10

BRANDING IS NOT BRAGGING

“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

—COCO CHANEL

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE THAT I find Lyss Stern, forty-two, chilling in the “relaxation room” at the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa on Fifth Avenue in New York City. She had posted on Instagram a few hours earlier that she was taking a midweek “mommy time-out” and getting pampered. Swaddled in a fluffy white robe, with her dark mane piled into a messy chic bun on the top of her head, Lyss was working. She assured me that, seriously, she really was working. For Lyss, posting on Instagram is part of her work—it’s promoting her brand and driving her lucrative luxury lifestyle event business Divalysscious Moms, or Diva Moms as it’s usually called. That I locate Lyss through social media is appropriate since I had been trying to interview her about how she successfully brands herself and her business. So about an hour after seeing the Instagram post, I’m at the Red Door Spa, perched on the edge of a leather recliner, violating the quiet room protocol, and whispering my questions to Lyss.

“I think my business has grown because mothers trust me, and my announcing on social media that I’m taking a ‘mommy timeout’ this morning is okay,” Lyss says. “You’re allowed to do these things for yourself, or you’re going to go batshit fucking crazy.”

GROWING DIVA MOMS WITH AUTHENTICITY

It’s Lyss’s authenticity and relentless self-promotion that has helped propel her business from a small company—hosting mom and kid events at FAO Schwarz and Dylan’s Candy Bar—to a true direct marketing company for high-end consumer brands and New York City real estate developers. Lyss’s database of nearly one million women and a robust following on social media attract companies and even Hollywood casting agents to want to work with her. Lyss tweets, posts photos, and engages with her Diva Moms every day—sometimes multiple times a day. And everything she puts out on social comes directly from Lyss. There is no surrogate or intern generating her feeds.

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1996, Lyss worked for acclaimed celebrity publicist Peggy Siegal while attending New York University at night to earn a master’s in communications. Burnt out from the grind of publicity, Lyss returned to school two years later, adding another master’s degree in early education. She loved the classroom, and for six years Lyss taught kindergarten and pre-kindergarten at synagogue Rodeph Sholom’s day school on New York’s Upper West Side. While on maternity leave with her first child Jackson in 2004, Lyss went to a “mommy lunch” and came home depressed. She was shocked by the lack of stimulating options for new mothers. When Lyss’s husband Brian asked how her day was, she said, “I went to this mother’s lunch and I hated it, but the good news is that I’m starting my own business.”

Lyss believed she found a void in the market. She thought New York City needed trendy events for the well-heeled and well-educated mom crowd. So with three thousand dollars in retirement savings, Lyss launched Diva Moms. Today, Lyss hosts about one hundred lectures, book parties, product launches, and other events each year. She weaves her upbeat brand message into all that she does. Her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts will read fabuLyss or DeLysscious, and if she loves an item, it may be included on her Lysst. She signs off with a “Big XO.” Lyss realizes that the aggressive self-promotion can turn some people off. In fact, even the name of her business, Divalysscious (aptly inspired by a remark from a salesgirl at the Barney’s department store), was at first rejected by her friends and family. “I remember everybody telling me, ‘You can’t do this,’” Lyss says. “It’s kind of narcissistic, and who puts their name in the title of a company? And I said, ‘Calvin Klein did it, Donna Karan did it, Marc Jacobs did it, and we’re going to do it.’”

Lyss readily admits there are haters and naysayers who think she’s over the top. But Lyss says her loyal followers listen. She has been cultivating her Divalysscious brand for almost a dozen years now, and when she puts something on her Lysst, women pay attention—and the product, book, or service sells. Her authenticity is everything. “I think being your true brand ambassador is most important to your brand,” Lyss says. “You can’t pretend to be somebody that you’re not. We have a following of real moms who listen to our voice and advice.”

