 Hi there, good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you are joining us from. My name is Abhijit Bahaduri and I work as a leadership coach and I also work in the area of personal branding, but today it's going to be the Guru on personal branding. So I have with me an amazing person and just to give you some of the credentials that if you look at the year 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 this person has had the most viewed marketing and advertising profile in India. That's a lot of views for a country which is 1.3 billion people most viewed and not only that, in LinkedIn he was the top voice in 2020. He's a person who writes regularly about media ads. He's got a huge fan club of people who follow him about that and he's got one weird habit. Yeah, that's the only word I'm going to use. He's got one weird habit, which of course, I don't know how to even describe it and how does one find that kind of stuff. Let me not spoil the surprise because I think weird things are best spoken by the person himself and so without any further ado, I'm going to sort of invite you to just grab a cup of coffee or your favorite beverage and listen to this particular episode of Dreamers and Unicorns featuring Karthik Srinivasan. Karthik, thank you so much for joining in. I kind of thought that I don't know whether I should start with the weird habit or the rest of it, but let's get started and so much to talk to you about. Thank you for joining. So, you know, when I think about personal branding, there's a whole lot of questions we have and you've got an incredible book. So guys, if you've not read this book, this is one absolute great recommendation I have for you. You'll love it. It's called Be Social, Building the Brand New Online and of course, that's going to be something that we'll get to talk to in greater detail. But in the meanwhile, you know, Karthik, this is a live audience so, you know, people will be asking you questions. So if you are there listening in and we can also see that some of the people have already started saying I can see some of the people, you know, there you go. Nishit Chauhan says your wishes come true and of course you have Usha Raghunath who says, two amazing people I followed together. So thank you very much and everybody else do keep your questions coming in. I want to first start with Karthik. A lot of people have asked me when I asked people on Twitter, what is it that I should ask Karthik and there is whole KFC Karthik fan club, you know, which what are the things people were intrigued? How on earth you managed to read and consume so much of content? I mean, how many hours a day and you will spend consuming content and talk to me about that? Content consumption is ongoing, actually. I mean, it's almost like all through the day in smaller pieces. But the point is more about the content pipelines that you build for yourself. Because we don't have pipelines, we start with the Google search, what do I read today and the interest that I have, that becomes an endless rabbit hole, then you tend to waste a lot of time. So the first thing that you need to do, which is something that I actively recommend in my personal branding workshops also is build content pipelines. It's I mean, it's actually very simple. Basically, for instance, if you're interested in sports, if you buy two daily newspapers, what would you do? You would go to the last two pages, which is usually sports pages in those new papers. So you know exactly where the sports news is, you buy the paper instead of looking at the first eight or 10 pages, you would go directly to the last page and start reading the page. But online, what happens is that there are tools that are there are so many tools, obviously, which allow you to collate from various sources on specific areas of your interest. So that they just land up. For instance, I use something called feedly, which is an RSS reader, where whichever website I read more often, and it's actually updated very, very often, I just add the RSS feed on feedly. And then whenever I need to get something to read, and when I have the time to read, even if it's just five minutes, I quickly go to feedly and see what are the feeds saying for the various websites that I track for, basically, it's like buying 20 newspapers and going to the sports page directly because you're interested in sports. Similarly, if you're interested in branding and marketing, if you look at the top newspapers, every one of them has a page for branding and marketing. For instance, financial Express is actually particularly my favorite that they have something called brand wagon, which is there. Hindu business line has a page on branding and marketing. Economic Times has brand equity, of course, business standard has one. So there are so many versions at land. If you're just on top of these four or five newspapers, you have actually covered much of Indian branding and advertising. And then there are the global ones, of course, which you need to pull up as a feed into feedly, which is F-E-E-D-L-Y dot com feedly dot com. So that's it. And it's completely free basically. So the point is to build content pipelines. That's the most important thing. That's brilliant. And you know, so when you look at content pipeline, that's the way you consume, let's say stuff about advertising. And how do you then make sense of, you know, this huge barrage, because a lot of us struggle with this, that, you know, there's, you know, conferences, podcasts, YouTube, social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, books, magazines, how do you then pause and make space to connect the dots and say, okay, these are two or three opposing ideas. Let's think about it. How do you do that? So there is a concept called triage. I'm sure you know that I mean, it's done in hospitals and during the work time, triage means, for instance, if there is a war, I mean, like the fact is that there is a war going on right now in another part of the world. But if there is a war, this was during the times of Napoleon, where there is a war and there are a lot of injured soldiers on the ground. The team which is handling the medical facilities does a triage, they get all the injured soldiers into one place and look at saying those soldiers who will die, no matter what we can do is number one. Those soldiers can be saved because of our intervention now is number two, those soldiers who can wait for our intervention because they are quite okay is number three. Similarly, you do a triage of what you read then and there, you look at saying things that make you think and you want to do something about it later. That's number one things that is interesting, but you can't form an opinion about them right now. That's number two and things that you want to completely ignore because I am indifferent to what I read basically, it didn't make a effort at all, I completely ignored. So I actually make notes like for the first 10, I mean, first and second part on Google Keep and keep it ready. So whenever I want to think about something, I go there and say, Okay, in the first triage that I did, what do I need to think more about? Do I need to research more about kind of stuff? So you make notes and then it actually comes back when you are able to add the dots later. That's incredible. So you know, there are two things that we've sort of learned from you so far, you know, one was about how do you build a content pipeline? So you know, using feedly.com. And that is incredible. And so of course, you know, so people kind of appreciate what you've just said. And then there is of course the other thing that you talked about a triage. So