Generation Brand: Controlling Your Life-Brand for Likes, Loves and Career Advancement

By Irina Soriano

Right this minute, you are the proud owner of a library full of content. And congratulations, it’s all about you! Cute, rambunctious, smart, or downright unflattering photos, videos, phrases, behaviors, what and who you like and love, where you’ve been, and what elicits your frown or thumbs down. You and your reactors have been building your life-brand since the birth of your life online. With trolls, cancel culture, reputational damage, and career destruction tainting our new connected reality, isn’t it time you take control of it?

Generation Brand is a modern playbook for cultivating your life-brand seamlessly through every life stage, leading to your early career and career advancement, as it gains power and strength with the rapid accumulation of live-out-loud content. Besides the different scenarios of life-brand, author Irina Soriano explains how it enables every human with social media access to impact positive change in their life and our society over the course of a lifetime. Also, start your exciting life-brand journey in real-time with an original Life-Brand Launch Kit designed by the author. It’s your life(-brand)! Love it forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736534304

Book preview

Introduction

Your Life-Brand

There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.

—Edward Tufte, American Statistician and Professor, Yale University

Iwonder how the last five minutes went and how you feel right now. When I did this thinking exercise for the first time, I did some rough math. I had my first Facebook account at the age of 23; that means 13+ years of comments, posts, and likes. I do all three of these things probably 10 times a day, that’s over 3,650 contributions per year and almost 47,500 social media interactions over the last 13 years—only via my Facebook account, and which does not include what others posted about me.

This is a hell lot of content I surely do not remember. No matter how many years you spent accumulating posts, likes, pictures, and videos, how could you possibly know everything that is out there about you? Do you remember what pictures or video others took of you when you had a couple of drinks too many? It’s out there regardless of your recollection. If not on someone’s phone, your precarious image is buried under some old documents in a school friend’s drawer or packed in someone’s memory box in their closet. Maybe that person is not your friend anymore or holds a grudge against you these days. It could be a disaster waiting to happen.

If you own a phone, I am sure it is near you right now. You use it so much that you’ve been guilty of looking for it while you’re holding it! RescueTime tells us that the average adult swipes, clicks, types, and makes calls over the course of 3 hours and 15 minutes each day (the top 20% even spend 4.5 hours on their phones). In other words, 50 days per year full of opportunity to make a mistake and post or comment something you might regret later in life. Maybe it will cost you your education or your job. Maybe it will cost you your family. Or if you are lucky, it won’t cost you anything but data charges, and you will be just fine.

Milwaukee Brewers baseball pitcher Josh Hader had to learn the hard way that every word counts, when several tweets from his account from 2011 surfaced seven years later with one saying: I hate gay people. Hader was 17 and 18 years old when he tweeted this and other statements of that same nature. The twisted tweeting did not end his career yet damaged his reputation.

Justine Sacco, on the other hand, did lose her job over one single tweet. In 2013, the then 30-year-old public relations executive boarded an eleven-hour flight from London to South Africa posting on Twitter just before taking off: Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white! While she was in the air, a viral Twitter storm ensued, surprising her with a globally trending hashtag stating #HasJustineLandedYet and a damaged reputation. She lost her job the following day. Her name—and a dark cloud—surface on Twitter even now.

Following stories like Sacco’s and Hader’s, we often hear that posting did not happen with intention and it was not meant to come off a certain way. Speaking of intention, ask yourself the following:

• Have you ever posted without intention?

• Have you ever posted out of emotion?

• Have you ever posted drunk?

If the answer is yes or maybe to any of those questions, I would go back to the beginning of this book and turn the five minutes into a couple of hours browsing through all your social media accounts to gain an understanding of just how unintentional your lifetime content library might be.

You need only look to a slew of movies released that reflect our digital culture: Share revolves around a teenage girl navigating the fallout after discovering a disturbing cell phone video. The Social Dilemma is about tech experts sounding the alarm on the dangerous human impact of social networking and how we have become the product. In Spree, desperate for an online following, a rideshare driver figures out a deadly plan to go viral and he will stop at nothing to get his five minutes of fame. (This one particularly freaks me out considering how often I rideshare in New York City!) And if these aren’t all ominous enough, Host centers on six friends who accidentally invite the attention of a demonic presence during an online séance and begin noticing strange occurrences in their homes.

Generation Brand is not a movie. It is a playbook for taking control of what I have coined your life-brand, so you can arrive, advance, and thrive in the professional corridors of your career and livelihood instead of potentially tarnishing your education and career, because nobody prepared you for what could come after opening the social media flood gates through your first Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Twitter account.

life-brand

[/lIEf/ /brAnd/]

noun

an individual’s digital fingerprint shaped by the collection of publicly accessible content shared by or featuring the individual such as photos, videos, audio recordings, social media posts, and written statements or comments.

Life-brand literally has a life of its own if not controlled by us—it gains power and strength over a lifetime the more content you accumulate in the cloud (or on paper, if you grew up with Kodak cameras like me). We all possess one life-brand. It might be strong, or it might be weak, but our individual life-brand exists. Generation Brand will teach you how to control your life-brand and understand what shape life-brand can take over different stages.

Screen time is no longer a casual activity. A click, a post—in one breath—can stain, even sustain, your reputation just like that. However, if you frame your life as your life-brand, which I will show you how to do, you will indeed, be able to use social media as the tool it was originally designed for, instantly recognize when it could harm you and thwart the danger. I certainly don’t mean harm in the form of a demonic presence like the movie Host! Still, we’ll look at a few striking cases of tarnished reputations.

In my efforts, I focus on two gigantic dilemmas, and one will feed the other: Uncontrolled social media usage and the lack of gender parity in the workplace. At first blush, these dilemmas do not seem to be related, but as you come on the life-brand journey with me, you will learn that both of those huge challenges actually have one thing in common: They are the solution to one another.

Glimpse into a Life-Brand

I grew up in a small town in Germany, alongside a sister six years older. I know it’s rare to say these days, but I had a drama-free, happy family life in an upper-middleclass upbringing. I had loving parents that instilled early confidence and self-belief in me from a young