August 30, 2016 | less than a minute read

Is your personal brand harming your business?

Passle

If the Ryan Lochte saga has taught us anything about personal branding - it's that with one fell swoop, your reputation can be destroyed.

Having recently joined Passle as a Sales Director, I quickly realised something - people are looking at me. The notifications from Twitter and profile views from LinkedIn were ramping up and to be honest I didn't really know what people were seeing. Cue minor panic.

When we meet a new person or are introduced to a new business, we inevitably scope them out; social media being the general go to. And it's probably not the two espresso martinis I had the night before that will entice people to find out more about my company... No wonder Speedo and Ralph Lauren made swift exits from the Lochte train and began clear up campaigns of their own.

So thanks Ryan, I've had a quick social media makeover and I feel a lot better for it!

On August 14, 2016, Lochte and fellow Olympian Jimmy Feigen claimed that they and their fellow U.S. swimmers Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger were robbed at gunpoint by people dressed as police. We later learned that the swimmers were not robbed; instead, they had a confrontation with a security guard because of vandalism they perpetrated on a gas station in Rio. We learned that Lochte’s story was fabricated (or, as he claims, “over-exaggerated”).