The Ultimate Status Symbol: Your Perspective.
We have spent years curating how we dress, where we go and what we surround ourselves with. Perhaps it was inevitable that professional reputation would become part of the edit, as well.
There is something distinctly modern about the woman answering emails from an airport lounge, changing shoes in the back of an Uber (or should I say the Blacklane) before a meeting and knowing exactly where to order a martini in Mayfair, a coffee in Milan or take a client for dinner in Riyadh.
Her life moves rather seamlessly between the personal and professional. The blazer is both fashion and uniform. The hotel lobby is often the office. A business trip becomes a weekend away. The people met over dinner become collaborators six months later. And somewhere in between all of this sits a surprisingly important accessory to modern professional life:
LinkedIn.
Not particularly sexy just yet, perhaps. But neither was the laptop once. Remember that era?
LinkedIn has undergone a quiet image rehabilitation. What used to feel like a digital CV has become something closer to a professional business card, personal publication and global networking room rolled into one.
For ambitious women, founders and executives, that makes it increasingly difficult to ignore. We curate almost everything else, We understand intuitively that presentation matters. We choose what we wear to an important meeting differently from what we wear on Sunday morning. We care about the restaurant when entertaining a client. A fashion house considers its packaging. A hotel considers the scent in its lobby. A property developer considers the stone in its entrance hall. These details communicate before anybody says a word. Our professional presence does the same.
Before meeting someone in London, Hong Kong, New York or Riyadh, there is a good chance they have already looked you up. What they find creates an impression. Not necessarily consciously. But quickly.
What world does she belong to?
What does she know?
What is she interested in?
Who does she work with?
Does she have something interesting to say?
This is personal positioning in its most useful form. Not manufacturing an identity, yet making sure the digital version of you reflects the actual one.
LinkedIn is having its Instagram moment.
Instagram changed the way we thought about individuals and media. Suddenly a woman with impeccable taste in Copenhagen could build an international audience around her aesthetic. A chef could become a publisher. A designer could become a personality. A hotel could become a lifestyle.
LinkedIn is now experiencing its own, rather more grown-up version of this shift. The currency is different. Instead of outfits, restaurants and holidays, we exchange: ideas, expertise, introductions, businesses and points of view. The most interesting professional profiles today are not relentlessly corporate. They allow us to see something of the person behind the title.
A founder can talk about raising capital and architecture. A lawyer can discuss regulation and the restaurant she discovered during a conference in Madrid.
A developer can talk about investment, cities, hotels and why some buildings simply feel better than others. Our interests do not stop existing when we open LinkedIn and perhaps that is precisely why the platform has become more interesting.
Yes, it can be cringe! Of course it can.
There are still posts in which somebody spills a cappuccino and discovers five principles of leadership in B2B sales… There is oversharing. There is manufactured vulnerability. There are heroic stories about waking up at 5am. But this is a question of taste, not of platform. The solution is not necessarily to disappear. It is to do it better.
The strongest personal positioning has something in common with good style, it doesn’t look overly constructed. You notice the person, not the effort.
Visibility, but make it selective.
The luxury world has always understood that visibility and ubiquity are not the same thing. Being everywhere is rarely aspirational. Being known in the right places is. The same principle applies professionally.
You do not necessarily need 100,000 followers. You might need the right investor in Dubai to have encountered your name twice before you are introduced. The right journalist in London to understand what you specialise in. The right founder in Munich to remember an observation you made three months ago.
The right potential client to think, I’ve been following her for a while.
That is where LinkedIn stops being social media and starts becoming reputation infrastructure and reputation, particularly in industries built on trust, access and relationships, has commercial value.
Personal brand is really personal business development… This is the part I find most interesting. I have never seen marketing and business development as completely separate disciplines. A good reputation creates warmer introductions. Good positioning makes expertise easier to understand. Visibility creates familiarity and familiarity can quietly remove friction from the next commercial conversation.
Sometimes the person reading your posts will never like one. She may be sitting in a family office in Marina Bay in Singapore, a law firm in KAFD in Riyadh or a development company in Canary Wharf in London. You have absolutely no idea that she / he is there.
Your career has an aesthetic, too. Not aesthetic in the superficial sense.
Rather, there is a certain coherence to people whose professional identities feel particularly strong. Their expertise, interests, network, communication and ambitions seem to belong to the same world. This is what good positioning creates.
For some women that world may be technology and San Francisco. For another, fashion between Paris and Milan. For another, private capital in London and the Gulf.
There is no universal formula because there is no universal audience.
Culture matters. Geography matters. Industry matters. Economic background matters. The way you build credibility in London is not necessarily the way you build it in Abu Dhabi. What feels sophisticated to one audience can feel cold, excessive or completely irrelevant to another. That is why personal positioning requires considerably more sensitivity than simply “posting consistently”.
