Your AI Roadmap

CHAPTER 5Personal Brand: Get Credit for Your Work and Hone Your Brand

Let's start this chapter with the story of a branding expert, Aliza Licht. Brand savant and innovator, Aliza Licht's life is a mashup of Emily in Paris, Gossip Girl, and The Devil Wears Prada.¹ Rising the ranks in the fashion world, she has worked at some of the biggest brands in the world such as Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, Donna Karan, and DKNY.^2,3

One of the biggest inflection points for her career, though, was when social media and legacy brands collided. In 2009, she and her team created the Twitter (before it became X) handle “@DKNY PR GIRL.”⁴ The second season of Gossip Girl had just come out, and fashion brands did not yet have robust social media strategies. The team strategized that if they named the social media handle “Donna Karan,” people would assume that it was Donna's real words, while someone else on the team actually was authoring tweets and responding to comments. The workaround was to create a handle for a fake PR girl who tweeted on behalf of the brand. As the SVP of Global Communications, Aliza was tasked as the person who solely tweeted on the account. “It was like the wild wild West when we first started,”⁵ says Aliza about how brands wanted to leverage social media back in the early 2000s. In the next two years, the Twitter handle took off and garnered nearly 380,000 followers and 500,000 by 2015. With this new knowledge of how to grow huge followings on social media and create ...