Watch the interview on YouTube
When Children's Writers Guild did a feature on me, I thought, well, that's cool.
Then I Googled myself.
I know. Very humble of me.
But what I found was surprising. There was a Google profile pulling together information about me from different places. The image was the one Children's Writers Guild had used. The bio reflected that feature too. I couldn't account for every part of how the profile had appeared, but I could see that the feature had become part of how somebody else would find me.
I didn't really know what to do with that.
Erin Hoy would have had a list.
Erin is the founder of Her Digital Legacy, a personal branding firm that helps female founders make their online presence reflect the expertise people already see when they meet them. Before starting the firm, she managed social media for an engineering company and helped its employees become the faces people recognized.
What made me want to talk to her was a strategy she'd described before the interview: win press, stages, and awards; turn those wins into social content that lasts for months; and let the two keep building on each other.
I wanted the actual steps. But first I had about 20 minutes of questions about awards, funny engineers, going viral, and whether a post getting half a million views means you should suddenly change your whole business.
Fortunately, Erin was willing to follow me down those trails.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why your personal brand includes the gap between meeting you and looking you up afterward.
- Where awards can help, and why they might not be the easiest first PR step.
- How Erin got engineers comfortable appearing in funny office videos.
- What was happening before the author client who generated 400 book preorders had her big moment.
- Why a viral post is useful information without becoming instructions for your entire business.
- How to get multiple pieces of useful content from a keynote, award, magazine feature, or podcast.
- What Erin wants podcast hosts and guests to do with links, recordings, and collaboration.
- Why helping women become more visible is connected to the purpose of her work.
Table of Contents
- The person they meet should match the person they find
- Awards are useful, but they’re still work
- From a headband business to an engineering firm
- How she got engineers in front of a camera
- A million views during the slow part of Christmas
- The missing year behind 400 preorders
- A viral post is a clue, not a new business plan
- Don’t leave the keynote on the stage
- A magazine feature should keep working after publication
- The homework she would have given me
- The next opportunity can come from showing the last one
- What she wants a podcast host to do
- The guest has homework too
- What if sharing your work is part of helping?
- A little humility, followed by the reason it matters
- Questions to take back to your own work
The person they meet should match the person they find
I asked Erin to explain what a personal branding firm actually does. Personal branding can be a buzzword, and I wanted us talking about something more specific than “show up online.”
Her definition was simple: your personal brand is your reputation.
It's how people remember you at a networking event. It's the impression you make on a stage. It's also what somebody sees when they search your name after meeting you.
Her Digital Legacy works on a particular gap between those experiences.
A woman meets somebody in person. She's clearly knowledgeable. She's built a business, written a book, appeared on podcasts, or done work that makes the other person think, I want to work with her.
Then that person looks her up.
The online version doesn't tell the same story.
Erin sees this with women who already have substantial accomplishments. The expertise exists. The digital presence hasn't caught up.
So she works on both the story people find online and the places that establish credibility outside the woman's own accounts. Social media brings out the person's story and expertise. PR puts that person on stages, in publications, and in front of other audiences.
The point is for the reputation to make sense wherever somebody encounters it.
I've believed for a long time that people connect with people, not logos. Erin was describing how to make that belief part of the work, rather than a sentence you put in a marketing presentation and then forget while you post another company announcement.
Awards are useful, but they’re still work
I stopped at the awards part of her strategy. How significant are awards for PR and personal branding?
Erin's answer started with goals. Recognition can be useful at different stages of a career, but applying for it takes time.
Some applications require hours of answers and supporting information. Depending on the award, you might even have to gather financial documents. If you're already running a business, that isn't a tiny addition to the to-do list.
So when she's coaching someone who will do the work herself, Erin may suggest starting with a lower barrier: a magazine feature or speaking to a smaller crowd.
Once there's more bandwidth, or someone managing PR on the founder's behalf, awards can become a more practical part of the plan.
I tried to think of awards I'd won. Nothing immediately came to mind. I hadn't really considered them as a strategy.
But I could see a parallel with something I tell authors. If you hit a bestseller list, you may be introduced as a bestselling author for the rest of your life. The achievement becomes shorthand that follows you into the next room.
Erin agreed. “Award-winning” can do a similar kind of work when somebody introduces what you do.
She also suggested looking locally.
A chamber of commerce award might put you in front of the exact business community you want to reach. If your business serves local clients, that room could matter a great deal.
