Founder/ CEO Of Connect The Digital Dots: Rachel Simon AKA The Dot Connecting Boss – S3E14 (#110)

S3E14 Rachel Simon.mp3 – powered by Happy Scribe

Boss Uncaged is a weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners and entrepreneurs as they become uncaged trailblazers. In each episode, our hosts, S.A Grant And guests, construct narrative accounts of their collective business journeys and growth strategies, learn key success habits and how to stay motivated through failure. All while developing a Boss Uncaged mindset. Break out of your cage and welcome our host, S.A Grant.

Welcome back to boss Uncaged Podcast. Today we have a special guest, and I had the honor of meeting her through one of my networking groups. And it’s funny because when you get into these networking groups, they’ll break you up into smaller micro groups to kind of talk about off the bar topics. And somehow, some way, literally five out of seven of these off bar conversations, we both end up in the same pitch. Right? So you’ll do that. We obviously kind of built up a friendship. We obviously built in the community. So I’m going to deem her the dot connecting boss. And obviously, Rachel, you can tell them why when you get an opportunity very shortly. So why don’t you tell artists a little bit more about who you are? Rachel? Sure.

Thanks so much for having me. And yes, it’s always fun when we get paired off in our weekly networking group, in our small groups that you’re there, so it makes it more fun. I’m Rachel Simon and I have a company called Connectedots Digital. So my focus is solely on helping professionals utilize LinkedIn in the most effective and authentic way possible. And so that is really everything I focus on. Really focusing on profile, understanding who’s in your network, what kind of content you’re posting, and how to make it really engaging and effective, and then really whatever your specific ultimate goal is, whether that is business development, building thought, leadership, growing the following, and whatnot kind of helping pull it all together.

That’s definitely interesting. Out of all the different platforms in the world, we have Facebook, we have Twitter, and then we’ve had so many sidebar conversations and understand the reasons why you despise some of the other platforms. But how did you really get into LinkedIn? What did that passion for LinkedIn come from?

I think the focus on LinkedIn really grew organically. So I had been doing marketing consulting for a client who sort of doing some email marketing for this client, and they were like, we have an idea. Let’s put a call to action in the email to get people to connect with the CEO. So I checked out the CEO’s profile, and this is somebody who had been in his industry for like 30 years, and the guy had twelve LinkedIn connections. Twelve. So I was like, well, we really can’t put that in an email because people will come to his profile and recognize that this guy never uses LinkedIn, so why would they connect with him? And so started building his presence sort of connecting with his realworld contacts, people he’d done business with, his colleagues, and started seeing that there was so much potential with LinkedIn and that the problem is that majority of users just aren’t aware of how to take full advantage of it. And that kind of coincided with this shift over the last couple of years where LinkedIn has very much changed from being the place you go when you need a job to the place you go when you want to build your business, build your community, build your expertise, or whatever that specific goal is.

And so I think that sort of that timing has made a huge difference in why LinkedIn is so important for really every professional to have the minimum, a really good looking profile, but more than that, a presence.

So the listener does. Listening right now, I want you to hear. Do you not see how passionate this woman is about LinkedIn, right? So you may think about LinkedIn is like, oh, it’s online resume, so I can network. But obviously when you listen to the conversation that evolves in this podcast, she’s going to dive a little bit more deeper into what she does and how she does it. You kind of see that LinkedIn is more than just a networking platform. It’s every single day tool to get the best foot forward to market who you are and your services. So let’s back it up a little bit. Let’s just time travel back. Close your eyes and pull it back a bit. Right? So if you could define yourself right, in three to five words, what three to five words would you choose?

Gosh. That’s SA Grant question. Okay, hold on, let me think about that. Community, like real, like no BS bunny, humorous, engaging, and kind of dorky.

Okay. Bringing up like I said, this is starting with the dorky, right? So we’re time traveling back even more, right? Let’s go back to you and your adolescence. Were you a dorky kid? What were you like as a kid growing up?

