Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door???

Just because you do great work, doesn’t mean that work will have the impact and achieve the benefits it could.

The chances of your contributions having the impact you desire will often also depend on your profile, and who knows what you’re doing.

In my latest video, “Public Profile Building: Why, Why Not, and Your Options for How”, I delve into the why, the why not, and the how of public profile building.

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door
📌 (0:17) What is Profile Building?
📌 (0:43) Profile Building is Optional
📌 (0:58) The Case for at Least Considering Profile Building
📌 (1:18) Video Overview: Why, Why Not, and How
📌 (1:45) The Why of Profile Building
📌 (2:28) Why: To Increase the Chance that Good Work has Impact
📌 (3:19) Profile Building for a Cause
📌 (3:28) Other Benefits: Opportunity Generation
📌 (3:41) Profile Building Develops Many Useful Skills
📌 (3:55) Why Not? Four Key Considerations
📌 (4:08) Enjoying Profile Building
📌 (4:40) Becoming Proficient at Profile Building
📌 (5:23) Dealing with Harassment and Abuse
📌 (6:06) Even When Going Well It Can Be Exhausting
📌 (6:56) Broad Principles for the How of Profile Building
📌 (7:12) Professional Versus Personal Identity
📌 (8:12) Your Appetite for Self-Promotion
📌 (8:31) Profile Building Example: Politely Offering to Talk
📌 (9:09) Assessing Your Efforts Requires a Sustained Commitment
📌 (9:34) Make Some Attempt to Measure the Impact
📌 (10:01) Choosing the Ways in Which You Do Profile Building
📌 (10:18) Remember Platforms Are Always Changing
📌 (10:27) Social Media Platforms
📌 (10:53) Check the Personal versus Professional Flavour of the Platform
📌 (11:06) Many Ways to Engage in Person
📌 (11:24) You Don’t Always Have to be the Star of the Show
📌 (11:39) Tips for Becoming Proficient
📌 (11:53) Collaboration Can Be Helpful
📌 (12:24) High Quality Modifiable Collateral
📌 (12:52) Automation and Assistive Tools
📌 (13:35) Profile Building Enhances What is Already There
📌 (13:55) Not Doing It, And Taking Breaks
📌 (14:17) Summary and Final Words

