It’s not about becoming an influencer — it’s about creating opportunities for yourself.

In this episode, we tackle the common misconception that personal branding is solely for influencers, revealing how it’s actually about creating the right visibility and opportunities in your professional sphere.

Helena Merschdorf shares her unique insights, drawing from her rich background in GIS and marketing, and discusses:

• Solving the Obscurity Problem: how personal branding can help you get noticed by the right people, not just everyone.
• Effective Communication in Technical Fields: the art of conveying complex GIS concepts to non-experts.
• Defining and Building Your Personal Brand: the essence of personal branding and how to strategically develop it.
• Overcoming Challenges: guidance on tackling imposter syndrome and finding your niche in the vast world of GIS.
• Choosing the Right Platforms: tips on selecting the best channels for your personal branding efforts based on your target audience.
• Success Stories and Strategies: the different levels of personal branding success and what might work for you.

This episode is not just about building a personal brand; it’s about leveraging that brand to carve a unique path in the geospatial industry.

Connect with Helena here! LinkedIn | tales.co.nz

Other relevant podcast episodes: Rebranding GIS and Geospatial | Python Maps | Getting Your Dream Job In Earth Observation

In Conversation

GIS Companies and the Knowledge Bias Problem

Daniel: Do GIS companies face particular struggles communicating what they do, or is this just a general tech problem?

Helena: It’s symptomatic of tech in general, but GIS companies have it worse in some ways. Subject matter experts get so excited about the products they create that they don’t stop to think about how to articulate that for someone slightly outside their world. The classic failure is what I call knowledge bias — you misjudge how much outsiders know about what you do. A lot of GIS company websites are really generic: “We provide XYZ solutions, here are some use cases, here are some testimonials.” What’s almost never there is the problem. Very few start with a clear statement of what problem they’re solving and what that problem sounds like from the customer’s perspective. The audience comes in, reads something like “we provide XYZ solutions,” and they’re just not speaking the same language. Accounting software has a higher public baseline of pre-existing knowledge than a GIS platform that helps engineers document boreholes — so the education burden in GIS is bigger.

What Personal Branding Actually Means

Daniel: When people hear “personal branding” they think logos and color palettes. Can you demystify it?

Helena: A personal brand is really just the way you are perceived in the marketplace — by everyone, full stop. It’s a culmination of your skills, experiences, values, and personality, and how you put yourself out there. In practice that often looks like a LinkedIn presence where you demonstrate expertise in the context of your own personality. You might share a map you made — the subject you choose for that map reflects your values, which resonates with people who share those values, and the quality shows your expertise. But it’s also everything else: how you show up at events, the topics you speak about, how you interact with others. It’s your entire public-facing approach so that people understand what you stand for as an individual.

Self-Promotion as Sharing Expertise

Daniel: Self-promotion feels uncomfortable — almost icky — for a lot of people. How do you reframe it?

Helena: It’s not about bragging or talking about yourself all the time. A nicer way to look at it is sharing your skills and talents with the world in a way that creates value for other people. It often comes down to educating. If you’ve got a unique perspective — in my case the GIS and marketing combination — people say “that’s such an interesting combination, can you explain how to apply that for my GIS company?” I can offer my perspective and they find it valuable. Every single person has a unique perspective shaped by their combination of work experience, life experience, education, even hobbies outside work. That is really what thought leadership is. People think it requires inventing something new, but most of the time it’s about taking existing things and putting them into your own context — adding your own two cents to a conversation and sharing that with the world. That’s all it is.

Getting Started: Any Career Stage, Any Starting Point

Daniel: Do you need a goal before you start, or can you just begin sharing things you’re interested in?

Helena: It works both ways. Everyone already has a personal brand — it’s how other people perceive you, cultivated intentionally or left to chance. The classic line applies: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is now. If you want to be strategic, start by thinking about who you want to get in front of — what are they interested in, where are they active? Then start engaging with them on their content before you even think about creating your own. Comment thoughtfully on their posts — not just “great post,” but something that adds context or asks a question. Their entire network sees that comment, not just the person who posted. After you’ve built that relationship you can connect, and then start thinking about what content you can create. Start small — maybe engaging with five people a day on your platform of choice. You don’t need a logo. You don’t need a content strategy. Just start there and build your confidence from there.

Niche Is Your Strength

Daniel: People sometimes worry their interest is too niche for anyone to care about. What do you say to that?

Helena: In an oversaturated internet, the only thing that will actually stand out is something niche. When I was a general marketer I had far fewer inquiries than when I narrowed specifically to GIS. Once I recognized I had both the GIS expertise and the marketing expertise and focused on just that intersection, I started getting exactly the right kind of inquiries — people who needed precisely that combination. Niche is strength, not a liability. Even if you see yourself as a GIS generalist, you will have preferences: network analysis, cartography, a specific industry, a particular type of analysis. Start there. And if imposter syndrome is holding you back, let it guide you rather than stop you — it tells you what you can speak about confidently. Start with those topics and grow as your career grows.

Choosing Platforms and the Consistency Principle

Daniel: Which platforms should people focus on, and how do you think about consistency?

Helena: Start where your target audience already is. If you want to reach senior people at GIS companies, LinkedIn is probably the right place. If your audience is more visual, maybe Instagram. The key principle is one dominant social platform, plus a home base where people can find out more — a personal website, blog, newsletter, or podcast. A lot of very successful influencers stick to one platform rather than spreading thin across all of them. Then choose a format that fits how you actually like to engage: long-form writing, short videos, commenting and resharing. That matters because of what you rightly highlighted — consistency. Consistency is the ultimate deciding factor between an intentional personal brand that succeeds and one that just drifts. Choose something you can maintain as a routine, not something you’ll sprint at for two weeks and abandon.

Influencer Tiers and the Silent Watchers Who Open Doors

Daniel: Can you walk through the different tiers of personal branding so people aren’t comparing themselves to the wrong benchmark?

Helena: At the top you have full influencers — someone like Steve Nouri in the AI/tech space, 1.5 million LinkedIn followers, posting multiple times a day, social media presence as his actual full-time job. Don’t compare yourself to that. Below that are micro influencers — people like Matt Forrest or Alis Dickinson in the GIS world, maybe 20,000 followers across multiple channels, producing a lot of content but still having a day job. That’s still 10 to 20 hours a week of extra work. Then there’s personal branding more broadly — and that’s everyone. People consistently showing up and posting, maybe with a hundred followers, maybe a thousand. Their successes fly under the radar: you’ll never know whether that job change someone had three months ago was because someone found their content and headhunted them. And here’s the key insight: the people who will open doors for you usually do not engage publicly with your content. They’re silent watchers — they follow along, never comment, and then one day they email you out of the blue with an opportunity that seems to come from nowhere. It’s not from nowhere. You built a relationship with them without knowing they were watching.

The 15 Employers Reframe: You Don’t Need Millions

Daniel: There’s an essay called “1,000 True Fans” arguing you could make a living from just a thousand genuine supporters. Does that scale down further for a professional career?

Helena: Absolutely, and that reframe is really freeing. For a business, maybe you only need a hundred great customers. For an individual professional across an entire career, you probably only need 15 employers — 15 people who notice you, value what you do, and want to work with you. That’s quite different from needing 1.5 million followers. It makes the whole thing feel achievable. Go on LinkedIn, identify 15 or 20 people who are genuinely relevant — senior people at companies you’re aspiring to work with, collaborators who share your interests — engage with them thoughtfully, build that presence, and your life can change very quickly without ever building a mass following. Follower counts are the bragging metric of the internet. For most of us, they’re not what we actually need.