saying, hey, you know, I’ve enjoyed what you’ve done at, I don’t know what you can switch muse whatever and here’s the thing I’m doing. You know, I’m a student, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m something else. But then if that doesn’t lead into like a real clear request, it’s more just a general, like I’d like to get to know you or it’s just unclear what they’re asking for and (Time 0:22:50)review

Speaker 1: know, I’m a student, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m something else. But then if that doesn’t lead into like a real clear request, it’s more just a general, like I’d like to get to know you or it’s just unclear what they’re asking for and then maybe it’s a long email and then it’s like, It is thoughtful and it’s in this middle ground that’s tricky and it’s hard to know 100% what to do with it. I still try to like find a good reply if I can, but it’s often ends up being more of a thanks for the nice words. I think you’re doing something interesting. You know, if there’s some specific thing you’re looking for, let me know. But this kind of comes to the rules for emailing busy people thing, right? Like make it short, have a crisp and clear request. Maybe they’ll say no, but just make it easy for them Speaker 0: just to add (Time 0:23:22)review

Speaker 1: You know, if there’s some specific thing you’re looking for, let me know. But this kind of comes to the rules for emailing busy people thing, right? Like make it short, have a crisp and clear request. Maybe they’ll say no, but just make it easy for them Speaker 0: just to add on to that. You know, speaking of what the bar is to stand out as like a non random person on the internet, like have a domain, have a clear asked, I found If that puts you in the 1%, well then the 1% of that is people who actually follow up and what I’ve been really surprised by is, you know, people will email you and they’ll ask a question and it will be very thoughtful and you’ll maybe send a reply and say, hey, I think this or I’m not sure, but I read an article about this, or here’s a person that might know better than I would (Time 0:23:52)review

Speaker 1: make it easy for them Speaker 0: just to add on to that. You know, speaking of what the bar is to stand out as like a non random person on the internet, like have a domain, have a clear asked, I found If that puts you in the 1%, well then the 1% of that is people who actually follow up and what I’ve been really surprised by is, you know, people will email you and they’ll ask a question and it will be very thoughtful and you’ll maybe send a reply and say, hey, I think this or I’m not sure, but I read an article about this, or here’s a person that might know better than I would and you send out this information, you’re connecting people and ideas, Nobody ever responds to those. But the 1% of people who do are really special and I feel like that’s where you build really cool relationships, is you know, (Time 0:24:04)review

Speaker 0: and I feel like that’s where you build really cool relationships, is you know, somebody asks, hey, I’m weighing these two offers at a job, what do you think I should do? And I’ll tell you what I think and then they respond, they say, hey, by the way I ended up doing this and even better as they say, oh, I did this and I learned this, right. And so one thing that I’ve started doing now recently with sort of these kinds of engagements with people, I don’t know where it feels a little bit transactional as I try and explicitly request a follow up and the way I frame it is, hey, by the way, if you end up making a decision, I would love to hear how you made that decision if you learned anything. So a lot of times this will end up being like job hunting or negotiation, (Time 0:24:44)review

Speaker 2: purposely build a brand as a first class goal and want to have a lot of followers either because they just enjoy playing that game or because they’re in some type of role. We’re having access to that marketing channel is valuable if they’re developer advocate or they write a newsletter, someone like that and that again, is that sort of classical brand that you would think of if you compare it to something like coca cola, I think of it more as an asset that I can draw on when needed. So I don’t particularly need any followers. I need the ability to point to something and say, hey, I’m reaching out to you, you can refer to this artifact and see that I’m a truthful person and that’s really all that I personally and I think that covers most people now. there’s a bit of a (Time 0:27:26)review

Speaker 2: something good and valuable to say versus having a stock of reputational capital in Speaker 0: the form of a bunch of followers. Speaker 1: Mhm. Although being known for saying things that people want to hear definitely is a huge amplifier on anything you might say, which is maybe to that fortune cookie point, you can say basically pretty generic platitudes, but if your audience is big enough for you have this reputation where people just care about what you have to say, then yeah, they’re excited about what would otherwise be a pretty bland statement. The other piece of this on the followers though is I would say that quality is not the right word, it’s people who are following me for the right reason and I especially like the mutual follows and maybe the mutual followers thing just kind of takes you back to a little more of a classic social network where you have people who sort of all know (Time 0:31:34)review

Speaker 0: the algorithm becomes very apparent, you can watch it in real time, take hold and you very subtly understand or maybe subconsciously understand what is going to get likes and what will probably not get likes and it just breaks your brain. At least I’ll say it breaks my brain because it puts you in this position where you are tempted and also rewarded for oversimplifying polarizing, tweeting the hot take, criticizing those kinds of things. I think a good example that I (Time 0:34:01)review

Speaker 1: back to a concept we talked about in the company brand episode which is there’s what’s known as brand extension. And the general thing is the brand extension is basically a pretty bad idea and almost never works. So, you know, for example, Kleenex is known for making facial tissue if Kleenex makes printer paper, which perhaps is a similar product in the sense of how it’s manufactured. Not only is it confusing withheld as Kleenex printer paper, but you’ve actually destroyed the brand equity of what Kleenexes in the mind of your customer and the recommendation there is generally make a new brand if you’re truly transitioning to a different market. So maybe that does beg the question of should I have just started a new twitter account when I was (Time 0:38:53)review