This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, our next guest is the founder of a consultancy called Leave Your Mark. She's a marketer, she's an author, she's a podcaster. She's written a couple of books. Her latest book is a book that I need a lot more than you need, Maddie, because you are so good with your personal brand. Maddy's got like twenty five thousand followers on TikTok, She's got thousands of followers. Get me out of my Instagram too.
I'm going to let him go with.
This one, and I like, I have some followers on Instagram. I just do not leave in to social media Twitter, you mean X?
You mean X?
Thank you? Yeah, teas so much as it makes me not even want to use it as much.
Alisa Lickt is the voice you hear. She's the author of on Brand, Shape your narrative, Share your vision, and shift their perception. Alisa, good to have you with us in the Bloomberg Interactive.
I am so happy to be here and to dive into this conversation.
Okay, you are you in your book? That first impressions are so important. What's the first thing you do when you meet someone new you just met us moments ago? How do you present yourself?
How do I present myself?
Well, the first thing I would do is probably say Hi, I'm Malise A Licht.
Who are you?
So I don't dive into like the elevator pitch. I actually think it's more interesting you ask questions. I ask questions, and I think it's more interesting to be interested in the other person.
And then they'll turn it around.
But yes, I'm a founder, I'm a marketer, author, podcaster.
I change it.
Depending on the situation in the audience.
Well, I have to admit that I know who you are. I know you from DK and YPR girl, which I know that that is part of your past and now you have this incredible media empire of your own. But I'm curious how much of the kind of principles you learned through that experience are applied to the work you do now and then for those who may not be familiar, can you tell them?
Absolutely so.
My former life, I was a corporate public syst for Donna Karen for seventeen years and back in the day in two thousand and nine when brands were first starting on Twitter not X at the time, I created an anonymous social media personality inspired by Gossip Girl that was.
Called my pr Girl.
Through my role in PR and I learned one valuable lesson that that still holds true today, which is, don't sell anything, tell a great story. And that really was the filter that I shared the brand through and that
sort of set off, you know, everything else. And I think, you know, when we think about storytelling online and we think about personal branding, you know, I became synonymous with that company that was my identity and in on Brand and in my previous book, Leave Your Mark, I talk about why you don't want to suffer from last name syndrome, which means you want your name to mean something on its own, because what you do today may not be what you do tomorrow.
And I'm always puzzled by people who have the name of the employer in their Twitter handle.
That's a great point. That's a great point.
So it's not to say that you can't be proud of where you work. I think there's a great halo effect of leveraging where you work and vice versa and being proud to work there. But at the same time, it's not really about where you work. The skills are yours, right, the experience is yours. You take it with you anywhere, So why not build equity in your own name?
What's your biggest piece of advice for that? Then, for people who are really tied to an employer right now, they're worried about the economy, but they want to make sure that they are building their own brand for the skills that they offer.
Such a great question. So in on brand, I really try to be equal between people who are into building social media presence like you did, and people who are like, that's not for me, because your personal brand is not just online, right, it's in real life. It's the executive presence that you have and the weight you carry in a meeting. It's how you earn social capital. Yes, it
is definitely easier if you have an online presence. I believe every single professional person should be active on LinkedIn. That is the non negotiable platform. But everything else is really up for debate.
How do you do it in an environment where you know it's like, okay, well Twitter was so important for journalists. Now it's called X. You're like punished for not paying the reach isn't what it was. They're deprioritizing news. It's as cesspool blah blah blah. People who spent years on that platform building their followings or walking away from it. Do they want to invest in the next biggest thing?
Right?
The next what could be the next big thing could be threads? Who knows? Is it TikTok where Maddie does such great work and that takes so much time to do Maddie, I know TikTok is crazy? Is it Instagram?
Like?
Where do you know where to spend your energy?
So I think the answer is really simple. You don't put your eggs in one basket.
Right. We are renting audience.
Wow, that is not unless you book collecting emails, you do not own that audience. So that means at the flick of a light switch, if Instagram changes their algorithm and all of a sudden, your views are different. TikTok does that? Instagram does that? We see it happen all the time. You are really at risk, especially if you're really building a business on one particular platform. So diversification, just like in stocks, right, you can't just put all
your money into one company. You have to make sure you protect yourself. So, by the way, I don't think people are leaving Twitter because people have spent years building that audience and that's not an easy thing to replicate. And yes, you know, if you jump on a platform early, like a lot of people did with Threads and myself included, you gain equity in that platform and your fans. You know,
it's new, it's exciting, everyone's there. That's when you test out a new platform, even if you don't plan on staying, jump in the pool when it starts.
I mean three years ago, if we were having this conversation, we'd be talking about Clubhouse. Now if you go to Clubhouse, you're speaking.
To yourself, right, And I jump on Clubhouse immediately, and it was huge. It was huge and for people, some people launched businesses off of that. So you kind of have to use the platform as much as they use us, which they are right. Without us, there's no content, So you have to use the platform and you kind of have to defer to what is important.
To them at the time.
So like when Instagram came out with reels, people were like, oh, no, I'm not doing that, I'm just going to post pictures. Okay, Well, fun fact Instagram is going to deprioritize your photos because they want you to post video. So it's not that hard to figure out.
Yeah.
Yeah, In our final minute with you, I want to do a couple of rapid fires. Yes, we don't have a lot of time. How LinkedIn biggest mistake you see people making over sharing?
I'm a big in on brand. One of my sections is called don't bring your whole self to work?
Oh my god, because.
Everyone loves to say that, and it is a Hallmark card. Okay, it's a Hallmark card. Your whole self is not appropriate for work. So really, if you ask yourself what your goal is you want to be known for.
The Problematti is you live too close to work, so you don't.
Have to have an insane personality.
You don't have time to drop off your the rest of yourself.
What about the biggest mistake people make in meetings?
Well, okay, camera off would be one of them. I think people have to engage and see your eye contact and that you're engaged. And the second thing is not being prepared, not not not coming to the table with ideas and then also not contributing.
Yeah all right, Alisa, we have to leave it there. But so many more tips on things to do and not do in your book, Alisa lickt Leave your mark consultancy and of course author of On Brand, Shape your narrative, share your vision, shift their perception. Thank you so much. This is Bloomberg.