The best profiles feel like good magazines.
They have a world. There are recurring subjects. A recognisable voice. Certain references. Certain things that simply would not belong. And most importantly, there is an editor.
For a busy founder or executive, that does not mean outsourcing their personality. Quite the opposite. Their experience, taste, opinions and intellectual capital are the valuable part. The strategy simply gives them structure. Because nobody building a company, managing a team or flying to another market for three meetings should feel guilty about not spending Sunday afternoon planning LinkedIn posts. The thinking should remain hers. The machinery does not have to be.
Being known, without being overexposed
Perhaps this is the professional version of quiet luxury. Not disappearing. Not shouting either. Simply developing enough presence that the people who matter know who you are, what you do and what you stand for.
Your LinkedIn profile is hardly going to replace the importance of walking into a room well, having an interesting conversation or building genuine relationships. Nor should it. However today, the room often begins before we arrive.
So yes, keep the beautiful business cards. Wear the excellent jacket. Take the meeting over lunch rather than Zoom when you can.But perhaps give a little thought to the person someone meets before they meet you since the most useful thing in your professional wardrobe might no longer be hanging in it.
So, where does one begin? Not with a content calendar. And certainly not by deciding that from Monday onwards you must post three times a week.
Start instead the way you might approach a wardrobe, a home or even a particularly good dinner party: by deciding what belongs in your world.
1. Decide what you want to be known for
Choose 3 subjects that genuinely sit at the intersection of your work, your experience and your curiosity.
Maybe it’s venture capital, negotiating term sheets and the start-up ecosystem in Austin.
Or architecture, adaptive reuse and the changing face of Copenhagen.
It might as well be a wealth management, next-generation clients and doing business in Zurich.
Or even cybersecurity, boardroom risk and what keeps CTOs awake in Tel Aviv.
The point is not to reduce yourself to a niche. It is to create enough repetition that people begin to associate your name with something.
2. Edit the shop window
Before publishing anything, look at your profile as someone encountering you for the first time. Does the photograph still look like you? Does the headline say something more useful than your job title? Does the profile explain the world you operate in, the people you work with and the conversations you are interested in having?
Think of it less as a CV and more as the front page of a magazine. You should understand the proposition in a few seconds.
3. Start with what you already know
You do not need to become a “content creator”.
You already have material.
The conversation you had with a client last Tuesday.
Something you noticed at a conference.
A mistake you keep seeing in your industry.
A business lesson from opening a new market.
A restaurant in Vienna that somehow made you think about hospitality. A book, building, investment thesis or founder you cannot stop thinking about.
Your working life is already producing stories. LinkedIn simply gives them somewhere to live.
4. Think in columns, not posts
The easiest profiles to sustain tend to have recurring formats.
One observation from your industry.
One personal business story.
One opinion.
One thing you saw while travelling.
One idea you keep returning to.
It removes the existential Sunday-evening question of, God, what am I supposed to post tomorrow?You are not constantly inventing. You are editing.
5. Be visible where it matters
Posting is only part of it. Comment intelligently on people you genuinely find interesting. Follow journalists, investors, founders and operators in the markets you care about. Congratulate people. Make introductions. Send the occasional thoughtful message without immediately asking for anything.
Digital networking, when done properly, should feel remarkably similar to good networking offline. I can’t stress enough curiosity first, commercial intent later.
6. Do not confuse consistency with frequency
You do not need to narrate your life.Once a week with an actual point of view is considerably more valuable than five posts written because an algorithm told you to be visible.The objective is not to become omnipresent. It is to become recognisable and if your life currently contains children, a company, a board position, three flights a month, no flights at all, school runs, investor meetings or simply very little appetite for another platform demanding your attention, good. LinkedIn should fit around your life. Your life should not begin to fit around LinkedIn. That, perhaps, is the entire point.
Being known, without being overexposed
What if quiet luxury isn’t Ralph Lauren button-downs, polo shirts, or Loro Piana shoes anymore? What if it’s simply about developing enough presence that the people who matter know who you are, what you do, and what you stand for?
So curate your perspective with the same care you curate everything else. Say something worth remembering, build a world around your expertise and then go live an interesting enough life to have something worth talking about. After all, the ultimate status symbol might simply be having a perspective worth knowing.
Author: Contributing Editor Mumble Forum - Valentina Lazzari.
Founder of Wordly, a strategic marketing and communications consultancy that helps businesses prepare for global trade shows, expand internationally, and strengthen their cross-market positioning. With experience across Europe and international markets, she helps companies communicate clearly, build a strong presence, and successfully navigate new markets.