I was probably like most kids kind of dorky. But I pulled that up because I love things like karaoke. Karaoke is like cheesy and goofy, but it’s so much fun. And I like to use that as an example because it’s one of those things where some people need a lot of liquid courage before they can pick up the mic. And I am not one of those people like, I don’t care, I want to just have fun. I’m going to pull out whatever ridiculous old school rap or silly song from the just have a good time because it’s fun. So that’s sort of where the dorky level, I think, falls in kind of what’s that phrase, like, dance like, nobody’s watching you, who cares? Don’t worry about what other people think. You just have fun. Be yourself.

Going from being kind of like the kid to being a free spirited person. So it’s kind of weird because you’re saying on one side you’re free spirited, but on the other side, when you get into LinkedIn, I would think that you’re very structured. Is that not a true statement?

There’s a structure to it. But I think that the way that I approach LinkedIn for myself, but also to help my clients, is that you have to show yourself as a bull person because just because it’s professional, it’s work. Right? It’s like Facebook for work. When you’re at work, when you work in an office, you don’t just talk about work with your colleagues or your clients. You talk about what great restaurant you went to over the weekend, what movie you were watching, the TV show that you’re all obsessed with. So you present yourself as a full person at work. And so that’s what I try to convey with LinkedIn is that be your professional, show your expertise, but remember that you have a personality and that’s what people are going to connect with and that’s what people are going to remember.

Nice. So this is going off of like personalities, right? I mean, in the LinkedIn world, like, you’re talking about CEOs all the way to this, say, entry level positions. And I think you’re more so on the executive level, more C suite level. Right. So dealing with that type of personality, which is the atype personality. And I’ll be the first one to tell you that I kind of ride on that line, but I’m being A, and I’m always fighting in my internal demons. Right. So what is the worst experience you’ve had dealing with A type personalities before in your line of business?

I think the hard part is getting that personality type to recognize that not only is it okay, but it is more effective if they can pull back the curtain to a certain extent. So there’s this fear of, well, are people going to think I look unprofessional? Are they going to think I sound silly? Are they going to too much worry like you’re in your head? And the reality is that if you have one post that maybe doesn’t go over great, so what? I mean, it’s gone in a matter of like, what, a day or two, nobody’s going to remember it. So it’s that get out of your own way and just kind of trust the process. But when the strategy is and often is sort of thought of as, I’m just going to share posts from the company page and boom, boom, I’m done. It’s boring. Like nobody’s going to engage and connect with that versus if you can talk about something that people can relate to and talk adjacent to what you do, you don’t only have to talk about what you do. Talk about sort of everything that surrounds what you do, business practices, things you learned in your process of building a business or being in whatever role you are, but kind of not being afraid to just go out and test the waters and see what resonates with people.

Yeah, it’s funny that you bring that up. So, I mean, I think part of your story, when you were saying earlier you were into marketing, you can obviously tell, like, no matter what platform you decide to own, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, it always goes back to marketing, and marketing always goes back to psychology. And then that’s what you just kind of brought up. Right? It’s kind of like utilizing these tools in that environment. So my next question is thinking about that. Right? So you’re dealing with executives, you’re dealing with psychology, you’re dealing with different systems in place. You’re letting people become exposed. Let’s talk about your exposure to a certain extent, like, in your business. How is your business structured? Are you more of an LLC, an S corp or a C corp?

I’m an LLC, so I am my business. My strategy is, like, I have a company page for Connected, US digital, and I do post there maybe once or twice a week. And it’s one of those things. I’m always curious how other solo preneurs do it. If they’re presenting from their company page, do they present from the we? Like to make it sound like we are the company or from the I, since anyone who can pay close attention would recognize that it’s one person posting in a different place. And I’m sort of still trying to figure that one out, but I tend to focus more on my personal LinkedIn profile, putting content out there. And that’s where I have lots of great conversations with people that I’ve gotten to know over the last couple of years, particularly over the last six months, really, because I’ve done a lot more content in the last since January than really ever before.

That’s very interesting. I mean, you bring up a really solid point that’s kind of like, with brand strategy. And it’s kind of one of the things that I always kind of like to educate people on is, like, what’s the overall brand package? You have a company brand like Apple, then you have a Steve Job, which is kind of like the asshole individual brand, and then you have a product like an iPhone brand. So to your point, is it the we or is it I, or do you use both based upon the platforms? And that’s a good question to kind of put out there into the ethos to get some responses on that one, for sure. No, what were you about to say?