Full Video Notes

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” – this is the phrase that is often quoted and critiqued, and it is highly relevant to the topic of this video – I’ll get back to this in a moment, but first a few definitions.
Public profile building is the deliberate or incidental act of increasing the amount of exposure you, and what you do, has amongst parts of the population that are related to your professional career. To take a very simple example, one example of profile building is simply giving more presentations or talks – the more people who see you talk about what you do – the more you are building your profile.
Profile building is an entirely optional activity – you can have a successful, fulfilling career without deliberately doing any of it. In most careers, your job will involve a bit of incidental profile building anyway. However, in many professions, such as academia, developing a deliberate and systematic profile building strategy is also of potential value. It’s something that you should at the very least consider, evaluate and then make an informed decision on pursuing or not pursuing.
In this video I’m going to cover the why, the why not, and the considerations in choosing how to profile build. I’m going to focus on the key concepts and considerations rather getting into the deep technical specifics of any particular strategy – e.g. specific social media platforms – in part because that would make for a much longer video, and also because these platforms are continually changing.
So why would you consider a strategy of deliberate profile building? It comes back to the quote in the opening of this video about building a better mouse trap.
The reality of the modern world is that it is a very busy, very noisy place, and this is true of many specific careers and sectors too. It’s often not a place where individuals systematically review everything that is occurring in their field on a regular basis and seek out stuff that is of interest to them. Even if they do this, there is often so much stuff happening that much gets missed – especially in larged, particularly fast moving fields.
If you do great work – great research, developing a fantastic new product, or reforming policy – you typically would like that contribution to have as much impact as possible. In this noisy environment, the chances of that work becoming known and appreciated by the people who could benefit from it, or could fund it further, or any other desirable outcome, is relatively low if you do nothing else. That’s where profile building comes in – a strategy of tilting the deck so to speak, to significantly increase the chance that when you do good things, they become known by the people or organizations who should know about it, used and put to good effect.
In other words, deliberate profile building is a pragmatic approach to increasing the likelihood your work will have impact. It can also help you raise attention to an issue you consider important, or facilitate support or fundraising for an activity you are leading. It also has lots of secondary benefits to your career – increasing job offers, opportunities such as speaking gigs, collaboration and many more activities that can be helpful in your career. Profile building in of itself is also a skill you can develop, that has onflow beneficial effects on your communicating and pitching skills, your ability to engage effectively with a wide variety of stakeholders and many other professional skills.
That’s the broad brush strokes of why – but there are also a few reasons why not, or why a cautious approach to profile building should be taken. I’m going to cover four key considerations here.
The first is simply that if you don’t enjoy, at least to some extent, the act of profile building, you’re unlikely to be able to keep it up. Doing profile building purely as a means to an end is possibly but unlikely to be a viable ongoing activity. People can enjoy profile building for a variety of reasons – it can be fun to interact with lots of people, to develop your social media skills or to continually think about how to pitch what you do to a very diverse range of audiences.
The enjoyment issue is linked to the second key concept which is becoming proficient at it. All types of profile building – whether it’s giving a public talk or doing social media engagement, can initially involve a steep learning curve. It might take you many hours the first time to prepare a short 10 minute presentation, or to prepare a simple short social media post. The key here is that your skills rapidly improve and you become proficient at these activities, so that you can do them with almost no preparation. Without becoming proficient, profile building may not be an enjoyable or worthwhile return of your time investment given all the other things you could be doing.
The third concept involves the not-so-nice aspect of being higher profile in the real-world – things like abuse, unwanted attention, racism, misogyny, and other completely unjustified forms of feedback or interaction. For many this is a rare experience, but for some it can be truly horrific – and unfortunately, the likelihood of experiencing such things is not the same for everyone. There are some things and best practice you can do to mitigate the effect of this, but only to some extent. Hence profile building, or how you go about profile building, should take into consideration your general status and level of resilience to such issues.
The fourth concept is simply that profile building is an activity that, even when things are going well, can be quite time consuming and draining. The higher profile you are, the more attention is given to what you say or write. It takes an incredible amount of concentration to minimize the chances that you misspeak, and even with that attention, you will still occasionally make legitimate mistakes. Dealing with the fall out from these events can be exhausting and needs to be factored into your overall plan. Even civil, rational interaction – for example through a social media discussion about an emotive topic – can be exhausting because you will need to devote your best attention to ensuring you adequately represent your perspective.
The “why not” reasons are important to consider, but in many cases are not a hard reason not to do profile building, but may moderate how you go about profile building. Before we get into the “how”, there are some broad issues you should consider.
