Personal brand insights from an award-winning marketer who spent a decade leading Brand at Google and Founder of Glittersphere, a community helping people build visibility that opens doors. Real stories, honest truths, practical advice for people building something meaningful - including how to use AI to build your personal brand more effectively. If you're ready to stop being the best-kept secret and start being unmissable to the right people, you're in the right place. 💎Join 2000 readers getting clarity, twice a week.
Your personal brand is too polished. (That's not a compliment.)
|
Hello Sparkler, Right. Quick question. Have you ever spent ages crafting the "perfect" post, agonised over every word, made sure it was polished and professional and on-brand... and then watched it disappear into the void while some random person's messy, off-the-cuff thing goes viral? Yeah. Me too. For about thirty years. I've spent a hundred conversations telling other people how to build a personal brand. Be consistent. Be professional. Find your niche. Post on a schedule. And I did all of that. I was good at all of that. I spent a decade at Google being professionally excellent at all of that. Then I watched a bloke in a hoodie build one of the most magnetic personal brands on the planet by doing the exact opposite. And it broke something in my brain. In the best way. Fred Again. If you don't know him, he's an incredible artist and DJ (I'm genuinely envious of everyone who got to those recent Ally Pally shows). But he's also, without really trying, produced the most useful blueprint I've seen for building a personal brand. No polished content strategy. No carefully curated grid. He livestreams himself making music with all the mistakes left in. He tells fans to put their phones away. His fans' actual faces become his album artwork. And millions of people love him for it. Because he figured out something the rest of us are still catching up on: in a world where AI makes polish free, the new premium is being unmistakably, unapologetically human. Not "authentic" in the way LinkedIn coaches tell you to be authentic. Actually, properly, couldn't-be-anyone-else human. I pulled the whole thing apart in this week's YouTube video - Behind The Unmissable Brand - and honestly, I haven't been this excited about a piece of content in ages. ​Watch the full breakdown on YouTube​ 15 minutes. My VIP Club framework. Five things you can steal for your own personal brand, whether you're just getting started or you've been at this for years and feel like nothing's cutting through. And if you want the proper nerdy brand strategy essay (why it works, the psychology behind it, what it means for all of us trying to stand out), that's on my Substack. I'm committing to sharing more at 80% from now on. Definitely a work in progress. But being more Fred about it. Nishma x Powered by glitter. Opinions all mine. ​Watch it here​ Please subscribe and follow along ... |
​All That Glitters.
Personal brand insights from an award-winning marketer who spent a decade leading Brand at Google and Founder of Glittersphere, a community helping people build visibility that opens doors. Real stories, honest truths, practical advice for people building something meaningful - including how to use AI to build your personal brand more effectively. If you're ready to stop being the best-kept secret and start being unmissable to the right people, you're in the right place. 💎Join 2000 readers getting clarity, twice a week.
Hello Sparkler, You're doing the work. You're showing up. You're putting things out there. You're building something you believe in. And some days it feels like absolutely nobody is watching. I know that feeling. Intimately. So when I found out that Olivia Dean performed to four people in 2023, and then won a Grammy in 2026, I needed to understand how. Not the luck. Not the breaks. The actual mechanics of how someone goes from an empty room to the most commercially coveted artist in Britain...
Hello Sparkler, Ever waited to feel ready? Waited for someone to finally notice how brilliant you are? Built your entire sense of worth on what other people think of you? Yeah. Me too. So I did something slightly unhinged this week. I asked an AI to tell me the harsh truths that younger Nishma desperately needed to hear. Not the motivational poster version. The actual uncomfortable, slightly stinging, "oh god is that true about me?" version. And wow... it delivered. Some of it made me wince....
Dear Sparkler, Quick question. Have you ever bought a training course at 11pm on a Tuesday because you were feeling wobbly about whether you actually know what you're doing? Yeah. Me too. Thousands of pounds worth, actually. I wrote about it this week on Substack and it's probably the most honest thing I've put out there in a while. The confession of a woman who spent 30 years building brands for the biggest companies in the world, then walked away from Google and immediately forgot how to...