you prioritize priority ABC, that this is what I want to think about. And I'm going to sort of, you know, this priority A, and you write it down such a way that you can go back to it later. Is that what it is? Absolutely, absolutely, which sort of leads me to this whole question that how did you, you know, at any point of time when you started, you know, what's your background in what did you study? And what did you, how did you train yourself to be the kind of person that you are? Study much of nothing big deal just become an MBA, which is a standard stuff, no big deal at all. I mean, that's what most people do in industry these days. So that's very simple. But I would probably credit my first couple of jobs to this interest in communication, because I started in corporate communications, which not many people do, it's quite ironic actually. And then I moved into PR agencies, and then I moved into digital agencies, and then came back to corporate communications with Flipkart and then social media with Ogilvy. So I think that PR as a starting point was a very, very big deal because as a very young PR professional, I was forced to go through about 25, 30 newspapers every single morning for my clients, which is called tracking in PR world actually. That's where I noticed that these newspapers, which people don't even treat properly these days, I mean, I mean, we hardly buy newspapers and we just skim through newspapers. They are a treasure trove of information every single day day after day. There are so many talented, well meaning people who are involved in putting together one newspaper, which has news on about 20, 30 different industry areas every single day. And I just figured that if I read the top 10, top 20 newspapers, not read, just skim through them, there is so much to connect the dots later. All I need to do is just make notes that new campaign, new brand type or or or a new brand ambassador, that's about just make notes. And then I just skim, make notes, and it just falls into place later when I'm thinking about something else. I remember seeing that connected dots, there is so much to think about basically, start with newspapers seriously, don't treat them poorly, they are phenomenal. So, you know, Kunal Gupta has a question that can you please show us a some kind of a you can talk about it even if you can't show us a snapshot of your digital workspace, like Google Keep, etc. Yeah, so what does that look like? I mean, how do you categorize even Google Keep? Is there a way that I can show? I mean, I can show for instance, a screenshot or somewhere? Not no, okay, so maybe, you know, later on, if you put a screenshot in the comment section, it'd be great. So actually, it's not a big deal at all. You just need to go to keep.google.com. It just helps you make small notes, which is like the sticky notes, that's about it. It's like instead of doing a physical sticky note, I just do it online. I just put a one line note and a link saying think more about this. So I have just color coding, think more is one color, write more is another color, and then later is a probably another color. That's about it very simple. So Kunal says just show the phone on camera, you know, if you show that and that just so you see, this is the magic of crowdsourcing, but always fine. So I use Google Keep a lot as well. And I have, you know, things like what I want, you know, for triggers for what I don't think it's very clear because of the light, but yeah, we'll put a screenshot or something. And then we can sort of look at that sometime. I want to come to the weird habit that I talked about, you know, the weird habit is, you know, I don't know how many of my listeners actually know that, you know, Karthik has his website, which I'm going to sort of really look at, you know, talk about that website as well, where you track all the plagiarized music and the original source. How did that even come about? You know, how did that come about? What a weird hobby? But I know it is extremely weird. But it came about from my dad, actually, because my dad grew up in Calcutta. And he did his college and schooling in Calcutta. And he used to tune into the kind of radios that were available back in his time. I mean, he just needs to tune into radios. And he used to tune into radios from places like Spain and then Greece and then Italy and everywhere. And it used to be available just radio waves anyway, used to be available. And then when he heard some of the songs, he thought he had heard Hindi songs based on the same tune. And then he started making notes, basically. And then he started making notes saying this Hindi song might be inspired by this Italian song by this Greek song, this Spanish song and everything that he made a small list and gave it to me much later in life. And said, this may have interest to you kind of I just picked it up and made a digital home for it. That's it. So is there an example that he can play for us? Yeah, of course, my one of my favorite, favorite test inspiration, which I feel very bad to even share this with people so that I mean, the fact is it will break many hearts in case you know the original because it's such a loved original in India. Let me just play the I mean the Hindi version first and then the original. That's the Hindi song. Now let me play the original. language is that it's Polish. It's Polish. And it's supposed to be a wedding song in Poland, very popular wedding song in Poland. Gosh, that's quite incredible that, you know, when you how do you differentiate between plagiarism and inspiration? You know, what I noticed you use the word inspiration? Yeah, so I mean, I mean, full disclosure, I am not trained in any form of music at all, completely no I mean, I'm actually musically blind as they say, I mean, I can sing reasonably well. But for some reason, I'm able to connect the tune with this and that. And if I'm able to get the actual tune, similarly, I actually call it plagiarism. Coincidence is different because you would actually notice that the base tune is actually different. But there are only specific elements that seem to be mixing. So which could actually be an Indian Raga also, which is why I gently avoid talking about things that sound similar based on Raga, because if it's the same Raga that's used by two composers, you can call it plagiarism because the source same. But of course, it's a good question. What is coincidence? What is plagiarism is very, very thin line. Unless a composer himself says, Yes, I copied it. I was inspired by it. You can't do anything at all. And of course, we all have our favorite examples of people, you know, who do more of the copying. But can I be greedy and ask you for one more example? This is one of my favorite songs by Rajesh Roshan is this from the movie Guna. Let me just play that one. That's a Hindi song. It's star Sunny Dio and Dimple Kapadia. Now, this is the original. I'll tell you who it is by after I play it. So the original is actually composed by Charlie Chaplin for the movie Limelight. He was also a composer. He composed music for the film Limelight in which he starred and he composed music. The same original has been used by multiple composers in Hindi, not just Rajesh Roshan. There is a very famous old songs in the he kind of stuff. There are so many versions of there are about four versions of the same song basically. Yeah, so what is the name of your site where people can look at? Yeah, I mean, it's a very old and dodgy website, which has got very outdated music clips, but it's okay. It's I T W O F S I T W O F S for France, S for Spain. And okay, so just tell me if this is the one and yeah, so I just think it's an incredible