Evolve and Adapt: Keeping Your Brand Relevant

Lyss also has an uncanny knack for sniffing out what’s going to hit it big. She was the girl in middle school in the late eighties with the cool “Gear” bag, EG Smith socks, and Hot Dogger jogging suits before anyone. Her forecasting instinct is partly what makes Lyss so naturally good at what she does. “We are always in the front of the trend,” Lyss says.

Before the steamy Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy made it to America, Lyss was already reading and promoting the erotic novels on social media. In 2011, Lyss reached out to British author E.L. James, who was selling her series through ebooks and printing on demand from a virtual publisher in Australia. Lyss offered to host a book party for James in New York. One of the Diva moms who came to the event worked as an executive at Vintage Books, part of Penguin Random House. Soon after Lyss’s book party in January 2012, James wound up with a North American publishing deal.

Lyss continues to look at how she can expand her brand into products or other services for moms. She’s has cowritten books including If You Give a Mom a Martini and has written short-form web series for NickMom and Scripps Networks. While mom events and the mom marketing world have become more crowded since Lyss first began, she believes that knowing who you are and being true to that identity is the key to growing a successful business. “It’s really important for your brand to keep relevant and keep evolving and adapting and never get complacent,” Lyss says. “Because of social media today, it’s also easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing, but there is space out there for everyone to be successful. My mother would always tell me, when you’re at a traffic light don’t envy the Porsche to your left or the Jaguar to your right—just stay in your own lane, be focused, and move ahead.”

IT’S NOT ABOUT FAMOUS

Personal branding is no longer reserved for the famous and for most people, it’s not about trying to become famous, either. You don’t need to be a Kardashian to be intentional and thoughtful about how you present yourself to the public. And you don’t need to have a business driven on social media like Diva Moms or an email list of a million people for it to be important to develop your brand.

In her best-selling book Leave Your Mark: Land Your Dream Job. Kill It in Your Career. Rock Social Media, Aliza Licht writes, “Personal branding is about identifying the best version of you and striving toward achieving and communicating that every day.”¹

If anyone knows how to juice a brand it’s Aliza, a communications and social media guru, who the New York Post once called the Yoda of the fashion industry for her nearly two decades of innovative work at Donna Karan. Aliza became a social media maven in 2009, just as brands were trying to make sense of how to engage with the public on social. Aliza created a dishy, anonymous Twitter personality, a social avatar of sorts: DKNY PR GIRL. Inspired by the TV girl drama Gossip Girl, DKNY PR GIRL was imagined as a filter through which Aliza could convey the world of Donna Karan. Her insider diary of the fabulous-yet-normal life of a fashion publicist became a sensation. The audience grew to 380,000 before the company decided to reveal, as exquisitely fitting to a fashion brand, a behind-the-scenes New York Fashion Week video shared on YouTube that outed Aliza. When Aliza left the company in 2015, the audience had grown to 540,000, and the company retired the Twitter personality.²

Repetition Is Reputation

Aliza, forty-two, embodies personal branding. While in college, she would “get dressed” when she went to class. There was no rolling out of the dorm wearing sweats and a scrunchie. Aliza loves a red lip so much that her red hair and red lips are her signature look. It’s part of her personal mojo and how she presents to the world. After Aliza left her gigantic gig as Senior Vice President of Global Communications for Donna Karan, a position she still calls a dream job, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next. “I left because there was a piece of me that was missing, and I no longer felt challenged. But I didn’t have a plan,” Aliza says.

The first thing Aliza did was make a list of her capabilities. When you have a job title, she says, it’s very specific; but when you start thinking of what you can do, it becomes much broader than your title or the bullet points on your resume. “I was shocked to see the breadth of what I had learned in over twenty years in fashion,” Aliza says. “I looked at where my strengths were within that list, but just because I knew how to do something doesn’t mean I wanted to do it. So what did I actually want to do?”

