Episode Summary
Social networks have become part of everyday life, both personal and professional. And a strong personal brand on social media can help you a lot in your career.
But not all companies are open to this type of promotion of their employees, even if it can be of great benefit to them. Fearing that employees will leave them one day, companies do not want to support them in their personal branding efforts and limit them in terms of the content they can publish.
Kaylee Edmondson, Director of Demand Generation at Brightwheel, believes that leaders should always support their employees. As someone who had great leaders who invested in her and empowered her, she notes that it made her love them much more.
In this episode of Rep Your Brand, Kaylee gets into the importance of personal branding. Kaylee and our host Nick Bennett discuss whether a constant presence on LinkedIn or the content is more important, how companies look at posting content, and the benefits of LinkedIn.
Guest Profile
- Name: Kaylee Edmondson
- What she does: Kaylee is the director of demand generation at Brightwheel.
- Company: Brightwheel
- Noteworthy: At the beginning of her career, out of pure luck, Kaylee joined a startup and helped build out the marketing function there. She found that she was skilled the demand gen function, and today, Kaylee is the director of demand generation at Brightwheel.
Key Insights
- A personal brand is super important. A personal brand can significantly impact an individual's career, sometimes providing so much information that a job interview is unnecessary. According to Kaylee, the most important thing in personal branding is how you present yourself; you don't have to be active on social networks every day to have an impact. "I have not applied for any of the jobs that I've had. I've either been found by a recruiter that's working for that company or have been found by someone that's leading that function at that company directly — all through LinkedIn. […] I have almost always worked for MarTech companies, which would set me up for success in terms of personal branding. And I’m almost using LinkedIn as my true diary to express wins, losses, and learnings within my field to an audience that is applicable for buying the product I'm working for."
- Leaders need to support their people. A personal brand can bring many benefits to the individual who builds it and the company where they work. However, some leaders don't want to empower employees because they believe that these same people will move on after building a solid brand. Kaylee thinks this is a mistake and advises you to support your employee as that will also benefit you. "The tech world is so small. So if you are starting this mentality of being very selfish as a leader, a company, or a brand, it's not going to do you any favor. That world will spread like crazy, and everyone will be like, 'We don't wanna work for them. They have crazy restrictions on who I can be as an individual.' So I think that's a general rule of thumb for leaders. Please don't be that way. Support your people."
- LinkedIn is a great place to spend time and learn. Although she used to post content on LinkedIn almost daily, Kaylee is not so active now. As she says, she is now focused on growing the marketing team and building a long-term strategy but plans to return to LinkedIn with impactful content because she thinks it's a great place to share your learning. "I still want to focus on LinkedIn and provide really great content to that community. I honestly learned so much from this network that I have and from following other people like yourself who have built up this really great network. It's selfishly also a really good place to spend time. So I need to get back to where I have more time in my day to be there, to participate, and to communicate all of those types of things. […] I've just hit my 90 days, so I am working on some content that's like, 'What I thought I was gonna do in the first 90 days versus where we actually landed.' And I really wanna try and walk through some discrepancies around that so that maybe other people can be like, 'Oh, this is what I should try and do in my first 90 days, et cetera.'"
Episode Highlights
Share Your Experiences on LinkedIn
“I had come back to [Chili Piper] — I guess it would be January of 2021 — from maternity leave. I had some time off to think and not be in the daily grind to really understand what we should be doing at Chili Piper to move the needle. And it was like, ‘Wait, we’re trying really hard to sell specifically to demand gen marketers.’ And I’m a demand gen marketer. It’s really hard for me to think of myself as a thought leader or put titles on it like that, but I was like, ‘I feel like I do a successful job here for Chili Piper.’ So I’m sure there are learnings, even if some of them are like 101-level learnings, that I should be sharing — not only for my own sanity and well-being but also for others to really learn from my mistakes or my wins.”
Companies That Build in Private Versus in Public
“If you’ve landed at a company that really believes in the power of confidentiality or privacy, or just keeping everything very hush, then they are going to be naturally less supportive of you being public, especially depending on the type of content that you’re publishing. […]
If you work for a company that is public, and you’re held to Wall Street standards, that probably looks a lot different as to how you’re able to build your profile online. Because, naturally, you have different investors and different stakeholders, and you can’t share so publicly. But if you’re working for a company that is private or public and does need to report to Wall Street, I would still imagine that there’s a world in which leaders can be very supportive of how you want to build your brand in public. Just with maybe a couple of caveats that are like, ‘Please don’t disclose our revenue numbers or our growth metrics,’ or, ‘Please don’t make projections in public about where you think we’ll be’ — those types of things, which I still feel are totally within bounds for building a healthy and supportive relationship from a leadership standpoint so that your team can truly go out and crush this word-of-mouth dark funnel market.”
A Personal Brand Is About Providing Value With Authenticity
“When I was going to make my first post on LinkedIn, I was literally thinking things like, ‘Be myself.’ Because if I’m trying to create a character, I’m not qualified to be an actor either. I need to sound like myself; this needs to be sassy and short and Southern and like all the things that I am. So that it’s just like, ‘This is who I am. Take it or leave it.’ And if people repel it, then I know this is not gonna work. So, I just need to figure it out. But I also feel, ‘If I’m going to do this and I’m gonna spend time on it, it needs to provide value. What do I actually know within these two ears that’s truly helpful to humans?'”