I wanted to know how competitive those opportunities were.
It depends. Erin mentioned business journals in cities such as Austin and San Antonio, where well-known awards can attract strong applicants. A smaller chamber or local women's group may have a different level of competition.
The organization behind the award matters. So does how long it's been around and how much work it has done to build the award's reputation.
That made me think about two separate questions: could I win this, and would it put me in front of people I actually want to know?
By that point, I was also thinking about my clients. Was there a place for awards in how we helped authors build their reputations? It wasn't something I'd been making enough room to consider.
From a headband business to an engineering firm
Erin's path into marketing didn't begin with a marketing degree.
She studied speech, language, and hearing sciences. In college, she started a small headband business and learned to market it through social media.
Looking back, she could see that she was building a personal brand as the person behind that business. At the time, she mainly knew she loved the work.
The headbands weren't paying the bills, though. So after college she took a full-time job as a social and digital media coordinator at an engineering firm, working from its San Antonio office.
This was around 2022.
I asked what that title actually meant. In practice, she managed the company's social media, including Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
But she also worked on the engineers' individual digital presence.
She'd sit down with them and look at their LinkedIn profiles. Was the About section clear? Did the headshot still look like them? If somebody clicked from the company page to the person, would they find a credible, current picture of that person's work?
Those employees could become ambassadors for the company. That required them to have an identity people could actually recognize.
Erin wasn't calling all of this personal branding yet. But she was already doing the work: helping the people inside a business become visible as people.
How she got engineers in front of a camera
In a technical industry, Erin was seeing plenty of social feeds full of buildings, hard hats, and renderings.
All of those things belonged to the work. They didn't necessarily show much of the people doing it.
So she brought the people forward. She described involving everyone from the janitor to the CEO in the company's social content.
Some of what worked best was funny office content: voiceovers, skits, familiar workplace situations, and engineers being a little less formal than people might expect.
I wanted to know how those videos actually got made. Did she write the skits? What was her part in the process?
First, she gave credit to the marketing team. She said they taught her much of what she knew about marketing.
There was a broader plan. Each month had a campaign or theme, perhaps a particular engineering service or project the company wanted to highlight. That helped guide what belonged in the content.
The platforms also had different roles. LinkedIn was more professional. TikTok gave her more room to play.
For inspiration, she'd set a 15-minute timer and scroll TikTok.
When the timer went off, she had to stop.
That part matters because “I'm researching content” can very quickly turn into you disappearing into the void. We both knew what she meant.
During those 15 minutes, she'd write down sounds, trends, and approaches that caught her attention. Then she'd ask how they might connect to office humor or engineering.
Sometimes the creative work was mainly figuring out the on-screen caption that would make a voiceover relevant. Other times, she wrote lines for employees to say.
Marketing was upstairs. The engineers were on the main floor. So she'd go down with scripts and show people an example of what the finished video would look like.
Here's what you're going to say. Here's when I'll move over here. Here's what happens next.
That example helped calm their nerves.
Being in front of a camera can feel uncomfortable anyway. Doing a silly skit for an engineering company adds another layer of “Are we really doing this?” Erin appreciated that her coworkers trusted her enough to try.
Not every idea came out of the timer session. Sometimes she'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking they had to do a particular trend.
The funny videos had room for that kind of spontaneity. They also had a person figuring out how to make the idea work with the people, setting, and business in front of her.
A million views during the slow part of Christmas
I asked how long she'd been working on this before the first viral video.
Erin placed the early stretch roughly between September and December. She hadn't walked into the company and immediately started producing a successful TikTok account.
Then Christmas created some room to experiment.
The office was slow. A few of the younger coworkers who didn't have much PTO were still there. She decided to revive a neglected TikTok account and post consistently through that period.
For two weeks, she posted three times a day.
Around the two-week mark, she said, a video reached a million views.
I asked for the number because “we went viral” can mean very different things depending on who's telling the story. A million views definitely counted to me.
Erin had heard claims about posting consistently for two weeks leading to a viral moment. Her experience happened to line up with that timeline.
But she didn't treat it as a dependable algorithm trick. She said luck could be involved, and later in the conversation she was very clear that she couldn't hand every client a template that would produce the same result.
The company kept going with content that showed its engineers' personalities and workplace culture. Erin said the work also helped the firm win regional and national marketing awards.