Aliza realized that at her heart she was a passionate storyteller, and she became most excited when she was figuring out a brand’s narrative and how it plays out in the digital space. For many women who leave big careers and are trying to reinvent themselves, Aliza says the struggle often begins with what to call themselves. “When you introduce yourself and say ‘former,’ you’re living in the past,” Aliza says. “I think you need to give people a clue as to your present and future. You also have to make it really easy for people to understand who you are and what you do.”

One of Aliza’s mottos is that “repetition is reputation.”

“I think there is a necessity to knowing who you are, knowing how you present, and knowing what your message is—no matter what you do,” Aliza says. Part of that message is being consistent. Leave Your Mark, the branding bible Aliza wrote the year she left Donna Karan, became an umbrella under which she could pursue other creative avenues—including her branding and digital strategy company with the same name. “I think at the end of the day, you have to pick a lane and think of a title that is almost a catchall to everything,” Aliza says. “And understand that it’s okay to not have it all figured out. No one has it all figured out.”

EVERYONE NEEDS PR

Five years ago, Meredith Fineman, twenty-nine, quit her digital strategy job without a backup plan. Being entrepreneurial was part of her DNA. She always had side hustles, including working as a nightclub promoter while at the University of Pennsylvania. After college, Meredith had worked in Buenos Aires for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, and as a freelance writer she was becoming well known for her lifestyle and humor blogging in Washington, DC. Meredith hadn’t considered working for herself full-time as a realistic option. But as she explored what to do next, she found that whenever she tacked on “public relations” as a skillset, she would get a bite. People were interested. So in 2009, at twenty-five years old, Meredith launched her company FinePoint as a PR firm.

For three years, as she promoted everything from lifestyle to technology, Meredith started noticing how the media were growing fascinated with CEOs and founders of tech companies. They were becoming the new celebrity, with brands and platforms and growing cults of personality. This, of course, is what certain PR people can do well—craft images and position high profile people for media and industry opportunities. But Meredith didn’t feel like it was fair that the benefits associated with understanding visibility and press were only reserved for those who had a budget for it. She began thinking of PR in more democratic terms. She saw it in its broadest sense as leadership and professional development skills that could and should be learned by everyone. And Meredith found that the women she met, at every stage in their career, often had difficulty talking about themselves and promoting their work. At a time when branding was everything, Meredith felt there was an enormous opportunity not only to reframe how women spoke about their work, but also to help these professional women apply strategic PR tactics to their lives.

“In 2016, talking about the work is a huge part of doing the work,” Meredith says. “There’s a misconception that talking about the work is not work. But it’s a learned skill and it helps explain your work. With an economy that’s so entrepreneurial, it’s more important than ever to understand visibility and know how to be out there. My concept is about creating this projected self that you strategize around.”

Go Ahead and Brag or Find Someone to do it for You

Meredith wants to take back bragging. She doesn’t see it as a dirty or contentious word; instead, it’s something that she feels women need to own. Meredith also believes we need the space to talk about our accomplishments and what we’ve done. “Women tend to verbally undercut themselves and downplay their accomplishments and give credit to someone else,” Meredith says. “People don’t know what you’ve done until you tell them, particularly if they don’t know much about your industry or your job. It’s a skill that is increasingly important for your career, whether you are fundraising or in a boardroom or in a classroom.”

Meredith has grown FinePoint into a leadership practice with a mission of teaching women how to brag and self-promote. Successful branding has virtually nothing to do with how smart or capable you are—it’s all about the public perception. Meredith says that people are rewarded by volume, not merit, and that means producing work, which today is through articles, speeches, videos, graphics, photos, or activities that highlight your specialty and superpower. This output of “work” shapes your public persona—it helps cultivate your image.

But sharing what we do and what we’ve achieved is uncomfortable for many women. Self-promoting makes us squeamish. Meredith wants women to get over this discomfort. She says you must get behind your work and let people know what you are doing. She advises not to use negative qualifiers when you post something, such as “This is a shameless plug for a new article I wrote.” Instead, you should own the work you’ve done and say, “I’m really proud of this article I wrote for X. I would love it if you could share it or send me your feedback.” Gracious, nice, and to the point. The goal is to have others bolster you. You want them to share on your behalf.

