‘Authenticity’ is a topic that pops very often as a question in my corporate personal branding workshops. The usual question goes, “Do I need to be myself online, in the name of personal branding?”.
The answer to that is, of course, you must be yourself, online, whatever you say/share. You can try putting up a facade of someone you are not, but chances are that the double-life would show up at some point very soon and you would end up burning your credibility away. That’s definitely not worth trying to be someone you are not.
Also, when people hear, ‘You need to be yourself’, they mistakenly assume that they need to air their views on what they do in real life/offline, on digital platforms too. This is not true and is a wrong assumption.
As I often explain using the ‘100 windows’ analogy, you need to be your 100% self only with people you live. For everyone else, including your digital presence, you need to showcase only a curated version of yourself. So, it is still you, the real you, but not 100% you. Just 5-10% you, for instance.
This means that if you share your opinion on controversial topics with your spouse or parents, or immediate colleagues at work, you need not do the same online, on say, LinkedIn or Twitter. Not doing so doesn’t make you inauthentic. It simply means you consicously choose not to share those views with complete strangers online.
Why? Because strangers online do not know you. They cannot understand the context of what you are sharing or why you are sharing. In simple terms, they do not know ‘where you are coming from’, as the phrase goes.
But even when you are sharing the 5-10% of your 100% self with strangers online carefully, they are not the only audience you should be thinking about. There is one more audience that most people forget, ignore, or just overlook… at their peril!
For context, I occasionally look up someone’s tweets on X. The person recently became a parent. But even before that, the person has an abrasive way of talking and airing point of view on many topics including politics and politicians. There is a lot of swearing, in English and a regional language. There is innuendo-laden abuses and gossiping too. This continues freely even after becoming a parent.
Why is the ‘parent’ part relevant here? After all, the child is not going to look up the person’s tweets, right?
Wrong.
The child may not look up the parent’s tweets today. Not tomorrow, and not in the next decade too perhaps. For all we know, there may be newer platforms for the child to naturally lean into after 10-15 years and X may not even be topical or relevant then. But those things do not matter.
What matters is that the child could want to look up what its parent has been up to online, generally. This is on-demand personal branding, the way an interviewer or a recruiter would look you up before a meeting. Or a potential client may, before your first meeting. Or a potential date.
The audience, in all these cases, is just one. Or, very few. We usually associate ‘audience’ with a lot of people – followers, Likes, Shares, etc. But those are strangers as audiences, who only think they know you. They know only the 5-10% you.
But the audience of one could end up being far more important than you can imagine.
It could be your spouse. Your child. Your parents. Your colleagues in your floor at work. Your neighbors. And so on.
You generally do not think of such people as your audience. But please do.
These are what I call ‘anchors’ when it comes to personal branding.
To bring authenticity to your voice online, in your effort to building your personal brand, more than the invisible (potential) millions of strangers, think about the anchor audiences.
How?
Simple. Before you share anything on any platform online, ask yourself this question: If my child/son/daughter, or spouse, or parents see this piece of content from me, would they find a very different version of me, far removed from who they are used to when I be with/talk to them?
If the answer is yes, then you need to seriously re-evaluate if you really need to share what you are about to share with millions of strangers online. Or rethink the way you would go about sharing the same piece of content in a way that you can explain to your anchor audiences about your intent and motive.
This is not just for online content alone. This is applicable for anything you say in any public forum, online or offline. So, it could even be something you say in a talk show, podcast (as a guest), in a panel discussion in an event, or as what Ranveer Allahbadia is finding out the hard way, as a guest in a so-called comedy show’s guest/jury panel. All these are videotaped and are meant for public consumption. Just like your own post on LinkedIn or X.
You may argue that we all have different faces that we wear, even though we are just one. We wear the face of a husband/wife with the spouse. We wear the face of a parent with children. The face of a son/daughter with parents. These are not interchangeable and each face is dependent on the target audience. We wouldn’t say to our children what we may say to our spouse.