She described the firm as the first engineering company in the country to go viral across those platforms. We didn't independently establish that industry-wide first. What we did discuss was a concrete change in the way a serious technical business was presenting itself, and a response much larger than she had been seeing before.
The important permission inside the story was that a serious field could still contain funny people.
You don't stop understanding engineering because someone sees you make an office joke.
The missing year behind 400 preorders
Naturally, I wanted to know whether Erin could repeat the result.
Had she helped other people go viral? Was there a method?
She wished there were a template. People ask for one all the time. Her advice was to let the audience see the actual person: what they know, what they're doing, and the stories they have to tell.
Sometimes that means a useful tip on Stories. Sometimes it's something less planned that helps people feel they know you.
She was skeptical of the “post these hooks every day for three weeks” challenges that show up in her feed, especially around New Year's.
I asked whether she'd tried one.
She had, and it hadn't worked for her. She felt she'd been posting to complete a checklist instead of thinking about the person she wanted to connect with.
Then she told me about an author client.
They were posting seven days a week. Erin gave the author prompts, and the author recorded herself talking to the camera: life stories, unusual things she'd experienced, and tips.
Erin said the account took off and helped produce around 400 book preorders in a couple of months, organically and without a publisher's support.
I stopped her there.
Somebody could hear that, point a camera at themselves, tell a life story, watch it go nowhere, and conclude that they'd been left out of the real explanation.
What else had been happening?
They'd been posting for that client for about a year before the big moment.
There it was.
There were other pieces too. The hook mattered. So did understanding the audience and making something they actually wanted to see.
Consistency wasn't a command for everyone to post seven times a week. Erin said it should fit your capacity. If you can sustain two posts a week, that's different from deciding to post daily and burning out.
The task is to keep learning what connects with the people you're trying to serve.
I think this is where a lot of marketing success stories need another question. “She talked to the camera and sold books” leaves out the time, practice, positioning, and understanding that made those particular videos work.
You don't have to dismiss the result to ask for those details. The details are what make the story useful.
A viral post is a clue, not a new business plan
I've wrestled for years with the balance between what an audience responds to and what I actually want to be known for.
Sometimes something pops, and my reaction is basically, What? That?
Erin knew the feeling.
She'd recently gotten married and posted a funny reel about trying to be both a bride and a business owner during a chaotic season. It reached about 500,000 views, she said.
It was real life. It fit her personal brand. It was also one of those moments when you look at the response and wonder why that was the thing that took off after all the effort you put into other content.
That got me wondering whether a big response should tell you what direction to take next.
If this works, is this what you do now?
Erin wanted more evidence.
She gave an example of a hypothetical reel about getting venture capital funding. If it went viral, that wouldn't suddenly make venture capital her area of expertise.
It would be a piece of information. She could experiment with a related topic and see what happened. She wouldn't hand the whole business over to one successful post.
She also wanted to know whether people bought anything.
A video can get attention from people who will never buy your book, course, or service. That's useful to know too.
The views tell you that people watched. They don't automatically tell you that the post strengthened the reputation you want or reached the customer you need.
That was a much more useful answer than either “always follow what goes viral” or “ignore the numbers and just be yourself.” Look at the response. Keep testing. Then put it beside the other evidence.
Don’t leave the keynote on the stage
Eventually I pulled us back to the strategy I'd come to ask about.
Win press, stages, and awards. Amplify every win so it lasts for months. Let the two compound until you're the obvious choice.
What does that look like in practice?
Erin asked me to picture a recycling symbol, with PR wins and social media feeding each other.
Say you're selected to give a keynote at a local conference. You prepare, get onstage, deliver the talk, and then leave.
That doesn't have to be the last useful thing that happens with the talk.
Erin would record the whole keynote. Then she'd break it into five, 10, or 15-plus reels and work those into the client's social content.
People who weren't at the conference can now see the person speaking. Someone planning another conference can get a much better sense of what that speaker would be like on their stage.
Instead of only saying “I'm a speaker,” the person keeps showing evidence of speaking.
An award has several moments worth capturing too.
Erin might interview a client before the ceremony about how they're feeling. She'd capture the stage moment and ask how the client felt afterward. Those aren't all the same post with a different crop. They show different parts of the experience.
The award or keynote is one event. The material inside it can do more work if somebody plans to collect it.
I like how practical that is. You can't turn footage you never recorded into 10 good clips later. Some of the strategy happens before the impressive thing happens.