one that you know, so back to you know, and we could of course keep talking just about this alone, but that's not the purpose of what you know, so many people are here for. I wanted to sort of talk about this whole question of personal brand. And you know, that there are a whole lot of these beliefs that I am really going to focus on my work and my work should speak for itself. I shouldn't have to brag about my work. And this is the whole thing. A number of companies say that you know, they take great pride in saying that we are a well kept secret. And unfortunately, they remain a secret from the customers as well. But what what's your sort of view on personal branding? What is this bad press around personal branding? It just seems that it's something that somebody who's bragging, blowing their own trumpet, tomm-tomming about themselves, pushing others down. It's just a very negative press around that. Absolutely. What is your take on this? And you've written a phenomenal book. By the way, guys, if you've not read this, if there is one book on the subject, you must, must, must read. It is Karthik's book, you know, which is pre-social, building brand you online. Karthik, do you have a copy of that book? Yes, of course. Hey, there you go. Look at that. The man himself with this. So take a screen shot. Yeah, but just a beautiful one. And I love the book. But let's get cracking on this. So how does it work? Yep. I think to some extent, I think it's very Indian in nature, because we have grown up with our parents telling us, don't talk about your work, your work should talk about itself, which probably comes from Bhagavad Gita, which says, do your duty, don't expect the fruits of what you do, the duty cannot. That's where it comes from. And to some extent, it's right. Because if you just pigeonhole personal branding as talking about yourself and your own work, that's just a spectacular failure of imagination. Because personal branding is far beyond talking about yourself and your work. Just imagine a student in college, she wouldn't have any work at all to talk about what will she talk about in the name of personal branding? And people who are in their early stages of their career, they don't have anything to talk about if they don't even if they can't talk about the work because there is no work to talk about. Basically, so first we need to get out of this, this, this focus that personal brand is just about me, my work. It can be about your interest areas and not about your work at all completely. For instance, if you're a student or if you are if you are an early career person, who's interested in human resources as a topic, talk about other companies, how they are handling their human resources from your own point of view, from your perspective, you don't need to talk about your own work because you don't have any work to talk about at all. So stop talking about yourself, talk about others work and how perspectives that you think about what others are doing. Start there, actually, which is quite useful. But when it comes to talking about your own work, there is an important part. The most important thing is this, if you don't talk about your work, who else will? Of course, the factors you can probably expect your mother to talk about your work because she's your mother. But nobody else would do that. Actually, you need to talk about it pretty unlikely that your mother will be talking to your employers and saying how good exactly, exactly, she will be talking about it in the family WhatsApp group, not to a potential employer. That's the difference. So you need to talk about your own work. The only difference is don't make it the mainstay of your content online. It should barely be about 5 to 10% of your content. The rest is your interest areas, your perspective, your point of view, and your observations. The more you read, more observations you would have basically talk about those and occasionally plug what kind of work that you're doing. Most people do complete reverse. They just talk about I did this in work. We did this. We achieved this. We succeeded and occasionally there's a point of view. Why do they do that? Because they're very scared. If I share a point of view about something else, what will those people think and what will other people think which are looking at it? Basically, stop getting worried about that. Get your point of view well enough by reading as much as possible instead of just jumping online and saying something impromptu. Think about it, observe, read, ponder and then form points of you and then share it. The more you do it, more people will be able to associate saying when it comes to HR, Abhijit is a person that I need to relate to because that seems to be the most important topic that he's writing about. That's as simple as it basically in terms of personal branding. And you know, there is also this whole challenge that a lot of times, you know, company employers prohibit you from talking about the company they say that you can't talk about our clients, we have NDAs with them. So which is probably where it's possible to talk about completely different things beyond the workspace. So is it okay then to, you know, when you look at some of the popular and just from the point of view of simplicity, we take three, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Yeah. And when you look at that, are these for three different audiences and more, is it about three different kinds of content? How would you define that? If you look at the user base and age groups of the people, it seems to be that they are for three different audiences. Instagram is for the youngest, Twitter is probably in between and LinkedIn is for the oldies like you and me is what general assumption is. But I would completely challenge that perspective because because of one, I mean, one example I can give you that has happened to me, which is quite amazing. Actually, I joined Instagram very late, probably only about two or three years ago after the whole world has joined and made use of it, I joined very late because I don't see myself as a photo or image first person, I see myself as a text word first person, who is forced to use an image on Instagram. Otherwise, I can't say anything at all. So that's how I am. So then I actually started using Instagram the way I want to because the way I use Twitter and LinkedIn, I started using Instagram, I was completely okay with nobody trying to read my posts on Instagram, totally okay. But then what happened? I got a client and I finished the workshop, everything went very well and the CEO, she actually called me after the workshop and she said, do you know how I got to know you and how did we come to do this workshop eventually? I said, you must have read some post of me on LinkedIn, we are connected on LinkedIn. I said, no, she said, yeah, of course we connected, but I'm I've rarely read anything you wrote on LinkedIn. My daughter, she's 16, she follows you on Instagram and she reads all your marketing related posts and personal branding related posts on Instagram. She's 16. And she told me this is an interesting person who writes about personal brand. I remember you talking to somebody in the office about personal brand, he might be someone to contact. I can't tell you how it works, but it just works like that. All you need to do is be consistent across all platforms. Instead of trying to pigeonhole each platform thing, this is meant only for this, this is meant only for that I'm totally consistent on all platform action. So the same content can go on to Twitter, same content can go on to LinkedIn, but you need to customize based on the platform's necessities. You