But the online world doesn’t have compartments or specific target audiences. Anything you say anywhere online, on any public platform, can be seen by your anchors even if you did not intend it for them.
Anchors and compartments do not apply to private spaces, of course. Emails, chats, offline meetings, direct messages, etc. are generally assumed to be private. But even these tend to have a way of surfacing when things go wrong, particularly digital screenshots, where possible.
So, the broad thumbrule for sensible and authentic personal branding is to never say things (either topics or the articulation) that you wouldn’t want your anchor audiences to see/read and think that this is not the person I’m living with!
Such ‘anchors’ need not be immediate family alone.
In one of my corporate personal branding sessions, one of the participants said that they have very old parents who are hardly online and being single, they do not have the kind of anchors that I was referring to. Perfectly valid counterpoint.
Hence, these anchors need not be your immediate family alone.
It could also be a set of people that you spend 10-12 hours every week day – your colleagues at work, in your floor. It’s a simple premise – would your immediate colleagues, that you spend time with and are seated alongside, see a variance between who they sit/work with and your online version?
For example, the person they sit/work with doesn’t swear at all. Doesn’t pick up fights. Doesn’t offer sarcastic remarks. Is an empathetic person who is helpful and kind. But the online version generously swears, is highly sarcastic, picks up fight with strangers over what they say, and is mean to people who are suffering/victims. This is a problem with authenticity in personal branding.
The implicit assumption here is that what you do online doesn’t have a bearing on who are you in real life. But this is wrong. Even if the variance is not noticed immediately, it will catch up to you.
So, it helps thinking up your own anchor audiences so that they become your north pole in terms of what you say online and how you say it. More than the nameless millions to whom you are building a perception of yourself, the anchor audiences are the ones you should be most worried about. They are immediate, and far more important. They are also the audience to whom you need not build any ‘personal brand’ – you just need to be yourself and they would figure out your personal brand on their own because you spend so much time in their midst.
If you consider your anchor audiences and choose your words and thoughts accordingly when you share something with nameless millions online, you are presenting an authentic version of yourself. This is your real self. Not your 100% self, but still the real self. Understand the difference between the two so that you manage your authenticity in service of building your personal brand.
It’s not difficult, really. If you have a 100 topics that you can freely discuss with your spouse, choose only 5-7 topics that you share online, with strangers. Do it consistently over a period of time and you have a brand!
There are also certain nuances that you must be cognizant about. For example, if you imagine your child (say, aged 10) as one of the anchor audience to choose topics or articulation of certain topics, what if such a topic is not appropriate for a 10-year-old? There are a LOT of topics that are not appropriate for a 10-year-old, in any case!
In such cases, what matters is not the variance but about your ability to sit and explain to your 10-year-old child the why and what of what you shared online. This doesn’t apply to your other anchors, like parents, spouse, or colleagues, of course.
Remember that you can explain the choice of certain topics that you had to share your opinion on online. But you cannot explain the reason why you swore at or abused a stranger online… why you were mean to a stranger online… why trolled someone and called that person names. There is no explanation for poor behavior, which is not to be confused with age-inappropriate topics when it comes to a 10-year-old child.
From my experience, while many people overlook anchor audiences in a general way, they specifically overlook them during commenting, replying, or engaging in an online conversation! The swearing, abusing, sarcasm flows more freely during a publicly seen conversation online. It could be on the comments section on LinkedIn. Or the replies thread on Reddit or X/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram. But these matter. They will all turn up if one of your anchor audiences is intent on knowing if you have another self hidden somewhere online.
So, for your personal branding journey, before thinking about building an audience of millions, think of the most crucial anchor audiences and tweak your public persona in a way that your anchors see the same person offline and online. You should not be thinking along the lines of, ‘Who among my thousands of followers is going to know how I am in real life? I can be whoever I want here!’.