“When you understand visibility and why it’s crucial and use PR tactics on yourself, you can help propel yourself forward and feel better about being out there,” Meredith says. “Being strategic about how you present yourself is not conniving with premeditated bad intentions; it’s creating opportunity to be successful.”

Journalist Jessica Bennett also recognizes the importance for women to strategically bolster themselves—especially in a way that’s not seen as obnoxious. In her book Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual, she recommends “bragging in the service of someone else” and finding a “boast bitch” to help share your awesomeness. The “boast bitch,” Jessica writes, is “your female hype man. She boasts for you, you boast for her, boasting for each other makes you both look better, yet neither of you is perceived to be bragging about yourself.” And research shows that having someone boast for you is effective even if it’s obvious that that person is biased.⁴

MANAGING THE CAREER PIVOT

Meredith often works with people across all industries who are pivoting in their careers. They may be moving from law into venture capital, or they are entrepreneurs wanting to carve out a new image in the fashion or lifestyle space. The most immediate obstacle, as Aliza Licht would also agree, is figuring out your identity and then driving that reputation through repetition. “The biggest roadblock to visibility is not having a clear and consistent message of who you are,” Meredith says. For those changing industries, Meredith suggests redoing your bio, writing pieces in publications that matter to your intended field, and creating a personal website that speaks to the new career. Meredith says that understanding how to frame yourself in the right context and knowing how visibility works in whatever ecosystem you’re entering is key to raising your profile in a new industry.

Karen Shnek Lippman, who herself has pivoted from a career in public relations to one in executive search and recruiting, says a helpful tactical strategy for those trying to land a new position is to look closely at who has the position you want and to figure out where the holes in your resume are so you can get there. “Narrow down your choices and figure out what you really want to be doing next, then you work backward,” Shnek Lippman says. “Go on LinkedIn, find profiles of people who match the position you envision yourself in, and look at their career paths. Read what they’ve written, and tailor your resume accordingly. Look at what they’ve done to help better fine-tune what you need to get there too. It’s all out there for the taking.”

GETTING A JOB: PERSONAL BRANDING 101

I’m not an HR expert, but I have spent a good portion of my career being interviewed or interviewing others. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. While I used to agonize over the cover letter, online applications today mean that hiring managers don’t spend much time reading them. Yes, you should have a solid opening paragraph that shows that you have knowledge or insight into the company where you are looking to work, but you don’t need to be super creative or lengthy. The cover letter should be well written and not contain any spelling or grammatical errors. You don’t need to sweat the cover letter as much as you should sweat your bio, resume, or portfolio (if you are asked for a portfolio).

Below is the trifecta to personal branding from the gurus: Aliza, Meredith, and Karen.

Making Your Bio Stand Out

A professional bio is something everyone needs, and it should be updated and consistent across websites and platforms, Meredith says. Your bio should easily explain who you are and what you do. Everyone needs a long, short, and two-line bio. A long bio can be a full page and can go on your personal website. A short bio is about a paragraph (and often could be the first paragraph of your long bio). A two-line bio can go under your byline or in a description if you are appearing on a panel. For the shorter versions, think of your elevator pitch and how you would describe yourself in ten to fifteen seconds. Are you an entrepreneur? A salesperson? A storyteller? Build off of that and summarize who you are in a pithy but powerful way. Have a friend or mentor read it over, because it can be extremely hard to write about yourself.

Keep current and active. Meredith also recommends updating your bio every six months to keep it fresh. Make sure to use the active voice, keeping the tone dynamic and strong. Don’t use words that diminish your accomplishments. Be conscious of the language you use.

