Shea Swinford

By Shea Swinford, Founder of The Personal Brand Studio Someone may meet you first through a referral. Then they look at your LinkedIn profile, visit your website, and open the speaker page a colleague sends them. Each place gives them part of the introduction before they meet you. What happens when those introductions disagree? Your photograph may suggest a formal, distant leader while your work is built on making people comfortable enough to have a direct conversation. Your website may...

By Shea Swinford, Founder of The Personal Brand Studio I could have built an Audit that gives your photograph a number. People understand numbers. A seven feels clear until you ask what the seven is measuring and what you are supposed to do with it. Is a warm, relaxed photograph a lower score because someone expects an executive to look more formal? Is a studio portrait marked down because there is no office behind it? Those judgments tell you more about the assumptions behind the score than...

By Shea Swinford, Founder of The Personal Brand Studio Have you ever looked through your photographs and kept returning to the one you love most? You like the way you look. Your friends like it. It deserves a place somewhere. That still leaves a question: Is it the image you want doing this job? A photo can be excellent and still be the wrong choice for a particular page, profile, or moment in your business. I see this when someone uses the same portrait for everything because it is the most...