Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 1: Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, our next guest is the
Speaker 1: founder of a consultancy called Leave Your Mark. She's a marketer,
Speaker 1: she's an author, she's a podcaster. She's written a couple
Speaker 1: of books. Her latest book is a book that I
Speaker 1: need a lot more than you need, Maddie, because you
Speaker 1: are so good with your personal brand. Maddy's got like
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand followers on TikTok, She's got thousands of followers.
Speaker 1: Get me out of my Instagram too.
Speaker 2: I'm going to let him go with.
Speaker 1: This one, and I like, I have some followers on Instagram.
Speaker 1: I just do not leave in to social media Twitter,
Speaker 1: you mean X?
Speaker 3: You mean X?
Speaker 2: Thank you? Yeah, teas so much as it makes me
Speaker 2: not even want to use it as much.
Speaker 1: Alisa Lickt is the voice you hear. She's the author
Speaker 1: of on Brand, Shape your narrative, Share your vision, and
Speaker 1: shift their perception. Alisa, good to have you with us
Speaker 1: in the Bloomberg Interactive.
Speaker 4: I am so happy to be here and to dive
Speaker 4: into this conversation.
Speaker 1: Okay, you are you in your book? That first impressions
Speaker 1: are so important. What's the first thing you do when
Speaker 1: you meet someone new you just met us moments ago?
Speaker 1: How do you present yourself?
Speaker 3: How do I present myself?
Speaker 4: Well, the first thing I would do is probably say Hi,
Speaker 4: I'm Malise A Licht.
Speaker 3: Who are you?
Speaker 4: So I don't dive into like the elevator pitch. I
Speaker 4: actually think it's more interesting you ask questions. I ask questions,
Speaker 4: and I think it's more interesting to be interested in
Speaker 4: the other person.
Speaker 3: And then they'll turn it around.
Speaker 4: But yes, I'm a founder, I'm a marketer, author, podcaster.
Speaker 3: I change it.
Speaker 4: Depending on the situation in the audience.
Speaker 2: Well, I have to admit that I know who you are.
Speaker 2: I know you from DK and YPR girl, which I
Speaker 2: know that that is part of your past and now
Speaker 2: you have this incredible media empire of your own. But
Speaker 2: I'm curious how much of the kind of principles you
Speaker 2: learned through that experience are applied to the work you
Speaker 2: do now and then for those who may not be familiar,
Speaker 2: can you tell them?
Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
Speaker 4: My former life, I was a corporate public syst for
Speaker 4: Donna Karen for seventeen years and back in the day
Speaker 4: in two thousand and nine when brands were first starting
Speaker 4: on Twitter not X at the time, I created an
Speaker 4: anonymous social media personality inspired by Gossip Girl that was.
Speaker 3: Called my pr Girl.
Speaker 4: Through my role in PR and I learned one valuable
Speaker 4: lesson that that still holds true today, which is, don't
Speaker 4: sell anything, tell a great story. And that really was
Speaker 4: the filter that I shared the brand through and that
Speaker 4: sort of set off, you know, everything else. And I think,
Speaker 4: you know, when we think about storytelling online and we
Speaker 4: think about personal branding, you know, I became synonymous with
Speaker 4: that company that was my identity and in on Brand
Speaker 4: and in my previous book, Leave Your Mark, I talk
Speaker 4: about why you don't want to suffer from last name syndrome,
Speaker 4: which means you want your name to mean something on
Speaker 4: its own, because what you do today may not be
Speaker 4: what you do tomorrow.
Speaker 1: And I'm always puzzled by people who have the name
Speaker 1: of the employer in their Twitter handle.
Speaker 3: That's a great point. That's a great point.
Speaker 4: So it's not to say that you can't be proud
Speaker 4: of where you work. I think there's a great halo
Speaker 4: effect of leveraging where you work and vice versa and
Speaker 4: being proud to work there. But at the same time,
Speaker 4: it's not really about where you work. The skills are yours, right,
Speaker 4: the experience is yours. You take it with you anywhere,
Speaker 4: So why not build equity in your own name?
Speaker 2: What's your biggest piece of advice for that? Then, for
Speaker 2: people who are really tied to an employer right now,
Speaker 2: they're worried about the economy, but they want to make
Speaker 2: sure that they are building their own brand for the
Speaker 2: skills that they offer.
Speaker 4: Such a great question. So in on brand, I really
Speaker 4: try to be equal between people who are into building
Speaker 4: social media presence like you did, and people who are like,
Speaker 4: that's not for me, because your personal brand is not
Speaker 4: just online, right, it's in real life. It's the executive
Speaker 4: presence that you have and the weight you carry in
Speaker 4: a meeting. It's how you earn social capital. Yes, it
Speaker 4: is definitely easier if you have an online presence. I
Speaker 4: believe every single professional person should be active on LinkedIn.