can't just put exactly the way it is. For instance, on Instagram, people see the visual first. And if necessary, read the text later. On Twitter, they read the text first. And then if necessary, see the video or image later. Same thing with Facebook and LinkedIn, text first and this. People have actually got burned because they didn't understand this basic nuance. For instance, a famous post from Deepika Padukone two years ago, her team put the same message on all platforms, all four platforms, all three platforms, not LinkedIn. And only on Twitter, she actually got very bad comments for the post. But on Instagram and Facebook, no bad comments at all because people actually read the text. They got the context of what's being said. And then they saw the video. On Instagram, they saw the video first. I mean, on Twitter, they actually read the text and see the video. So there is a big mismatch between what was mentioned in the video and what was mentioned in the text. So you need to be cognizant of the differences, basically. Yeah. And, you know, for those people who are listening and thank you very much for all your comments and all your observations. If you have a question for Kartik, you know, this is the time to ask and delighted that you are listening. And of course, for me, it's like a masterclass with the master, you know, on personal branding. So thank you so much. I wanted to sort of ask a follow up question about personal branding that, you know, a lot of times people kind of look at office content, you know, so is for LinkedIn and office related content. Now, when they do something out there, there's a whole lot of stuff. Should I be attributing the content to that particular, you know, if I've gone through 20 books, you said, reading a number of things and then share your ideas. How do you sort of do this business? Because, you know, there are 20 books. How many references will I give there? How do I Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would first say, don't look at content for content sake, or even platform for platform sake. First, I mean, my first recommendation would be to define your personal brand as to what is it that you want people to associate you with? What are the topics that you want people to associate you with? For instance, for yourself, you would want to be associated with coaching, mentorship and human resources to some extent. I mean, to actually just make it very simple. Now, if those are the three areas that you want people to associate you the name with, you need to be consistent in delivering content on those areas and you need to be consistent in thinking about those areas. And something that I constantly mentioned in my workshop, you need to read 10x more than you write. If you don't read 10x more than you write, you tend to get things wrong, you tend to get things a bit hazy, because you have not formed those opinions properly in your own head. You need to think through them. So read 10x more than you write. So if you read 10 things, write only one thing about it basically. But when it comes to these quotes and mentions and references, you don't need to mention the whole thing because you are actually assimilating things from 10 different sources and forming a different opinion about yourself. I mean, on the same topic. So you don't need to worry about individual bibliography for each post ideally. So we've got a bunch of comments and questions. I'm going to do a kind of almost like rapid-fire model. What are first three steps? Akhil Gupta wants to know, what are the first three steps once there is a topic in mind? What do you do to get started, you know, when you're creating a topic in mind? Okay, if you've got a topic in mind, the first thing is to read, read, read as much as possible. Or probably if you listen to podcasts on the topic, listen, listen, read, read, listen, watch whatever it is. Research the topic in and out like it's your exam the next day or the next week kind of stuff, which will actually give you a much better hold on the topics. For instance, if for instance, marketing is your topic, read as much as possible and probably narrow it down. Is it marketing in India or marketing globally, marketing for what kind of products is it B2B, B2C? Look at those. So now you're narrowing India, B2C marketing. Okay, next in B2C, which area are you looking at? Are you looking at FMCG? Are you looking at what kind of products are you looking at? Then you're narrowing down. So now you're you just atomize the whole thing saying India, marketing, B2C products in FMCG space. Now you're coming very, very close and you just atomize the problem very clearly. Now you need to read as much as possible on the topic so that you're able to form opinions in your head first. And then you would start seeing the dots because you've read so much, you would start seeing the dots. Generally, that people tend to do what happened and what they tend to do is they just open LinkedIn or they just open Twitter and this thing, what do I have to write about? And then they go impromptu on something. Never go impromptu at all. Read at least a week's worth of stuff on the topic and then form opinion in the head. Add to the points over a week and then finally write. Which is why I said 10x more than you write. That I think is a fabulous point for anybody who's a content creator. We've got, you know, so there's a question from, you know, Huber Rahan Desikan and the question is why is the title of the workshop it's for you. You know, because and I'll try and answer that it's because a lot of times people equate personal branding with extra version, which is not true as it is. Sanjeev Roy has a good question, which is how much presence do you need on social media to be noticed? What's your take on that, Karthik? Yep. So the presence is not quantified by number of followers or number of likes that you get. The presence is quantified by your consistency. So for instance, I would I mean, I generally equate personal branding with our physical health. For instance, for physical health, there are two basic requirements. If I just if I just come to the bottom of it, it what goes in and what goes out literally what goes in is the kind of food that you choose and eat. What goes out is how you burn them as simple as it if I just make it very simple and rational. Personal branding is exactly the same. What goes in what you consume 10x you consume and what goes out it what you opine on what you add perspectives as what you share online. Here you can actually you something like you can actually pay up one full year's gym membership to Gold's Gym. You can buy the best equipment or best cloth from Decathlon and get ready and go to go to Gold's Gym and etc. But in spite of doing this, you need to show up every single day at Gold's Gym. If you don't show up all the membership and all the clothing will be completely useless. You need to show up every single day. Consistency beats occasional highs any single day literally. If you are consistent, your audience will be consistent. You will build an audience. You just need to be consistent. People tend to do one big post and they get a lot of likes and then they completely forget all about it for one week and one month. Exactly what happens in a gym. When you join the gym for the first time, you just dress yourself so much for the next one week. You feel completely tired and safe. Do I really need to go? It was so bad. Instead starts really small. Do only five minutes of exercise on first day. So you would at least want to do six minutes the next day, seven minutes the next day. Similarly, write only a tweet the first day. Next day write