I was just saying I don’t really know what the right answer is, honestly, because my hope is at some point I will have more than just me. Right. The goal is to grow a business where you need to take on employees. And so the I will simply become a we, maybe. Do you present we from the beginning? Or again, does it look like silly when people know it’s just you posting.

Interesting. Definitely very interesting. Let’s talk about your systems in place. Right. So on boarding, I’m a new client. I’m like, oh my God, I listen to you on the podcast. I want your services. Like, what does your onboarding process look like if I’m coming into your system.

Sure. So generally I would do like we’d have an initial conversation, talk about who you are, what you do, what your business is, what your goals are on LinkedIn, and sort of where you where your stumbling blocks are. Like, what are the barriers to LinkedIn. So generally those are like, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to write my profile effectively. I don’t have the time to do any of this stuff or I just like everything, I don’t know, like other but time is a big one. Time is a big barrier for people. And so generally, once we have that initial conversation and sort of commit to whatever package or engagement a client is looking for, then it’s pretty simple because I do it all through Google Docs. So I create a document that kind of goes step by step through profiles with every piece of your profile. So your profile photo, is it complete, is it done, good to go? Or do you need a new one? So the recommendation would be to get a new headshot. Your banner image, which is that gray rectangle that too many people have blank on their profile.

Do you have one? If you work for a company, can you get one from the marketing department? If you are a solo business owner, what would you like that to look like? So, I’ve done plenty of design. I designed some in Canva for my clients. I am not a graphic designer, but I can create a nice looking LinkedIn banner in Canva and then really go through like your headline, your about section. And then there’ll be various questions and prompts in each section. And then once that’s complete, I will give it to the client for them to respond to. And the way this has worked really well is that when I have like in the about section, for example, I’ll give multiple questions. They don’t answer all of them, but the ones that resonate when they are responding in the way they speak, then I can take their responses and then really craft those into a narrative between based on what they’ve shared with me and then what we’ve talked about in conversation. And that’s worked out really, really well. Nice. And then we kind of go back and forth on edits. And then once it’s good to go, then either they can make the updates themselves, but often we’ll do a zoom call and kind of do them.

I’ll walk them through how to make all the updates because it’s important for people to understand how to make changes on their profile. Because LinkedIn profiles are not set it and forget it.

Unfortunately, yeah, I think you brought up another really solid point. You’re talking about set it and forget it. And that’s the way LinkedIn used to be perceived. But now to your point, you’re talking about writing copy that’s more of a narrative, more of a marketing stance versus before it was more so not even a headlining it was just kind of like, yes, I worked here, I did this. Hire me that’s Lincoln used to be, but now it’s more so you’re talking about, well, not only did I do this, but this is the results of what I’ve done. This is the person that I’ve helped. And you’re creating this image of someone that you potentially want somebody to work with directly. So in your narrative style of writing, right, how are you picking that apart for your clients? Are you more so looking at the traditional copywriting style or are you just organically writing it based upon the image of that company and the individual?

Kind of I guess the way that I’ve done it is I’m going to take whatever collateral they have as a starting point. So whether that is the bio on their company website, something they have if they did a conference speaking engagement and there’s like an introduction or whatever their current LinkedIn About section is. So it’s good to have sort of like, here’s the starting point for information. But really generally when we have that onboarding call, I can get a good sense of someone’s personality and then the questions that I send them to their about section are very much crafted individually to that person. So, you know, there is some general, like, similarity at the end of the day, but everyone is going to lead from a different point of view. So the way I’ve been sharing recently is like, I will never start an about section with so and so has X number of years of experience doing skill. It’s boring. I don’t care. And I don’t care. Does somebody really care if you have 1015 or 30 years of experience at the end of the day versus when you can lead with a hook?

