Personal Brand Special Report: 207 insights and ideas to grow your brand and career

FastCompany: In the summer of 2021, Eric Pacifici started living a double life. By day, he was one of thousands of associates at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest corporate law firms in the world. Outside work hours, though, he was moonlighting on Twitter as @SMB_Attorney , an anonymous account where he shared the kind of legal insight behind real multimillion-to-billion-dollar merger and acquisition deals that one wouldn’t typically find outside a law firm’s deal room. There, he was one of one. At first, the secret account was just a hobby.

Within a matter of months, though, Pacifici’s inbox was flooded with the same kinds of requests: “I have a 2, 4, 6, 8, $10 million deal: Can you help me with it?” he recalls. Five years later, those same followers are the core clientele of SMB Law Group , Pacifici’s boutique M&A firm that’s doing hundreds of deals annually and has hit more than $1.9 billion in total deal flow since 2022. “Lawyers are risk averse by nature,” Pacifici says. “My big law mentor had an expression: ‘The nail that sticks out is going to get pounded in.’ Basically, wear your blue or white shirt, shut up, do your work.” Pacifici has found the opposite to be true.

He attributes his success almost entirely to the personal brand that he built on Twitter/X and, later, LinkedIn . His clients seek him out not only for his expertise, but also for his candor in a profession that valorizes secrecy. “People want authenticity,” he tells me. “They want to work with a real person.” In other words, they don’t just want a deal attorney; they want Eric Pacifici. Today, Pacifici’s story feels less like a moon shot aspiration and more like a template for where the workplace is headed.

Employees are increasingly rejecting the age-old mantra of “shut up and do your work,” and are instead deciding to wrest some power in the corporate workplace back into their own hands. You can see it in the Google search data. In just the last year or so, Google searches for the term “ personal brand ” spiked massively and have continued to trend upward. “A personal brand is the new currency to survive in the present-day job market,” says Dillon St. Bernard , Gen Z social media strategy expert and founder of the creative agency Team DSB .

Over the past five months, I’ve solicited input from 66 people to learn how and why they’re building their personal brands. My colleagues Shalene Gupta and Sage Swaby interacted with another 86 people. CEOs, artists, venture capitalists, consultants, entrepreneurs, chefs, doctors, and many more—these experts shared their stories, ideas, and insights for developing, growing, and running their personal brands. Nearly everyone agreed on one point: Opting out of the personal branding game is no longer an option . In fact, it may be the last, best way to stand out in a digital ecosystem overrun by AI content.

In this Fast Company special report, the first in a series, you’ll learn: How to identify your personal brand and manage it with intention Why personal branding is intertwined with social media—and how to find the platform where you can win The secrets of today’s three major personal branding strategies: the inside game, the trampoline, and the escape hatch What to do when your personal brand threatens the corporate one you work for What ‘The Brand Called You’ looks like today In 1997, when Fast Company published a cover story titled “ The Brand Called You ,” it canonized the concept of a “personal brand” for the first time.

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The article addresses the growing significance of personal branding in career development, which is highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals, though the concept itself is not entirely new.