something more. Next day write one more paragraph or next week. Have a consistent habit. Don't look at highs. Look at the quality over a longer period of time. You will build a following. You will build recognition online. Fantastic. We have a question from Musa who says, how does your personal brand align with your organization brand, especially if it's your own organization? Yep. It is exactly same like what I had mentioned earlier. Talking about yourself and talking about your own work. There are many people who use LinkedIn exclusively to talk about their own company. We have done this news. We have done this press release. We have won this new client. There is nothing else from them at all. And they end up sounding like a brand brochure. But they are not brochures. They are individuals with a point of view. But they think LinkedIn must look professional. So I will talk about my company. Pardon me. Always something profound that has to be different. But it's a professional networking platform. So what is professional? And I can tell you, professional is not wearing formals and working in an office. For instance, I know people who are football coaches who are active on LinkedIn. I know who are RJs who are active on LinkedIn. In fact, I asked one of the RJs. He was sharing audio clips and video clips of the celebrity interviews that he has done as an RJ. And I asked him why do you share them on LinkedIn? Shouldn't you be sharing them on Facebook and Instagram? That's a better platform for celebrity interviews. And he said, Karthik, I am looking for work as an emcee in companies and corporate people and people who actually head admin departments. They are active on LinkedIn and they are looking for good voices and good presence of mind. And then they look at me, my video, and then they hire me as an emcee. That's a logic that you can't break at all. But that's not a professional work. But it's still professional for him, not for you and me because we wear formals and go to an office. But he goes to studio and records. That's his profession, basically. So it's professional. That's what matters. But don't talk only about your company. Talk about your industry as a whole. Go above and talk about the industry. So Sunita says that you love the comment of the interconnection of social medium. And of course, we have Jimmy who says, how do you select who to respond to when you see several comments on your content? Yeah, this is a tough call because you need to ignore a lot. You need to respond only to some. There are some thumb rules that I use. If I look at the trend of similar replies that have come that that required me to respond, I respond to only one in the assumption that most of the others who are the same question would also notice that and do it. Similarly, I also look at in terms of how much I can add value with a comment. If I can't add value and it just back to us to comment, I generally don't comment at all. Every single post that I do online, I am looking to add value and make people think in a slightly different manner as possible. So I look at the value part of it mostly. Neha's question is that do introverts and extroverts deal differently with social media presence? You know, because personal branding now has become synonymous with online presence. So do people view it differently or do they deal with it differently? So I actually think introverts can do very, very well on social media because introverts are not stupid people. They have a lot of good opinions, good thoughts, they are super intelligent. It's all there. It's just that they are shy enough not to talk to strangers. That's about it. They won't go volunteer to talk to strangers. In fact, I'm an introvert. I don't talk to strangers that easily at all. I'm usually on guard with strangers and only with known people I go and talk. But online, just imagine what happens when you say something on Twitter or LinkedIn, you don't see the audience at all. There is no audience in front of you. You just see comments, you can ignore the comments. So I think social media, it's heaven for introverts. Unlike for extroverts, if they don't get comments immediately, they will feel very disheartened because they're extroverts. They always want attention from other people. For introverts, there's no problem at all. If you're not getting comments, all you want to do is share your point of view and move on. That's about it. So Rola Rora's question is what should be the ratio of personal take on your areas of expertise versus promoting your employer, especially if you work on the branding side of social media? I would say it's 90-10. 90 would be your industry related point of view and perspective. Just 10% about yourself and your own company. Nothing more than that. Otherwise, it will sound like a brand brochure. And of course, you know, there are people who are sort of making their comments on this. One good question. One study said that post every Tuesday morning at 11 o'clock on LinkedIn for the best chance to be viewed. Is this true? It may be true based on the control survey that they did for those people that surveyed and those records that they looked, it may be true. But I honestly say there is no right time or wrong time to post anything at all. Don't overdo it. For instance, just look at the basics of each social media platform. For instance, Twitter is a very busy platform. Every minute things change, what people are talking, what's trending completely changes. Whereas Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are slow platforms. Things don't change at all. I see something that you posted three days ago in my timeline today. So it's a very slow platform. If you keep on repeating things again and again on LinkedIn endlessly, people will notice that you are just shilling stuff very, very often. But on Twitter, it's perfectly fine. You can talk about the same topic 10 times during the day and new audiences will actually get to know something afresh basically. And of course, you know, when you think about personal branding, like Jimmich has this whole question that very valid point around how so individuals, especially senior people, they use LinkedIn only to comment and share about the organization they work for instead of their own thought as individuals. You know, so so and they are missing the point because the really the whole idea is to talk about you as an individual. But you know, sometimes I wonder that I feel extremely conscious and talking about my personal life as in, you know, where am I walking? Where am I eating? Where is that necessary to do on Instagram? Or not necessarily on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter kind of thing. It's not necessary, but I have this analogy to generally give and I probably explained this analogy many times, but I will do it one more time. Just imagine that you're living in a house with 100 windows, 100 windows, one house. If you open just five windows, the outside world will see you through those five windows whenever you are available, but you still got 95 windows, which is closed. So you need to choose what part of your life that you want to expose to the world. For instance, if I ask you saying who's the most outrageously dressed Bollywood star right now? Who would you say? Ranbir Kapoor. Ranbir Kapoor, exactly. All of India will say only that. Akha India, Oye Bolega. Ranbir Kapoor is the most outrageously dressed individual on Bollywood. Do you think he dresses like this at home with Deepika Padukone? I meant Ranbir Singh, not Ranbir Kapoor. I mean, yes, yes. Yes, of course. But it's funny, we both thought of the same person. Yeah, I know it is hitting Ranbir