And the one I like to share is I worked with a woman who had worked in the dental industry. She had a boutique dental marketing firm, and then she had closed that and had transitioned into a sales role, same industry. And so we were changing her profile from kind of the marketing to more sales. And so her about section started with I love the dentist. Yes, you read that right. And then went on from there because that’s something that’s going to be like, well, who loves the dentist? I want to read more about this person. So leading with some way to pull the reader in kind of just like traditional journalism or traditional writing, where you want to hook the reader so that they are interested to understand more about whatever the topic is.

Yeah, I think it’s definitely very cool because to your point, I mean, LinkedIn was kind of the boring stepchild to all these other platforms because it was like that. It was just literally bullet points from people’s resumes that they just copied and paste. So I think I commend you for not only understanding that the industry has changed, but adapting to helping other people understand that the industry has changed as well. So my next question kind of goes into the perception, right? So somebody is listening to this podcast and they’re like, oh my God, I love Rachel. I love what she’s about. I love her energy, I love what she’s talking about. She must have been doing this I don’t know how long the perception of you being an overnight success becomes a reality to that individual person. But how long have you really been on your journey? How long did it take you to get to where you are?

Oh, gosh, my professional career took a major pivot about six years ago because I worked in nonprofit for 15 years.

Wow.

So now there is a connecting line through all of it. And the connecting line is that everything I did prior to kind of going out on my own to do marketing consulting, and again, now launching my company has to do with community and building relationships. So in the nonprofit world, anybody who’s worked there knows that it is all about relationships because you have to build trust and goodwill with whomever your stakeholders are. So whether those are funders, obviously your colleagues, people coming. I did a lot of event planning and like programming. So people coming to program, getting people to participate on the people who are facilitating, getting them to agree to give their time to do that. So building that community, then I really just sort of took those principles and translated those to a digital space. Because LinkedIn is all about building community. I mean, it is not like I’m going to just put my profile up and this is something I’m actually going to work a post about, which is like, you can have a profile, but the real magic happens that you have a presence. And having that LinkedIn presence is about engaging with other people content, putting out content that people want to engage with you on.

You know, getting to know people in various ways, sending out direct messaging in the right way, not in a spammy way, but all that goes into community building, relationship building, trust building, so that you again meet your goals, whatever those goals are. So I think that’s sort of where the connecting dogs are.

Nice. Nice. I mean, I definitely see it Clara’s day. So something part of what you just brought up as far as having a presence, right? And LinkedIn is forever growing. It’s an organic monster, much like Twitter, much like Facebook. And there’s feature sets that people don’t even understand, right? So there’s one particular feature set which I think happened within the last three years or something like that. And that’s what you kind of give us a little bit more definition of it so people can understand this feature. So there’s, hey, I have 10,000 contacts and then I have 3000 followers. There’s obviously a difference between those numbers. How does that work?

That’s a good question. So your connections are the people that you have invited into or accepted into your network. So when I send you a connection request and you accept, you are my connection, my contact. But there might be people who they’re kind of big names and I’m not sure that if I send a connection requester, then they’re going to accept it. So I’m going to follow them. So when I follow them, I can see their content and I can engage with their content. And that’s such a good strategy when you have specific targets. And I’ve done this many times myself. So there’s one guy who’s amazing on LinkedIn and everyone should follow him. His name is John. Isperion. He’s in the UK. He’s so great. He does all kinds of fun experiments. His content is incredible. So maybe about more than a year ago, I was like, well, this guy’s never going to connect with me because he’s a big deal here. So I followed him. I started commenting on his post. He would respond because he was like that. He always responds to people’s comments. Occasionally I would reach out through a DM to ask a specific question.

Like if I was unsure about something, like, you know, could you point me in the direction of where I’d find whatever insert question here? And he was always really nice responding. And I did that for a couple of months to the point when then I felt like, you know, what if I send a connection request now, I think he’ll accept it. And he did. And between that and sort of also Clubhouse, which Clubhouse is a really nice companion to LinkedIn in a lot of ways. Now he’s like one of my LinkedIn friends. So it takes time to build those relationships. Like for myself, I have probably about a thousand more followers than I have connections because there are certain people that I’m not going to accept everybody as a first degree connection. I’m a little you know, everyone has their own sort of philosophy on that, but anyone can follow me, follow away. But it’s a good sort of again, it depends on what people’s goals are. If they want to grow a following, then trying to build their followers is a good strategy. If they want to build, just have a lot of connections, then they should be focused on that.

