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Reputation at scale

I went on a date with this guy. Picture me at a nice restaurant, there's delicious food on the table and sitting opposite me is an attractive man. We met online and now, a few days after we matched, we met for dinner. So, I'm on this date. He's chatting away, we are getting on well. He's handsome, attentive; seems to have his stuff together. He's a real gentleman. to me.

About halfway through our main, the waitress appears to refill our rapidly disappearing glasses. As she does, I make a point to make eye contact and smile as I say, 'Thank you'. She smiles back, gives a brief nod and then retreats to the edge of the restaurant. I know that she's watching for when she'll next need to provide us with a top-up or a dessert menu. She's been brilliant all night.

Then it hits me. Not once has the guy opposite me acknowledged her presence, let alone thanked her for anything. For the rest of the night I'm very aware of how he behaves around the waitress. As we get ready to leave, our waitress brings our coats from the cloakroom. He takes his from her without a word, but she beams at me as she hands mine over. 'Thank you so much for such a wonderful evening', I say as I button up my coat.

I'm talking to the waitress, not my date.

This is a true story. (Spoiler: we did not see each other again.) The reason I am telling you it is because your personal brand is built with every interaction you have. Every person you meet forms an opinion of you and your character. That not only means people who are your clients, employees and colleagues in your professional life. You also have a personal brand with the barista you buy your coffee from and the taxi driver who drops you off at the station and the shop assistant who helps you find an alternative size and your date to a nice restaurant. In reality, you do not build your personal brand, you take control of it.

I share a lot of content about being 100% OK with the consequences of being yourself, about not caring what people think about your opinions. But I care deeply about how other people perceive my character and I think a lot about how I come across to everyone I meet. I want them to have a good experience - even if they hate every opinion I have.

The waitress who served my date and me had a personal brand with me; and I had one with her. I like to think that she thought I was pleasant, and I certainly thought she was polite and excellent at her job (and tipped her accordingly). My date also had a personal brand with me and the waitress - we both thought he was rude.

The reality is, my date wasn't actually rude. He was just unaware. And therein lies the difference between those who take control of their reputation and those who do not. I made sure the waitress heard me when I said thank you and, in doing so, I was proactively shaping her impression of me as a person. My date was unconsciously shaping his reputation with her (and me), because he wasn't even thinking about it.

It's no longer just about the people you meet in real life that forms your reputation. It's not just one-to-one. Social media has enabled us to build what I call one-to-many relationships. I reach hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people per week. Building your personal brand, specifically online, allows you to grow your reputation, at scale.

Prior to social media, scaling your reputation was hard, if not impossible. I remember, when I was a recruiter, I was given the target of making 100 calls per day because they knew if recruiters hit that key performance indicator, at least a handful of those calls would turn into conversations and a few of those conversations would turn into business. The problem is, it's almost impossible to speak to anyone at length when you have that many calls to make each day, which means the number of meaningful relationships you build through those calls is a tiny proportion - I'm talking 3 out of 100. There is a finite amount of time in a day and so, using this approach, there is only a finite number of people you can connect with.

The beauty of growing your personal brand online is that the number of people you can reach in a day is almost infinite. If we start managing our reputations at scale - aka using social media to build our personal brands - we can reach one million people in 24 hours, instead of only being able to call 100 and reach about 4. This is all about getting people to know who you are in a way that is manageable but also incredibly scalable.

Back to basics: what is a personal brand?

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is hearing the word 'brand' and immediately thinking that their personal brand is something separate, and completely disassociated, from who they are. They think about traditional branding, where you invent a brand, typically for a business.

But here is the thing, you cannot invent your personal brand because it's based on, and intrinsically tied to, your personality. That's why the 'personal' bit is so important. This also means that, whether you have been intentional about building it or not, you already have a personal brand. The reason this first chapter is about reputation at scale is because that is the essence of what your personal brand allows you to do. It's a super-efficient and supercharged way of taking your personality and scaling it up - while also building the credibility and rapport you'd get from working on a one-on-one basis.

A lot of the blockers that you might have around building your personal brand are centred on ego, pride and being worried about what other people think of you. I was certainly in that place when I first started building mine. But the thing is, in almost all cases, you do not have those worries when you enter a one-to-one conversation. Most of us do not freak out when we are saying 'thank you' to the barista for serving us our coffee, or when we are bringing up a potentially challenging problem or topic at work or with friends. So, reframing personal branding as 'one-on-one interactions, but at scale', helps shift your mindset from 'what if they don't like me?' to 'I'll be fine if they don't'. And that is the basis of a strong personal brand - and of strong self-esteem.

Constructive interference

Attention. The single most valuable currency in 2024. Most of us understand that the more attention you get from the right people, the more opportunities you will receive. In a business that could mean sales, market share, investment. This is also true for your personal brand. When you start intentionally thinking about what you are doing, how you are behaving and what you are putting out into the world, you begin to reverse engineer what you want your outcome to be and align your actions to that. Aka, if you are clear on what you want, and who you need in your network to make that happen, you can tailor your content and actions to that outcome. I told you: personal branding is not an ego-driven activity, it's a strategic marketing imperative.

In physics, there's a law known as constructive interference. The principle is simple: when two frequencies of the same wavelength interact in such a way that they are aligned, they double in size.

As humans, the energy of our emotional state can be measured in a frequency. Research has found that the highest frequency emotion is authenticity, and not by a little, but by a lot: 400× more than love, actually.1 When you have interactions with someone, whether it's face to face or online, there is an energy exchange that takes place. If you go into that interaction with authenticity, and the person you are engaging with is also emitting that same emotion, your frequency will double. And that is why authenticity is so damn powerful. It's authentic content that goes viral; it's why people can attract thousands to speaking engagements where they talk about their failures and their losses. Authenticity is the only thing powerful enough to make our frequency double its wavelength. This is not some woo-woo fluff - it's scientifically measured and proven.

If you put yourself out there authentically - if you take control and commit to being yourself and are completely OK with the consequences of being yourself - then scaling your personal brand will have an immeasurable impact on your life, compared to if you just toe the line and do what everyone else is doing. Why do you think I have so many followers? Or Steven Bartlett gets so many downloads of his podcast, 'Diary of the CEO', or Elon Musk is so famous and successful? Love us or hate us, we are all authentic.

Back to the science, this energy exchange happens whether you are consciously controlling it or not, so the first step is to take control of your personal brand and be aware of how you are behaving in every interaction you have with others - and making sure you are being authentic in those interactions. If you do not take control of your personal brand and aren't consciously thinking about it, then at the very best you will miss out on opportunities, and at worst people will think you are an a**hole.

And this is never more important than with first impressions. You have one-tenth of a second before someone makes an assumption about you. When you know who you are, are...