Overcoming personal branding’s biggest challenges: 148 ideas and insights to take control of how people think about you

Ryan DiLazio was a rock star at his job. On paper. It was 2022, and DiLazio was a manager of social marketing and strategy at a global advertising agency, where he was working with such brands as Sour Patch Kids, Chicken in a Biskit, and Nutter Butter, all subsidiaries of the food giant Mondelēz International. Technically, DiLazio’s role only encompassed ideating social media concepts and scheduling them, but he was regularly taking on more creative work, too—including designing Instagram posts and recording TikToks. Soon, DiLazio’s creative work was taking off: His wacky, deep-fried TikTok strategy for Nutter Butter was regularly generating millions of views, while an activation based on the hit show The Summer I Turned Pretty was garnering major praise from higher-ups. “The president of Mondelēz is on an email thread going, ‘This is the best work I have ever seen from our brands in years,’” DiLazio recalls. Behind the scenes, though, DiLazio received a different message. “I got put on a PIP,” he says, using the HR acronym for “performance improvement plan,” the first step on the road to potentially being fired. For DiLazio, who’s built a personal brand around identifying and pla…

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