A magazine feature should keep working after publication
I asked for examples beyond keynotes and awards.
Erin brought up print and digital magazines.
A feature can introduce you to the publication's audience. When the piece is online, it may also become part of what somebody finds after searching your name.
If it links to your website, there's a path from that outside feature back to you.
Erin sees digital PR as part of both search visibility and visibility inside AI tools. She talked about SEO and GEO, or efforts to be represented in generative search results.
Her reasoning is that outside articles give those systems more places to encounter your name, work, and expertise. That is a visibility strategy, rather than a guarantee that one backlink will make every AI assistant recommend you.
Then there's the social content.
You can announce the feature and give people a reason to read it. You can draw out something you said in the interview. Erin also talked about adapting the ideas into an article for your own website or LinkedIn.
The point isn't to leave the whole accomplishment trapped in a link you shared once.
Somebody might miss that first post. Somebody else might care about one idea in the feature much more than the fact that you were featured. Different ways of presenting the material can give them different ways in.
That was the part of the conversation that brought my Children's Writers Guild feature back to mind.
The homework she would have given me
When that feature ran, I'd mostly treated it as a cool thing that happened.
Then I searched my name and saw the Google profile with the image and biographical material from the feature, alongside information pulled from other places. It made me realize the piece had become part of my public identity in a way I hadn't expected.
I told Erin I probably hadn't squeezed as much juice out of it as I would have if I'd been one of her clients.
What homework would she have given me?
First, she separated the two versions of her service.
If she were handling both PR and social media for me, she would do the content work. But if she were coaching me, here's the kind of list she'd give me.
Put the feature on the website. An “As seen in” mention gives a visitor evidence of where your work has appeared.
Make an announcement post. Let people know the feature exists and give them a preview of what's inside.
Then create another way to experience it.
One idea Erin likes is having the client read a short part of the article on camera while showing the magazine pages. It turns the feature into a video people can encounter in the feed.
There can be different reels and different ideas pulled from the piece. The goal is for people to see the material more than once without feeling like they're watching the exact same announcement over and over.
That was the practical shift for me. I hadn't needed to keep saying, “Look, a magazine wrote about me.” There were other things I could let people learn or see through the feature.
And yes, by this point she really had me thinking about awards too.
The next opportunity can come from showing the last one
I asked Erin to explain the compounding part.
How do the press and the social content work together until somebody becomes the go-to expert?
A PR win gives you something credible to share. Sharing it helps people understand what you know and where you've already been trusted to speak.
Some of those people may be in a position to create another opportunity.
They see you on a stage and think of you for their conference. They hear a useful point and want you on their podcast.
That next appearance creates more material to share. More people encounter the work. Another opportunity becomes possible.
It isn't automatic, and it doesn't mean every post creates a booking. But it's a clearer chain than simply trying to “build authority” by posting more often.
Erin also doesn't see a final point where you're finished with a personal brand.
Unless you're Beyoncé, perhaps. We allowed a little room for Beyoncé.
For most people, the work keeps evolving as the business and the person evolve. You begin something new, build another area of expertise, or move into a different stage of your career. The things people know about you need to keep up.
The loop continues because you're continuing to do work worth showing.
What she wants a podcast host to do
I had one last strategy question. Where do podcasts fit into all this?
They were Erin's favorite.
First, the conversation produces material. A recording can become a number of short clips, each built around a useful idea or moment.
Second, a digital appearance can create another place where someone finds the guest.
Erin talked about podcast platform pages, search results, and articles associated with an episode. If a host publishes an article that names the guest and links to the guest's website, it connects the conversation to the person behind it.
She also sees those pages as more material through which search and AI systems can encounter the guest's expertise.
Again, that's why she values the digital trail. We weren't establishing a guaranteed search ranking or an automatic AI recommendation.
I asked what a podcast host could do better for her clients beyond conducting a good interview.
Her first answer was links.
She wants the client's website in the show notes. If there's a useful free resource that leads into the newsletter, she wants the host to include that too.
The listener has just spent time hearing the person explain something. Make it easy for the listener to find the next relevant thing.
Social clips are helpful as well. Erin said she can make the clips herself if the host doesn't share them, but she appreciates a host posting a reel and inviting the guest to collaborate.
That can introduce the guest to the host's audience and the host to the guest's audience. Both people have a reason to help the conversation travel.