Singh. Everybody knows Ranbir Singh because he dresses, he carries all those bizarre clothing. But do you think he he he actually dresses like that when he is in his more private sense with Deepika Padukone in his home? Does he do that? I probably doesn't do that. It's a it's a nice construct because he actually carries a diverse set of roles and he carries a diverse set of clothes. He's able to attract the best of brands. He's probably the most most wanted brand ambassador for most brands out of probably even more than Amitabhajan these days. He's that much in demand, but he's able to carry those. But that is only two of the windows that he's opens in his life. And it's a very calculated kind of move basically does. What I say is when you want to talk about your personal life, open only five windows out of 100. Rest of the 95 is your private. The world doesn't know how you live on behind those windows. Just open five. I open only five. Occasionally talk about my daughter, son, etc. Things that happen in my road, the rain, gardening, that's about it. Nothing else. There is still 95% more, which I don't talk about at all. That people who live with me know inside out, but the world wouldn't know because the world is full of strangers. Yeah, and of course, yeah, Shweta corrected the both of us. No, corrected me primarily, you know, it's yeah. And of course, Emmanuel David has this comment. We don't know what releasing does at home at best. You may speculate. Exactly the point. And of course, we do have a question, you know, here from Rajesh. His question is, you speak about the power of the silent majority. And how do you get the silent base to engage more? You don't need you don't need them to engage more at all, because when you want the silent majority to engage more, you are expecting them to leave digitally available feedback to you, whether it's a like or a comment or a share, don't expect them at all. Look at the impressions that get unfortunately, most social media platforms don't show impressions as a metric. For instance, Twitter shows you impressions. If you go to Twitter analytics, it shows impressions. LinkedIn shows impressions, impressions, people who have seen this post. Facebook doesn't Instagram doesn't actually, which is a big problem. They only show things that people have left visibly digitally. Otherwise, they don't do it at all, unfortunately. So look at impressions as a way that it's the top end of the funnel. So many people have read it. But out of the top end of the funnel, only 10% are probably bothered to comment or reply or like. Don't don't think of your success metrics from the 10% alone. Get the success metrics on the top of the funnel, not the bottom end of the funnel. You know, I think sometimes it's also about the, you know, what people celebrate, they kind of say that I got 40 comments. So then you're kind of celebrating just the comment, except for the fact that you are missing the point that a lot of times, you know, when you when you say something in an audience, so for me, the equivalence really, Karthik would be that they say you're doing a keynote, you know, and in the keynote, you had two questions. That does not mean only two people like to say that, you know, they had 1000 people. So yeah, and, and I think, you know, so the question from Sarang Brahmi is, how do you find time to write blogs so regularly? He's referring to your handle beast of trial. Absolutely. So it's, it's quite simple. As I mentioned earlier, read more, read 10x, make notes so that you can go back to and write about something that is already there. Don't wake up that morning and think about what do I write about myself? Because I, for instance, I have about 10 days worth of blog posts ready right now, because it's there in the background. And I just keep writing more and more kind of stuff. It just becomes your habit eventually because you enjoy the whole process of reading, thinking, writing. If you don't enjoy the process, it's not sustainable at all. You need to enjoy it, I believe. So, and, you know, there was an earlier question somebody had raised, which I didn't quite sort of get to ask. What is the time lag from when you let's say today you want to write about a particular trend in which you know, let's say people switch off the cameras, you know, while they are on video. So does it mean that it is the rise of audio as a medium of communication? Now suppose this is the hypothesis, you know, from what time to what time, you know, so from that thought to the blog post, what's the duration? It depends. For instance, if it's a very topical topic, for instance, I wrote about Zomato Instant, which is a 10 minute delivery on that morning when I read the news, I mean, I read about the news earlier that day, and then I started writing immediately, and then I posted it then on their same day. But there are many topics which are not trending or topical or time based, you can write about it later also. So for instance, the topic that you just mentioned, people switching off their cameras and people being conscious about cameras and the audio kind of stuff, that is not a trending topical topic. So you can take some time, you can read more, you can let it fester in your head with more reading, more research and then you would probably come to some kind of consensus in your head. Yes, I believe switching off camera would probably lead more to audio interest. But I need to back it up. What am I backing them up with? What is my hypothesis? What is my perspective in that? So it will probably take a week for me to write the more I read about it, I'll probably think more. If I don't have a specific point of view on it, I won't even write about it. Because I'll be just rambling on without any point. I'm just talking, talking, talking, there is nothing at all. I need to have some end point and the starting point without which I can't write at all. And do you write first on a piece of paper and then write directly fully digital, fully digital on a very bare minimum notepad action. That's about it. Okay. And, you know, Sunita's question, how long till you get to the flow state and getting to a rhythm, you know, when you are writing, how long does it take? It I mean, there is no time because I was actually telling you earlier just before we started, I don't write in one go. I write small paragraphs here and there all through the day for various posts. It's almost like I'm parking various thoughts, write something, move on to another thing. It's almost like simile tasking to some extent. I have about 10 different posts. I think about this. I think about this. We are humans. We keep thinking about various things. We can't just force our mind to think about only one thing. The mind doesn't work like that at all. The mind has to wonder. You let it wonder. But the more it wonders, more goodness comes and you just keep adding to various stuff. At some point, I would say I've added enough, there is enough perspective. That's a post. That's about it. And you know, it's a lot sometimes people say that when you write a book, it's the same thing. And I'm sure you would have had that experience that you kind of have things which are there. It's not quite a book that you write some more, then you write some more, then you find a pattern, then you delete something, then you put it back. And at some point of time, you feel it is complete. So my question for you is, Karthik, when you were writing the book and I just wanted to, for those who were not there when I showed this, it's a lovely book. I absolutely recommend 100% that you should read that. And Karthik, all the proceeds from this royalty that you will get a huge