Success through personal branding

By Paige Arnof-Fenn

I started a global branding and digital marketing firm 24 years ago before social media or AI were on the radar. To stand out today it’s important to create a narrative for personal branding in this digital world. If we learned anything during Covid it is that your online presence is only growing in importance and I believe everyone is a brand today not just LeBron, Beyonce, Serena Williams and Taylor Swift. You do not exist today if you cannot be found online. Being invisible online is a terrible strategy and if you do not brand yourself then others will brand you instead. Having a brand is what helps you stand out from all the noise and competition. Without a brand you are a commodity and therefore compete on price. You cannot be everywhere all the time so choose high impact activities that work for you and play to your strengths. The key is just to pick your platform, it does not matter which ones you choose just pick one or 2 that are authentic to you. It should look and sound like you and the brand you have built.

Whether yours is polished or more informal, chatty or academic, humorous or snarky, it is a way for your personality to come through. I think people need to be on LinkedIn so that they can be found easily. It adds credibility and transparency when you know the people you are meeting or working with know people in common. LinkedIn has become more than an online resume or rolodex, it is the foundation for building trusted relationships in the digital economy. You do not need to blog or be on all social media platforms but make sure you are active on the ones where you are. If your audiences do not use Facebook, Twitter/X or Instagram to find you then you do not need to make them a priority. For many professional service businesses like mine, leveraging LinkedIn matters the most.

I’m a big fan of Content Marketing and Thought Leadership to build your personal brand but the rules have changed. Today AI generates content by remixing what it’s already seen. The one irreplaceable human element is creativity which involves intuition, emotion, and ideas sparked from imagination, not just patterns. AI responds to prompts, it doesn’t initiate discovery. AI mimics compassion, but only people can feel it. The emotional resonance that comes from shared experiences like grief, love, awe, and hope are uniquely human. Compassion drives engagement, loyalty, and performance. People want to be seen and understood. Authentic first-hand experience is key today, Google said for years that experience, expertise, authority, and trust matter but the prevalence of robotic and generic AI-generated content and users’ search for authenticity have made those qualities critical for anyone trying to rank content now.

When you share what you know, your passion, war stories, good, bad, ugly, the stories are interesting and the lessons real, people remember and come back for more. Tell your origin story, share mistakes and failures, be vulnerable if you want to drive engagement, build connections and relationships with your audience. Just show your humanity, which is more important now than ever before! Who would have thought that the killer application in 2025 would be authentic interactions, not Artificial Intelligence? A key challenge today we face is juggling the speed of change with the volume of activity and noise distractions. With all the AI tools generating robotic messages that sound generic, we can stand out and break through the sea of sameness with personalized, thoughtful communication serving your audience's specific needs. Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT are great tools that can help generate ideas and brainstorm but they cannot compete with or replace your humor, experience or war stories.

Connect With Paige

www.linkedin.com/in/paigearnoffenn

www.mavensandmoguls.com