Personal Branding

Are you one of those people who likes to get value for money?

I am. So after paying a company for a photoshoot, I was determined to get my monies worth so used the resulting pictures for everything including my LinkedIn picture.

Now, you have probably come across the 'memories' feature on Facebook, which likes to give me a yearly reminder every April of how long it has been since I had the aforementioned photoshoot. Each year I have felt an increasing urge to update this picture, a thought encouraged by exclamations of 'You don't look like your LinkedIn picture' from new colleagues or people I have interviewed with. So when it let me know it had now been five whole years I decided it was time to act...

The trouble with having had experts do my hair and make-up, tell me how to pose and then painstakingly (if lightly) edit the finished images seven years ago is that it can seem like an impossible task to match at home. And so another two years passed with the growing dishonesty of my profile picture gnawing at me until the seven-year memory appeared on my Facebook wall and I decided enough was enough, I had got my value for money and people deserved to know what I really look like.

So I grabbed a few of my favourite shirts and utilising the different coloured walls in my house and the photo burst on my phone took over 300 pictures. This is not something I ever do, super edited selfies are alien territory for me, I usually just take a single photo and post that one. So after deleting the obviously faulty (blurry, blinking etc) I ran the remainder through a photo editing program for a basic lighting fix. To my surprise, this simple step transformed my selfies into professional-looking pictures worthy of a photoshoot!

Now I had narrowed it down to five but I needed an unbiased opinion on which I should use. So I turned to photofeeler, a website which gathers strangers opinions on your Business, Social or Dating profile pictures. I had used them before to test my previous picture but didn't run any others to compare it with.

So I added the picture I liked as I believed the contrast between the blue wall and my yellow hair demonstrated my creativity well. I was certain this would be the winner. The voters did not agree.

It seems when you have yellow hair and a saturated colour background, people just think your contrast is off-kilter. So next I went for one taken in a pale lilac room that looks white in photographs.

This performed much better but there were comments about my 'pose'. As I had an image I liked from the same room I uploaded this next along with the remaining two options both taken in different rooms.

Now before I had taken the photos I was convinced that this blue printed shirt and orange wall combination was going to provide the best profile picture, I liked it a lot less after seeing the orange wall reflecting off my face but wanted to see how it scored regardless. Similarly, I had not liked the photos taken in the green room at all and nearly deleted all of them so was surprised that this picture achieved the second-best scores.

And finally the winner. The comments have hinted that I should wear a different outfit or the picture should be less bright (a misunderstanding about my hair again I think) but I think it strikes a great compromise in showing who I am as a professional, and it is so much better than the old one.

The moral of the story is, don't be afraid of being more authentic on LinkedIn.