For some people, in profile building, their professional and personal identities merge to the extent that they are indistinguishable from each other. When they are talking in public, meeting for a discussion, or posting on social media, there’s just the one identity – their merged one. This is particularly the case with individuals who are really passionate about a cause and pursue their cause through their personal lives and profession – their job “isn’t just a job”, so to speak. Others choose to completely quarantine their personal and professional identities, with minimal to no overlap between them. Then there’s the spectrum inbetween. As with all things, there’s no one correct answer – the best choice for you will depend on your circumstances and what you want to get out of profile building. What is important is that you give this some considered thought before you get too deep into it!
Another key issue to decide in your pursuit of profile building is your appetite for pushing the boundaries on things like self-promotion. For those who are new to professional social media for example, they can cringe at what is perceived as completely unabashed self-promotion on these platforms. If your strategy involves giving more talks and presentations in public, another facet of this would be whether you feel comfortable politely flagging with organisers of an event that you’d be happy to give a talk if a gap opens up in their program. If done politely and confidently, it can be a great way to bootstrap your speaking career. I’ve heard people deride this as being “desperate” – I can’t help but be skeptical that in many cases the people saying this have come from privileged, fortunate circumstances where profile building has come naturally almost as an afterthought.
Profile building is also an activity where you need to commit in order to get a reasonably accurate idea of its value for you. If you do a few isolated social media posts or a couple of talks or meetings – you’re unlikely to be able to get a good feel for the onflow benefits. You need to make a resolution to commit to a sustained effort over some extended period of time.
You will also need to make some attempt to measure the impact it has. This is hard to do in a purely quantitative manner – but take note of opportunities that come your way, and always feel free to ask people approaching you what made them approach you in the first place. At the very least you’ll get a qualitative feel for the amount of good stuff happening that can be attributed to your profile building activities.
The main mechanistic choice concerning profile building is the modalities by which you’ll engage in profile building – and the good news here is that there are many options. I’m not going to go into any specific detail here but will outline some of the broad choices you face.
Before you get too committed to a particular strategy, bear in mind that “nothing endures but change” – platforms will continue to come and go.
Social media is an obvious option for profile building – with a number of platforms available. Each platform will typically have a certain communication mechanism. Some – short text-based posts, often with images, videos or web links attached. Some are purely image or video-based, and in the latter case may further differentiate with a focus on short or long form videos. Each platform has a level of perceived suitability for talking about professional versus personal activities – don’t be the person posting only professional content on a purely personal platform, or vice versa!
Engagement with people and organizations is another profile building pillar. This could be giving a talk, running a workshop, or meeting for a chat over coffee. Professional events – seminars, panels, roundtables, consultations – are another activity in this vein. Profile building doesn’t have to have you up on stage at the front of the room all the time – you can also build profile simply by attending some of these events and interacting with those on stage through questions, and with the others present.
Coming back to the key concepts around successful profile building: whether you enjoy it or not will come down to you, but you can remove one possible reason why you wouldn’t enjoy it by becoming proficient at it.
Profile building, like many other activities, can be a highly collaborative process – it doesn’t have to be you leading the charge for everything. You can join other people’s profile building initiatives – joining someone else’s event as an organizer or speaker is a classic example of this. Promoting a cause on social media doesn’t just have to be you – co-opt others who feel similarly. If you make your profile building strategy entirely dependent on you, you are setting yourself up to fail.
Profile building is often facilitated by having high quality, easily tweakable collateral. Collateral could be presentation decks, high quality visuals, videos, diagrams or schematics, flyers and other media that can be easily integrated into many forms of profile building, with modifications made as needed. If you’re developing material from scratch for every profile building activity you’re not going to get very far.
Automation and assistive tools are another must have for profile building. Looking for events to speak at or attend – set up automatic alerts to let you know of events that pop up online with certain keyword combinations. Profile building going well but drowning in the amount of communications you need to do? Learn to use automation tools: these can store commonly used messages that you can one click paste in e-mails or social media posts. Automation can also schedule posts ahead of time. In the age of generative AI, there is a rapidly growing stable of tools that can assist you with writing compelling communication – whether verbal or written, text-based or visual.
In closing, a few things to keep in mind. Profile building is an enabler and force multiplier, but you still need a core career and value proposition. Profile building without anything of substance behind it is unlikely to be successful, although you do on occasion see people out and about who have made it work.
If you don’t like it, know that in most careers profile building is an entirely optional activity. Not doing it will not necessarily have any huge negative impact on your career, especially if you feel like there are other things you can more productively devote your time to. You can also stop doing it for a while if you need a break.
But if you do choose to do it, it’s like any other skillset – a steep learning curve, and feeling like you’re a bit overwhelmed at first. Stick with it, and you’ll get better quickly at much of it, and what was confronting will become familiar. You can find out what things you enjoy and become good at, and focus your strategy around those.