Link to the cool stuff. For any bio that appears online, link to your work if possible. If you discuss running a campaign, show the outcome. Link to articles you’ve written and accolades you have received. Make the bio comprehensive enough to act as a tool to showcase your accomplishments, with a link to click. If you can be booked to speak or to consult or have a course that you offer, link to that as well.

Sing and boast, but be professional. Your bio should not be simply a list of your jobs and degrees, it should spell out your accomplishments and accolades. It can contain information about passion projects and fun side projects, but it shouldn’t be as casual as saying, “In her spare time, Jessica enjoys checking out the latest microbrews.” Those bits of bio information are sometimes found on company websites where the tone is cheeky. But Meredith says to stay away from that kind of relaxed language. Professional bios are not a place to be playful. Also, skills like Excel or Photoshop should not be included, because they have become so common and expected.³

Creating an Effective Resume

Your resume is your personal marketing tool. Experts agree that you should have two or three different resumes geared toward each target audience, specific career objective, and industry you hope to pursue. You need to adapt each line depending on your goal. I have two active resumes, emphasizing different skillsets: one in PR, branding, and communication strategy and the other more editorially focused.

Cheat with LinkedIn. Karen suggests looking at the job that you want to get and see who has that position. Then see how they describe themselves on LinkedIn. What are the words they use in their summary to describe what they do? “LinkedIn profiles can be your best friend to help you fine-tune your resume, help in the job search, and cut out the noise,” she says.

Be specific. Look at what the hiring manager is asking for in the specific role for which you are applying. Make sure your language matches the job description. Because of the online application process these days at most companies, hiring managers get deluged with hundreds of resumes. They may first whittle down the resumes by keywords. Making sure you have the specific words they are looking for as far as experience and skillset is the first step to getting in the door.

Find the fit. “Don’t misrepresent yourself,” Karen says. “Be transparent, but align your experience with the job you are applying for. Think, how do my skills and experience really line up with this job? That needs to be front and center on your resume. Hiring managers look at the first two jobs you list. Make sure they are most impactful.

Use action words. Words like “delivered,” “produced,” and “managed” are strong choices for explaining what you’ve done. You want to show your results. What did you deliver? What was the result? What kind of tangible difference did you make in your role?

Feeding Social Media

When it comes to the social media feeds, Aliza suggests keeping to a rhythm that makes sense for you. When Aliza was behind DKNY PR GIRL, she didn’t have a content calendar. She posted in real time depending on what happened to her on any given day. It was the authenticity of her posts—not canned and planned, but legitimate ones—that Aliza believes helped to grow her audience. There is no magic number of tweets or posts per day or per week. But understand that what you are posting on one social feed may be very different from what you’re sending out somewhere else. Different social channels have different audiences and content that work for them. Some thrive on photos or videos, others use links to articles. Staying current on what works well and how best to reach the targeted audiences is important. And because social apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are so trendy and fluid, the rules of engagement and what works best could be outdated by the time this book is published. The good news is that everyone can become a pseudo expert on social media. Some quick Google searches on best practices and current social media trends can keep you up-to-date.

Keep it real. Genuine posts that connect back to you and your industry make sense to post. Be true to yourself.

Choose quality over quantity. Smart content with a real point of view and voice work best.

Maintain the mothership: your website. Today, everyone should have a professional website, and because of sites like branded.me and Square Space, they are shockingly easy to make. Years ago, I created a website, and I’ll be honest, I did a miserable job updating it because I never learned how to do it myself. The good news is that gone are the days when you need to know HTML or have a web designer create and maintain an expensive website. I promise you, everyone can do it now, which in an entrepreneurial age is more important than ever.

Having a hub for your resume, bio, portfolio, blog, photos, videos, or anything else that showcases your work can help you sell yourself. Just having a landing page that serves as a home for your information is a great first step. It also allows you to be creative and show personality. The first thing people do when they are looking to potentially hire someone is to Google them.

By creating your own website, you are controlling the way the public will see you. And if there’s one takeaway from this chapter, it’s that controlling your message and owning your brand is everything.