surge of today will come back to me. But on a different note, how do you feel that it is complete to be sent to a publisher? With the book, it's very different because you have a deadline, you need to finish it with a blog post. It's not like that at all. You can keep adding to it. And I keep adding to many of my posts because I think of something, I think of a new addition or a new related point that will help people understand the topic better. So online is very, very fluid that way. Actually, you can keep on adding to it. One of the reasons why I love threads on Twitter, not necessarily the continuous threads that you write in one go, but things that you keep on adding later, later, later so that it becomes more, more illuminative to the audience that are coming. In fact, I have been holding a couple of threads for five, five, six years. I keep replying to them. I keep replying to them. And then people notice the first point, first tweet in the thread and they gain something from it. And then they actually retweeted. Now I know that you saw my latest tweet in the thread and then you went back to the first one and you read it again kind of. So it is exactly like that. We just keep adding to it digitally. But with a book, there is a publisher with a gun on your head. So you need to deliver actually. You can't do anything with it. I suspect we have both had the same gun held to it. It's the best one. Anyway, we know that. Yeah, but it's been lovely to serve your book, make such wonderful reading. I can't recommend it enough. You know, Karthik, the other question I had is at what age should one start, you know, talking about social media? And what's the right time to build your presence on social media? There is no age limit actually, because I'm sure, you know, there are children on YouTube with millions of followers in the U.S. and India. There are tiny children. Of course, they are probably being orchestrated by their parents. But they're already there. Imagine when they grow up to be an 18 year old, they would have a treasure trove of followers already waiting for them. They are on a pedestal already. But it's not just YouTube and Instagram and being an influencer. You can be a perfectly professional child also. For instance, one of my favorite examples is a girl named Vinusha. She's from Chennai. She's a 10 year old. And she talks about baking her interest and her professional interest is baking when she is just 10. And you should look. I mean, look her up on LinkedIn. Her name is Vinusha M.K. She's from Chennai. Yeah, she's a 10 year old kid. Yes. She's the point is if she can do that, what is stopping you? So so therefore, it has nothing to do with the fact that, you know, you're too young to be on Twitter No, there is there is there is there is because Twitter to some extent is a school of negativity that exists. As a 10 year old child, you won't be able to know what is right and what is wrong. So you need some guidance to use. LinkedIn, I would say slightly better because anything you say is right next to your business card and your whole education quite literally. So people generally tend to behave slightly better than they behave on on Twitter. So it really helps that you start on LinkedIn. So for the fact that somebody like Venusha is active on LinkedIn is a much bigger deal than she's active on Twitter, which is slightly more of a problem. So yeah, Mansi says that she's seen her and she's quite inspiring. Of course, the question Achille wants to know is is Twitter a platform for professional networking? Any platform is I mean, any platform is a platform for professional learning, including Instagram, including Facebook. The example I gave you from Instagram, how I got a piece of work. It's all in your head. If you think Instagram is for children to show products as an influencer, so be it. If you think it is a professional platform where you want to talk about nuclear physics, so be it. You talk about it, you will build your own audience. Amongst the people who are there, you will build your own audience. It's up to you quite literally, not the platform's choice. And we have a question from a LinkedIn user who says introverts your judgment and they fear putting a bit of themselves out there and yet personal branding is unavoidable. So you know, do you have a tip to get over that entire thing? You have to, you have to get over that. The only consolation if I can add to that personal judgment is it's not being delivered physically in front of you by a fellow human being. It is being delivered in the forms of bits and bytes in a chat box, in a comment box literally. Because we use this argument very often when people actually dis each other online. People say that come on, it's just words, it's not a person talking to you or talking you down. You can use the same argument with introverts also, it just texts bits and bytes. You can afford to ignore it. It's not happening in front of you. So you need to do something about it. But having said that it's very difficult for somebody who is afraid of negativity online in terms of something that he or she said, and then the comments coming in very difficult. So obviously to seek professional help would be much better than trying to handle it on your own. And we are about coming to the towards the end of, you know, our conversation is I just never struck me until I took a look at the watch that it's been 54 minutes since we've been speaking. It's just absolutely fascinating. We have another question from Sai. Can we interrelate the same kind of communication strategies and recruitment or hiring people and how to get thoughts the way that you do? Can you suggest some blogs, blogs and books? Absolutely you can because recruitment hiring is just a topic. The more you read about the topic, the more opinions you form. Again, I go back to the same thing. Research, research, research, read, read, listen, listen, listen, listen, watch, watch, watch, read 10x more than you write. Don't jump into writing. Read more, you are mindful automatically connect dots and form opinions. They are just topics. You just need to pick a topic, read more, you will form opinions eventually. And then of course question everything please. Without that you won't get dots to connect. And of course for me this is today's biggest takeaway actually and you of course have the most predictable question. Jimmy, I'm sorry to say a million people have asked Karthik this whole question. So he's got if you go to his website, you will find a post which says exactly this. But nevertheless, I have to ask you, why Beast of Troll? That that has an extra A you know, at the end. But basically Beast of Troll is a character from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of my all time favorite books. All my online footprint is inspired by something to do with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I have a music blog where I actually review new music of the week, week after week every weekend. It's called Millie Block. That's inspired by Millie Ways, which is the last restaurant at the end of the universe, according to the book. Everything is connected to that basically. And and of course, your own email, which is also six times nine. Yeah, that's from the book. I mean, it's a reference from the book. Okay, Jaitain, Jungit wants to know by how do you replace reading with something else? I mean, what if you don't like to read as much as you can listen? You can watch, but I won't replace the reading part at all because there is one big thing that happens with reading. These are the watching and listening with reading. You can skim with viewing. If you skim something, you