There’s a tweet I think about a lot.
A few months ago, a freelancer bragged on Twitter – now known as X (ugh…) – about how he was earning “high six figures” from his freelancing efforts. Within minutes, someone replied to his tweet asking a few questions, and through his responses, it became quite clear that he was talking out of his arse. It got so bad that the tweeter blocked the person who had shown him up, and even deleted his original tweet about it – which is one hell of an admission of guilt of a lie if I ever saw one, y’know?
In an age of literally saying anything you want and expecting people to simply believe it (I’m looking at you, I-earn-six-figures/buy-my-course crowd!), and motherfreakin’ AI, where someone can ask ChatGPT to write a blog post or a book for them, the most important trait in your personal branding and marketing efforts should be integrity.
…And yet I’ve seen examples* of people who have tweeted something that could be easily disproven – similar to the example above.
Why, though?! Why do this? Why bother to lie, just to make yourself look a little bit better / cooler / more successful, at the risk of losing your integrity and people considering you a freakin’ fraud? You risk losing people’s respect, if they know the truth and/or if you get found out. I for one have lost respect for people who are doing this type of thing – and I might not be the only one who feels that way.
And the worst part? Most of the examples I’ve seen were recent – just in the last few weeks/months. People’s bullsh*tometers are on high alert these days (no thanks to AI/ChatGPT, NFTs, etc. etc.) – so it should be the last thing you’re thinking of doing…
So what’s the solution? Easy… Don’t lie. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t mislead. Don’t deceive. I mean, all of this should be freakin’ obvious, and yet here I am having to blog about it.
Be you. Be an authentic you. Have integrity.
Because the alternative – while it could make you look better – may end up biting you in the arse.
And that’s it, I guess. That’s all I wanted to say on the matter. This isn’t an ‘ultimate guide to marketing with integrity’, because the solution is simple: don’t do stuff that lacks integrity.
* Note: I didn’t want to share actual examples – despite the example at the top of this post – just in case the people responsible for them see this (as they’re all people I know and follow me on Twitter/X), realise they’ve been subtweeted, and we get into arguments about it. And besides: I would be lacking in integrity if I did that… 😅 But I easily could’ve shared 3-4 examples from recent memory – and that’s 3-4 too many.
As an aside, I’m sorry for the looong quiet on the blog (the last post was published in January!) – I’ve been busy working on my epic fantasy novels (I’ve just finished the 1st draft of the 2nd one). However I do have a few ideas of Anti-Sell posts I want to publish, so hopefully I’ll be back with more posts soon.
