Your Authority Should Travel With You
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 describe a new area of expertise while the images still show the work you did several years ago. Your LinkedIn About section may sound like an experienced executive, but the photograph beside it was made for a very different role.
None of these pieces has to be terrible to create confusion. They may simply have been created at different times, for different purposes, without anyone looking at them together.
Your image sets an expectation
“An image can win the click and lose the meeting.”
That phrase can sound dramatic, so here is what I mean. A photograph can attract attention and still prepare someone to meet a version of you that does not quite exist. The goal is not to make a smaller or less polished image. The goal is to make an introduction that the real person and the real work can carry forward.
I think about this when I photograph someone, when we select images, and when The Personal Brand Studio works on the words and places those images live. A strong portrait, a clear LinkedIn description, and a website that shows the work can each answer a different part of the same question: Who is this person, and what can I expect from working with them?
Look for the gaps between touchpoints
Open your LinkedIn profile and your website side by side. Add the speaker kit or leadership page you send most often. Try to see them as someone who knows your name but has not met you.
What qualities come through in the photographs? What do the words say you do now? Is the same person recognizable across these places? If the images differ, do they show useful sides of you, or do they feel as though they belong to different stages of your career?
There is no rule that every photograph must match. A close profile portrait and an energetic stage image can work together. What matters is whether both help someone understand the person they will actually meet.
Notice what is missing
Sometimes the problem is an outdated image. Sometimes the photographs are current, but none show you doing the work you describe. Sometimes the images are strong and the website copy has not kept pace. You do not know which part needs attention until you look at the pieces together.
The Authority Image Audit™ starts that examination with your stated intention and your current image. When you provide your LinkedIn or website context, it can also consider the language surrounding the photograph. It gives you a place to begin deciding what to keep, what to adjust, and what to create next. https://authorityimageaudit.netlify.app
Your authority was earned through the work. Your digital presence should help people recognize it when they meet you there first.
Take the Authority Image Audit™: https://authorityimageaudit.netlify.app