might miss something vital and you have no idea what you have missed with also audio listening. If you skim something, something that could have missed basically. But with reading, it's always there. You can go one paragraph, one paragraph, if something stops you, go back with another paragraph and read everything is quite seamless that way. So I prefer reading, but not many people read these days and it's just unfortunate that we are moving forward in the direction. But I gained tremendously from reading eventually. Yeah, likewise. I mean, I can't emphasize it enough because it just builds in. I would add another thing that if you don't read as much, potentially talk to people who read a lot and they'll in many ways summarize what they have read. So there are book clubs, for example. Become a member of a book club just to listen and just say that I'm trying to build a reading habit. But I want to get started and then wait for that one conversation that inspires you to read that book. And you can just sort of really go back and say that, okay, you know, this is a book. I just must read it. And then you go through it. The other is the gym habit example start small, but be consistent. Read for five minutes. I mean, you know, many of the devices make it possible for you to actually track. You can choose I will read for five minutes every day, or 10 minutes every day, whatever way you can read for 10 hours every day, you can put that number. And then the device prompts you that today you completed your goal or you have three minutes more, don't close it now. Yeah, and of course, you know, sign in with the library, just see it's a low risk option before you buy the book, you can just go there and do that. And today, you know, compared to the price of even watching a film, I think books are inexpensive. You know, we are in this golden age where the books are available. So reasonably. And, and I think, well, Sunita says she enjoyed the session because it was not prescriptive, but good food for thought, also thought for food, you know, we are getting close to dinner time. If you had to sort of look at some of the books, which have really inspired you. What what would those books be, which sort of shaped you profoundly that you recommend any audio books, video, podcasts, movies, anything, music? Yeah, there is one book that I really love. And I also mentioned this in my book also, it's called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Been Big. It's by Scott Adams. He's a creator of Dilbert series. Now, I'm not a fan of Dilbert anymore at all. I used to like it at one point. Now I lost interest. But this book is almost like a self help life hack book. He talks about a lot of interesting life hacks which help him do more. Some of them might work. Some of them may not work. For instance, he speaks about one very quirky thing, which I know somebody else also abuses that he he tends to actually go to the gym during the lunchtime, because it's completely empty at the time. Everybody's having lunch. He goes to the gym and he has the entire gym for himself. And he actually shifted his lunch time only for this. So he doesn't need to waste time waiting for the gym to get empty or something that he wants to do that. I know of quite a few people like, for instance, Krish Ashok online on Twitter. He does something quite similar. He eats only twice a day. There is one 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock one meal. And then early evening, he has one more meal. He doesn't eat the three meals a day like the rest of us basically. So these are life hacks and you would find tons of them in his in his Scott Adams book. It's called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I would highly recommend the book. Is there a movie that has really shaped you, made you go back and watch it again and again for a different layer of meaning? What would that go? Quite a few movies nothing that stands out from the hundreds of movies that have that I want to go back to it again. I mean there is nothing specific that pops out of my mind at all. Is there a piece of music you listen to more often than others? Is there a composer, Rajasthera? Composer wise, I'm a big fan of Ile Raja and A.R. Rahman being a Tamilian huge, huge fan. But I listen to all kinds of language because I actually listen for reviewing every week. I actually make a playlist on Spotify and YouTube every week of new music. So I want to listen to more and more newer and newer music so that I'm able to help others saying out of the 40, 50 songs that released this week, here are the 10 good ones that you can afford to listen to. And this is my reason why you should listen to. So instead of going back to the same thing again, I listen to more and more new ones. And of course, you know, I think when you look at just all of us, we can start with what interests you and just look for, you know, today, Google is such an incredible resource. Pretty much if you say 10 best books on gymnastics, I'm just speaking of that, you will find somebody has curated it and, you know, done that and you can skim through because, you know, Amazon gives you a little bit of a feel. So you can read and say, ah, this is not what I would enjoy. And so you can sort of do that. Or you can, of course, you know, on Twitter, I routinely shamelessly ask for recommendations, you know, what is it that you are reading? I share my recommendation of what I have enjoyed. And, you know, I think on social media, I found that if you, you know, are generous to give, you receive a lot. Thank you, Karthik. You add one small point there. When I'm talking about reading so much that is read 10x more than you, right? I'm not talking just about books alone that is printed books alone. I'm actually talking about online reading on websites. There is so much to read. The problem is people don't know where to start, which is where I started with build content pipelines through RSS feed. If you do that, things come to you like an email basically. So you don't need to start with the Google search. Why do I read about latest updates in the world of recruitment and hiring? Because you've read something in some other website. For instance, can you ask the newspaper vendor to deliver only the sports pages of a newspaper? You can't do that. He will say get lost man. You need to buy the entire newspaper. You can go to the last page yourself. I'm not going to deliver only those two page for a reduced fee. You have to buy the entire newspaper. But the online world helps you do that. For instance, if you actually subscribe to the Economic Times online, the website, do you know that you can subscribe to HR updates in Economic Times alone through RSS feeds? You can do that. You can actually substrate to the marketing feed in Economic Times only, not the entire newspaper. You can do that on feedly. It's that easy. So which is why the importance of building content pipelines so you don't waste time searching what to read. It is there waiting for you to read basically. We have overshot our time limit, you know, but so I apologize for that, Karthik, but I cannot tell you how incredibly useful it has been. And you know, somebody has asked you for your LinkedIn profile and all of that. So, you know, guys, Karthik will put his, you know, connect details in the comment section of this particular video. So just give a couple of minutes. We'll finish this and he's going to respond to all those comments. Thank you. Once again, and it's been absolutely a delight and we must meet in real life for a cup of coffee and continue this conversation. Thank you so much. Absolutely wonderful talking to you, Abhijeet. Thank you.