The missing idea in every personal branding room on Clubhouse
From profile bios to clubs, the proliferation of people who do or are “everything” is all over Clubhouse. So why aren’t we talking about hybrid professionals alongside personal branding?
Wake up Clubhouse! The hybrid professional revolution is here!
In my framework of professional identity, I talk about a spectrum from singularity to multiplicity to hybridity. In my research, hybridity is the component we’ve been missing to define ourselves and our value. Hybrids are professionals who work at the intersection of multiple identities, and create an entirely NEW identity.
For decades, society has been stuck in the mindset that you must either be an expert or you’re a multi-EVERYTHING.
This is absurd!
In clubhouse, it’s obvious people are spelling out all their various parts when in reality, they’re the SUM of all those parts. They just DON’T KNOW HOW to market that yet. It’s become a personal fascination of mine to listen in on conversation after conversation about personal branding, and like clockwork, the same question gets asked on stage each time: “If I do so many things, how do I show my value and help people understand me? What’s my personal brand?”
And, like clockwork, a moderator responds with, “You know, you really have to pick one thing to showcase. You can’t be all of that to your audience.”
You know how I feel about that answer 😱!!!!! That’s not true!
Joining clubhouse has been an enlightening experience to see how people are building their personal brands, largely through influencer marketing, crafty bios, and shoutouts from moderators on stage, all of which drives traffic back to people’s instagram and twitter accounts where DMs and follows can occur.
It’s clear to me that the multi-hyphenate tribe is strong, abundant, and has flocked to Clubhouse.
There are two ways clubhouse is showing how widely spread the multi-hyphenate phenomenon has become: 1) profiles and 2) clubs.
Take a look at this profile snapshot. Very few of them have a title, instead, it’s sort of a list of features, adjectives, and interests that are used in the first precious opening line. Right away, it’s about listing things. Personal brand is the name of the game on Clubhouse. People’s bios can be one sentence to multiple finger scrolls long. There can be a lot packed into that small areas. Emojis are aplenty. These profile pages are like mini “sales pages” about each person. They’re delightful to read.
In clubs side of Clubhouse, I’ve found some very interesting ones for “multi-talented” people. Two in particular are Slash-preneur and Misfit Mafia. There are spaces designed to attract and convene others who are in the category of “otherness” or “multi-ness.” The reason so many join is because this phenomenon of being “multiple” is felt so widely.
There is never going to be a lack of people obtaining more professional identities. The present issue always goes back to INTEGRATION. As identity research claims, we continually evolve and adopt new identities over our lifetimes and shed others away. Some identities are fixed and others are dynamic.
What I’d love to see more of in profiles and hear more about in Clubhouse rooms is how people are combining, mixing, marrying, meshing, and integrating their multiple-ness together. Who are you as the SUM of all those PARTS? Until people start to get hyper-SPECIFIC about what they mean by their list of generic and familiar identities (biologist, engineer, gamer,….), we’ll never quite know what sets them apart and how unique they truly are.
After all, the art of personal branding is figuring out what each person has to contribute in this world that’s unlike anyone else. No two painters paint the same way, so there has to be a better way to clarify what type of painter he/she REALLY is.
You know what my answer is? Solve for who you are in the INTERSECTION of your multiple identities. The center of the Venn diagram is the heart of who you are.