The guest has homework too
This was especially useful to me because I was building a more involved process for what happens after an interview.
My old version was fairly simple. Cut anything that needed cutting. Get the episode posted. Make sure the guest's name and website were right in the description.
Now I was thinking about using AI agents to help create an article and send it to the guest for feedback.
I described an idea for a clearly identified AI-assisted follow-up: here's the article based on your interview; what would you change? The guest could reply with corrections or the details they wanted included.
Erin liked the idea. She also pointed out that the guest has a responsibility here.
If the host asks for your links and headshot and you never send them, the host can't include the material you didn't provide.
For her clients, she wants to have the important pieces ready: the website, useful free resources, and the appropriate social accounts.
That helps the listener find the guest. It also makes it easier for the host to do a good job without having to guess.
I appreciated that it wasn't only a list of extra things the podcaster should do. There are two people who can make the finished episode more useful. The guest can supply the right details, and the host can make sure those details survive into what gets published.
What if sharing your work is part of helping?
By then it was time for the purpose question, which I always seem to reach late in an interview named The Purpose-Driven Entrepreneur.
What is all this work for? When Erin thinks about her vocation and the legacy she wants to leave, what matters most?
She wants to help female founders who haven't felt they could have a voice take ownership of the spotlight.
Some clients are nervous about the camera. Some don't want to tell people they won an award. They've done impressive work but feel uncomfortable saying so.
Erin coaches them through that.
If the people who need your expertise never hear about it, they can't use it. If you keep telling yourself your story isn't important enough to share, the person who could benefit from it may never find you.
That is what she sees as the opportunity in digital platforms. Your work doesn't have to be limited to the people you can personally meet in your own community. The message can reach someone across the country or around the world.
I asked why that was important enough to be something she wanted to hang her life on.
She'd seen women shrink their accomplishments in different parts of her life.
It's not that big of a deal. It's not that impressive. Don't talk about money. Don't brag.
She acknowledged that men can experience this too. But she sees it often enough among women that helping them move through it has become central to her work.
She wants clients to be able to talk about what they've done, claim their expertise, and help more people with it.
That makes the PR strategy feel different from collecting impressive badges for their own sake. The stage or article matters because it gives a useful person a chance to be heard.
A little humility, followed by the reason it matters
I told Erin I'd wrestled with the humility question too.
I naturally focus on myself plenty. I'm not claiming that's a virtue.
But I've also wondered whether being so humble that nobody ever finds out what I did is really the solution.
One way I've found a middle ground is a little self-deprecating humor, followed by an honest explanation of why the thing matters.
Make the joke. Then say why you're grateful, what the accomplishment allows you to do, or how it connects to the purpose you're trying to serve.
The joke lets me acknowledge the awkwardness. The explanation keeps the awkwardness from swallowing the actual point.
Erin recognized that. She might joke that her whole job is sending emails and posting on social media.
Then she'll explain why the work means more than that.
There's a person who's been holding back. There's something useful that person knows. There's somebody else who needs to hear it.
Those are worthwhile things to help connect.
Questions to take back to your own work
- If somebody loves meeting you and searches your name afterward, will the online version make sense?
- Which award, publication, or small stage would put you in front of the right people, and how much work would it take to pursue it?
- Who are the people behind your business that your audience never gets to see?
- What part of a success story are you missing? Ask about the year of posting before you copy the one video.
- Are you learning from a viral post or asking it to choose your whole business direction?
- What should you capture before your next talk, interview, or award ceremony so the material can keep working afterward?
- Where can someone go next after hearing you explain something useful? Make the link easy to find.
- What accomplishment are you hiding because sharing it feels uncomfortable, and who might benefit if they knew?
The next useful step doesn't have to be winning a national award or posting three times a day.
You may already have something worth using better: an interview, a talk, a feature, a piece of work you did well. Look at it the way Erin looked at my magazine story.
What did you leave sitting there? What could somebody learn from it? And how can you put it in front of the person who needs it?
Watch, connect, and read the transcript
Watch the full interview on YouTube
Connect with Erin through Her Digital Legacy
Read the original interview transcript in Google Drive
Erin also mentioned Instagram and LinkedIn in the interview; her website is the verified starting point for connecting with her. The edited video is 38:51 and the meeting transcript ends at 38:52. Reported client results, view counts, and personal details above refer to the August 26, 2026 conversation.