Hi Reader, welcome back to Brand Credential, a platform where I share insights on personal branding and marketing from my experience as a 10-year marketing industry professional.

This week’s edition will focus on building your personal brand as an employee, AI’s continued impact on marketing and the creator economy, and sharing my free personal branding book with you.

More content about AI—big surprise, I know.

Weekly Personal Branding Tip: Be Transparent With Your Employer

If you are concerned about your side hustles impacting your job performance, being too distracting, or upsetting your boss, consider being transparent about it with your employer.

Being upfront about the fact that you are going to be working on building a personal brand can help you to unlock the confidence and support you will need to do so.

• Be transparent about your personal brand projects.
• Talk to your boss about your personal brand goals and let them know how important it is to you.
• That way they won't be surprised when they see you becoming more active on platforms like social media.

Being transparent with your employer about your personal branding goals can prevent misunderstandings. It can also create synergy between your job and personal brand as they begin to benefit each other.

For example, when I wrote my first book, I gave my employer a heads-up, allowed them to review my final draft, and thanked them for being so cool about it once it was published. This set expectations with them ahead of time and turned a situation that might have been a surprise into one where I received great support.

Being upfront about the fact that you are building your brand is a good way to set expectations and make sure you feel comfortable as you start creating more content online alongside your job.

Read more about building your personal brand in a way that creates a win for you, and a win for your employer: “Benefits of Personal Branding for Employees”

Insight From the Head of Marketing: What I’m Building This Week

The latest news from my desk is that I (finally 😮‍💨) published my second book, “The Personal Brand Blueprint: A No-Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding in the Age of the Creator.”

The link above is a link to the free version I am sharing with my network to help you grow your personal brands. My main goals with this book are to continue growing my own personal brand and helping as many people as I can with their own.

Making money on this is secondary. If you’d like to purchase one, you are more than welcome to grab a print or Kindle copy on Amazon. No pressure though. I’ll be happy if you check out the free one!

This Week in Marketing: OpenAI’s Sora Makes Everyone a Videographer

AI tools were already changing the calculus on marketing skills, helping designers become copywriters, copywriters become designers, and everyone add video content creation to their capabilities.

That took a step further this week with OpenAI announcing Sora, its new text-to-video product.

Sora promises to enable people to create high quality video assets with text prompts similar to the way we use ChatGPT. Instead of saying “write me a blog post on this topic in this style,” we can ask Sora to create a video with a prompt like “The camera directly faces colorful buildings in Burano Italy. An adorable dalmatian looks through a window on a building on the ground floor…”

Keep in mind, there are already text-to-video solutions on the market like HeyGen, Runway, Lumen5, and invideo. How Sora compares to these existing solutions will be interesting to see as OpenAI releases it to the market this year.

OpenAI is currently running a beta of Sora with select filmmakers and creative professionals to get feedback. Soon, we will all be able to give it a try, and see how it complements our content creation.

While we do not know where Sora fits into the AI software market yet, one thing is clear: AI-powered video content creation tools are just getting started, and they are set to change the way we all create content and do marketing.

More Ways I Can Help

That’s it for this week! As always, thank you so much for reading.

If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:

• Read more on my website, Brand Credential​
• Check out my latest Medium articles​
• Read my free book, “The Personal Brand Blueprint: A No-Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding in the Age of the Creator”