"Oh yesss, I just gained some aura points with him."

One of the members of my Indian folk dance group said this after talking to the head of our group. She is Gen Z and constantly makes references to pop culture and memes. Of course, I'd seen the aura memes going around online. But it is very different to hear someone actually use an internet meme in a daily conversation. I found it super interesting. The word really STUCK with me.

Later, while thinking about my newsletter, I remembered this incident. And I thought, actually, that's what you're trying to do when you're building a personal brand online. You're trying to gain aura points. You're trying to show people how appealing your aura is.

It was settled then. AURA had to become a framework we can use. So here’s me attempting to make it a thing.

So why aura and not authenticity, or voice? A big part of it is that aura is an extremely memorable term. It's meme-worthy. It has also been culturally relevant across generations. For example, in the first episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S., Phoebe attempts to ‘cleanse’ Ross’s aura. In the 90s, aura belonged to alternative people. Today it's about how appealing, attractive and cool you are. I think terms like authenticity and voice will disappear over time. Aura has stayed relevant across generations (and if the crystal crowd and my dance group can agree on a word, I'll take it).

So what is AURA in a LinkedIn post?

A post with aura contains:

The first step in the AURA framework is starting from an ACTUAL experience in your posts. I pulled my own posts to show you how AURA works. My MagicPost export has 75 of my LinkedIn posts since January of this year. The 14 I tagged as personal stories have a median of 1,670 impressions. The other 61 sit at 946. Those 14 posts are 19 percent of what I published, and they brought in 288 of my 542 profile views. That's more than half.

If you've been reading since August, this won't surprise you. In my August article “LinkedIn is in the Hospital…” I told you 12 of my 62 posts led with something that actually happened to me, and they ran 40 percent above my median. Twelve posts weren’t enough to draw a conclusion, and fourteen aren’t either. But my experience is consistent across my clients as well. For example, my ERP client’s analytics tell the same story. Once we leaned into personal stories, his posts that started with "I" kept taking the top spots on impressions.

I need to call something out before you do. The first time I spelled out AURA on LinkedIn was in a post called "Five LinkedIn post red flags" on 12 June. Red flag number one was "lacks AURA," including being UNIQUE to you.

Interestingly, I wrote this post using one of Matt Barker’s LinkedIn templates. It might sound ironic that I preach about uniqueness while using a template. But I don't see templates as a way of losing your uniqueness. I see them as guardrails. They make you more focused on what you would like to talk about, and they give you a framework to experiment and play around with. You can be unique even with guardrails. I think that's generally how people's personalities come out: society gives you certain guardrails for how you behave, and within those you bring out your uniqueness. Building a brand online works the same way.

If you want to easily extract your AURA then this is a tool I absolutely LOVE! I use it with Claude and also when I just want to make simple notes or write a draft for a new piece.

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Now back to the article.

R is the letter my clients struggle with most. It's also the one I struggle with most. Talking about an experience that is RELATABLE to a big part of your target audience is very difficult. Part of the challenge is defining that audience very clearly: understanding what really moves the needle for them, and what would make them want to listen to you.

My best receipt is my most-seen post. In February I wrote that ChatGPT is NOT your friend. It got 11,539 impressions, more than ten times my median, at 0.6 percent engagement. All the comments came from staunch AI haters. That isn't a standpoint I hold. I'm about being cautious with AI rather than dismissing it completely. The post clearly didn’t resonate with a good portion of my target audience (which at the time was AI-forward people who didn’t want to engage with anything remotely negative about AI). 

Do I regret posting it? Absolutely not. It was an experiment about a conversation I felt strongly about, and I learned from it. It’s also the most prominent proof I have that a relatable post can still land with a completely different audience than the one you intended. 

The second A is harder the more senior you are in your career. 

A few weeks ago, a sales coach I work with in Germany told me a story on our call that hit all four letters. Halfway through, he stopped: "I'm thinking like if I post this, how is my company going to react?" We tried anyway. But so many details had to be hidden or anonymized that it kind of made the post bland. When you want to add detail but still stay ambiguous, it's very difficult to write a post that is rich and appealing. The post never went out. It was too sensitive to tell. 

When I ask senior clients for a story, the block is usually one of these. Sometimes their mind just goes blank. Sometimes there’s a very big fear of broaching certain topics, of offending people, of content affecting someone negatively. 

In some cases, however, the lack of detail comes not from the sensitivity of the matter but from the absence of the right process and framework. When someone sitting opposite you asks the right questions, you remember details and stories you never thought could be relevant on LinkedIn.

When clients come to me with a story that is ‘sensitive’, I simply tell them: “Give me all the details, then redact whatever is unacceptable to say.” 

Even small details help: a point in time, the country you worked in, the team you worked on. Extract the mundane details too, then see whether they add richness. This is also where I come in as a ghostwriter. The ACTUAL experience belongs to the client. I can't supply it. My job is to make sure it's relatable to their target audience and has ample details.

What I'm still unsure about is how people read AURA, because they take it in many different ways. Some go all in on personal posts and share every detail of their lives, sometimes gory and very in-depth. These stories may not always be relevant to their target audience. In these cases the R disappears under the A. The challenge is keeping a balance between all four letters, and I don't think anyone gets it right every time.

I have never had a post that met all four letters and flopped. But I have had posts that met none of them (read: memes) and worked  So I'm not giving up the framework. I just can't tell you, with a straight face, whether a meme earns real aura points or exploits a loophole in the scoring. 

Maybe my dance group friend knows. I'll ask her at practice.