“You’re well within your right to gatekeep your online voice”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“I work at a very small design studio, and my bosses expect me to be the face of the brand. That means sharing everything they do on my personal social media and tying my own identity to theirs. I’m not comfortable with that, especially because I do not always resonate with the work they produce. I’m here because I need to pay the bills, not because I want my personal brand folded into the studio’s. In a team this small, it feels claustrophobic to push back against an expectation they seem to take for granted.

How do I tell my boss I do not want to be the studio’s social media mouthpiece?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

I understand your reservation to link yourself to the studio. Your personal brand is your currency in the industry, and will long outlast your current role.

I don’t think you need to be blunt in pushing back. You’re not saying “I want nothing to do with the studio output”. You just need to set some boundaries on what you’re willing to share.

For example, by explaining you’re happy to engage with studio content and post any projects you’re proud of. You can share the work you don’t love in a temporary way (to your stories for example, or removing it from your grid). You could even offer to manage the studio social accounts, and help build a following on their own profile. If there are parts of a project you like, you can create some of your own tiles that showcase the work how you want it to be seen. It’s amazing what a beautiful mockup can do to transform a project.

Remind them that it’s actually in their interest for you to develop your own personal brand. All publicity is good publicity right? Everything you do to build your profile will feed back into the studio reputation.

And there are lots of ways to build your personal brand offline. Getting involved with universities, whether that’s reviewing portfolios or guest lecturing. Putting your hand up for public speaking events. Mentoring, awards juries… The list is endless. It shows you’re willing to improve the studio’s visibility without jeopardising your authenticity.

And you do hold a lot of power. The average person gets 561 per cent more engagement sharing a brand message, than when that same message is shared by a company. That’s a statistic from the brilliant TED talk by Talaya Waller, ‘The Future of Branding is Personal’. It’s well worth a watch (perhaps before you have the conversation to aid your conviction).

You’re well within your right to gatekeep your online voice. Look at it this way – if you decided to post about your political views, being so closely linked to the studio might not be a good thing for them.

You’ve got to look out for number one, so you’re doing the right thing by protecting your power.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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