Speaker 4: That is the non negotiable platform. But everything else is
Speaker 4: really up for debate.
Speaker 1: How do you do it in an environment where you
Speaker 1: know it's like, okay, well Twitter was so important for journalists.
Speaker 1: Now it's called X. You're like punished for not paying
Speaker 1: the reach isn't what it was. They're deprioritizing news. It's
Speaker 1: as cesspool blah blah blah. People who spent years on
Speaker 1: that platform building their followings or walking away from it.
Speaker 1: Do they want to invest in the next biggest thing?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: The next what could be the next big thing could
Speaker 1: be threads? Who knows? Is it TikTok where Maddie does
Speaker 1: such great work and that takes so much time to
Speaker 1: do Maddie, I know TikTok is crazy? Is it Instagram?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Where do you know where to spend your energy?
Speaker 4: So I think the answer is really simple. You don't
Speaker 4: put your eggs in one basket.
Speaker 3: Right. We are renting audience.
Speaker 4: Wow, that is not unless you book collecting emails, you
Speaker 4: do not own that audience. So that means at the
Speaker 4: flick of a light switch, if Instagram changes their algorithm
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden, your views are different. TikTok
Speaker 4: does that? Instagram does that? We see it happen all
Speaker 4: the time. You are really at risk, especially if you're
Speaker 4: really building a business on one particular platform. So diversification,
Speaker 4: just like in stocks, right, you can't just put all
Speaker 4: your money into one company. You have to make sure
Speaker 4: you protect yourself. So, by the way, I don't think
Speaker 4: people are leaving Twitter because people have spent years building
Speaker 4: that audience and that's not an easy thing to replicate.
Speaker 4: And yes, you know, if you jump on a platform early,
Speaker 4: like a lot of people did with Threads and myself included,
Speaker 4: you gain equity in that platform and your fans. You know,
Speaker 4: it's new, it's exciting, everyone's there. That's when you test
Speaker 4: out a new platform, even if you don't plan on staying,
Speaker 4: jump in the pool when it starts.
Speaker 1: I mean three years ago, if we were having this conversation,
Speaker 1: we'd be talking about Clubhouse. Now if you go to Clubhouse,
Speaker 1: you're speaking.
Speaker 4: To yourself, right, And I jump on Clubhouse immediately, and
Speaker 4: it was huge. It was huge and for people, some
Speaker 4: people launched businesses off of that. So you kind of
Speaker 4: have to use the platform as much as they use us,
Speaker 4: which they are right. Without us, there's no content, So
Speaker 4: you have to use the platform and you kind of
Speaker 4: have to defer to what is important.
Speaker 3: To them at the time.
Speaker 4: So like when Instagram came out with reels, people were like, oh, no,
Speaker 4: I'm not doing that, I'm just going to post pictures. Okay, Well,
Speaker 4: fun fact Instagram is going to deprioritize your photos because
Speaker 4: they want you to post video. So it's not that
Speaker 4: hard to figure out.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, In our final minute with you, I want to
Speaker 2: do a couple of rapid fires. Yes, we don't have
Speaker 2: a lot of time. How LinkedIn biggest mistake you see
Speaker 2: people making over sharing?
Speaker 4: I'm a big in on brand. One of my sections
Speaker 4: is called don't bring your whole self to work?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, because.
Speaker 4: Everyone loves to say that, and it is a Hallmark card. Okay,
Speaker 4: it's a Hallmark card. Your whole self is not appropriate
Speaker 4: for work. So really, if you ask yourself what your
Speaker 4: goal is you want to be known for.
Speaker 1: The Problematti is you live too close to work, so
Speaker 1: you don't.
Speaker 2: Have to have an insane personality.
Speaker 1: You don't have time to drop off your the rest
Speaker 1: of yourself.
Speaker 2: What about the biggest mistake people make in meetings?
Speaker 4: Well, okay, camera off would be one of them. I
Speaker 4: think people have to engage and see your eye contact
Speaker 4: and that you're engaged. And the second thing is not
Speaker 4: being prepared, not not not coming to the table with
Speaker 4: ideas and then also not contributing.
Speaker 2: Yeah all right, Alisa, we have to leave it there.
Speaker 2: But so many more tips on things to do and
Speaker 2: not do in your book, Alisa lickt Leave your mark
Speaker 2: consultancy and of course author of On Brand, Shape your narrative,
Speaker 2: share your vision, shift their perception. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg.