8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: personal brand

Chapter List

  • Pitch Brand

    I’m pretty sure I once missed out on an interesting job opportunity because my head froze up when the interviewer asked me if I could make his social media profile go viral.

    What does that even mean?

    I mean… I get it. He wanted a million followers. He wanted to be an influential. Fame. Adoration. Social capital. He wanted to be known and heard with a notification tab that needed to be silenced lest it wake the neighbourhood.

    To me, the shy auteur and guy who values meaningful connection and measured interaction with real people, I found myself floundered by the question that came out of nowhere in the middle of a seemingly average job interview.

    They keep telling us we live in the digital era, but I often think they’ve got it wrong. We live in the influencer era: social media as invaded every aspect of every layer of our lives and we have all become no less than personal brands who spend the day crafting illusions of our lives to share into those spaces. Even choosing to not participate becomes a meaningful action, one that defines a person and commodifies their social footprint.

    Personally… I loathe it.

    But it is inescapable and pervasive—and the reality of our times.

    What’s a creative soul to do but figure out how to not get swept up in the digital river and washed away by the social networks.

    Under the category of Pitch & Brand, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Hustle Up

    What if the people buying are not into what you are selling?

    Consumer-driven culture and basic economics would argue that supply should meet demand. If you are supplying something that no one seems to want, capitalism argues that you need to shift your product to where the demand seems to be.

    But what if the supply is, well… you?

    What if you are selling yourself and your skills, or your ideas and your art?

    Is it worth shifting the product to meet demand? Should you change to align with what someone seems to want from you? 

    Say, you submit a proposal for a big idea or walk into a job interview or call into a pitch meeting—and what you are selling there is your ideas, your skills or yourself—but they are not buying?

    Are you in the position to say I’m not going to be or do something I’m not, sell something I don’t have, or pretend to be good at a skill I don’t yet have just to get a gig or a deal? Or are you full on ready for the hustle of becoming someone different simply to get the work? 

    Maybe you are. Maybe you don’t have that luxury.

    Either way, it often seems to be little more than a balance between selling yourself …and being yourself.

  • Costume Party

    Does everyone need to brand themselves? 

    A personal brand goes well beyond a clever URL and a logo made up of your initials. 

    In an online world we are presented with this ideas of an avatar, a kind of costume that we don when we share our work, our thoughts, or our best selves in digital spaces.

    Since we are (obviously) unable to be online in the physical, tangible way that is the organic stuff of reality and a million years of social evolution, what we then present online is necessarily a construct. After all, we cannot know the subtleties of our own personalities like the ticks and quirks we give off when sitting across from a real person, so all of it is fabricated as some kind of manicured self image if we like that idea or not.

    Embracing this idea, leaning into it, is the notion of personal brand: shaping that avatar to fulfill a purpose, and perhaps to be more than—or at least a more refined and controlled version of—our real world selves.

    The notion this implies is that we are all somehow emotionally mature enough to construct these online characters in a way that presents us in a positive and beneficial way. 

    What this implies is skill and nuance. 

    What this notion misses is that not all masks well made.

    To brand oneself, one puts on a mask and becomes someone or something else, which can be useful and necessary, but can be a difficult illusion to maintain. 

    This doesn’t make it impossible or ill-advised, but rather perhaps something that is done with care and purpose and not just because it seems to be a fad.