Visibility Season
Personal branding matters in Web3
You never know who is watching you. With nearly a decade in the Web3 industry, I’ve learned a lot, made mistakes, seen a lot, and have been blessed with opportunities. I want to share with you one of those opportunities and a lesson in personal branding. People often forget that this is an industry, and we need to be mindful of not only the distribution of software, hardware, tools, products, and the like, but also the career path or personal development of your own voice as a brand or thought leader.
I am considered a KOL (key opinion leader) in the narrative of Bitcoin / Bitcoin L2s on X, which is a short-form content platform, and a Top Voice on LinkedIn for long-form content. While I can speak well on camera and do video content, I prefer words.
Perhaps it’s the spoken word poet in me, but words work for me. In an era where attention drives everything and people are acting like a “Pick Me” most of the time, meaning they are trying to find non-cheesy / sales-y ways of confiscating your attention for a few seconds, words have always been a passion point for me. This is why I love writing books, because videos connected to hosting services can be taken down, but words can be passed down from generation to generation. But I digress.
If you are on Twitter, now known as X, you are aware of Mario Nawfal in some capacity. Mario runs the biggest Spaces on the planet and is connected to people like Elon Musk, prime ministers, etc. During the pandemic, he provided a space for high-level, raw conversation to happen from people who were actively in the field, and it exploded. One of Mario’s interests is in Web3 outputs such as Bitcoin, NFTs, DAOs, altcoins like Ethereum, DeFi, and the like. I was on Twitter like I am literally every day, and I got a direct message from Mario Nawfal’s account. I thought it was a scam.
After doing research, I discovered that this was indeed real; he actually followed me, and his team wanted to connect. Since April, I have been doing Bitcoin-related spaces with Mario and his team live on Twitter, where at least 50K live audience members on Twitter listen in to me and other KOLs in the Web3 space. This happened organically, and it’s been a personal joy of mine to be able to add value to Mario Nawfal’s shows. As of last month, things took a turn that changed things for me on Twitter: Video.
Twitter is optimizing for video streaming and will have a TV app where all Twitter video content will be able to be streamed, and for a media entity such as the one that Mario Nawfal is building out that already does 2 billion impressions a month, it seems right as rain to do audio spaces AND video spaces. This resulted in me speaking on a weekly basis during video streams from Mario Nawfal’s show, and each video stream averages 100K live viewers. I am asked to speak in multiple video streams per week, meaning my personal brand is growing as I’m in front of nearly 1M people per week.
It’s wild. I’ve taken a lot of losses, but I put my trust in God and kept building!
The lesson here is to be diligent, strive for excellence, stay consistent, and when God blesses you with opportunity, I pray that the opportunity finds you working!
It’s also worth noting that you have to plant your flag on the social platform that makes the most sense. I do TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Rumble out of obligation, but without a team to film, edit, and distribute consistently, video is a grind. Platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn have mass appeal, which worked for me because I write on LinkedIn weekly and Twitter daily. If you’re interested in being a KOL in your industry, make sure you add value or reinforce a narrative that adds to the global conversation.
You never know. You may be one DM away from going from a few hundred to millions.
— Christopher Perceptions
P.S. Sorry Elon. I’ve called it Twitter for like 11 years. Give me some time. I’ll call it X soon enough.