So it really just depends on what they’re looking to do.

And isn’t there like a limitation whether you’re on a pro LinkedIn account versus a regular account? To kind of have access to the followers, non followers as well.

There’s no limit on followers. There is a 30,000 limit on first degree connection, but that’s a lot of people as first degree connection. So there’s people I know who have tens of thousands of followers and they have 2000 connections.

Nice, cool. So my next question is with everything that you’ve learned about LinkedIn, right, and you are where you are on LinkedIn and like, you just told a story about the connections versus followers and how you use following to then make a partnership, to then become a connection to where now you guys are friends. So if you can go back in time and whisper something in your ears at any time in the last 1020 years to change something, do something one thing differently, what would that one thing be?

Wow, that’s a great question. What would I do? Tell myself, well, ten years ago I would say, Rachel, you’re going to have your own business, so don’t laugh when your husband tells you that you should quit your job. I think in like the LinkedIn world, it would be taking the platform more seriously sooner. I don’t think I really saw the value of it until again I started supporting that one client with it. But I had been on it since 2011, mainly because at my last position when I was still working in nonprofit, I was managing social media for them. And so Facebook was the main channel, but we also had a smaller presence on LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever. So I was like, I guess I better join LinkedIn. But I didn’t really do anything. And in fact, I did an analysis of my posts and I realized that in the first five years I was on LinkedIn, I posted a total of 50 times in five years. But that’s just not how people use the platform back then. But there were some that did and they were the real trailblazers.

Nice, so still trying going back in time a little bit to kind of figure out obviously you started off as a corporate employee, then the entrepreneurial bug hit you and now you’re running your own business. So I want you to think back in time, like, was there ever someone in your family, maybe your dad or your mom, that had that entrepreneurial hustle, that insight? Maybe it could have been like a cousin that ran something that you heard about but you didn’t really engulf yourself in. Like, where does your entrepreneurial side come from?

Honestly, with my husband, he’s the one who has that entrepreneurial drive. And he had talked many will be married 20 years next year. So over in the two decades that we’ve been together, he spent some time working with his dad, who had his own business. He had explored some potential business opportunities, kind of doing things on his own. So he always had that entrepreneurial drive and interest and he is the one who kind of encouraged me back in 2015, the beginning of the year, because I had been in my job for like, eight years, and I was working part time in nonprofit, which is not super financially lucrative. He’s like, you could be doing this on your own and easily make up what your current salary is. And that thought was terrifying to me. It was so scary. I was like, you are out of your mind. Why would anybody hire me to do this stuff? And it took me several months to think about it and to kind of be like, okay, let’s just see what happens. And he was 100% right. I mean, it took no time because I had such strong connections in my community, because I had been working in the community for so long.

Someone who I knew who immediately was like, I have a client that you might be able to help with. You want to come to a meeting? Like a month after I had quit? And I was like, okay. So it’s really amazing when someone can see something in you that you can’t see for yourself. And now I’m like, I just am so grateful because I absolutely love what I do, and I’m incredibly proud of what we built together. My husband has helped me a lot with on the strategy side and just talking through work stuff, and he sits up with me talking about LinkedIn all day long.

Nice. So you talk about your husband, you talk about your family a little bit. So considering that your husband has the entrepreneurial hustle, you also have it now. How do you guys work with the balancing of the entrepreneurial hustle and your family life?

The easier part is our kids are teenagers, so they don’t prefer similarly age to yours, so they don’t need as much hands on time as they used to when they were little. I think it would be a lot harder if this was 510 years ago. I mean, ten years ago for sure when they were little. So my kids are going to be in 9th and 11th grade. I’ve got one that drives. It makes a huge difference in not having to constantly be going places left and right, driving kids here, there, and everywhere. And I think it’s just a balance. The nice thing is, like, working for yourself, you work when you need to work. So if I have to go do something in the middle of the day, I’m going to go do something in the middle of the day. And I can always work later in the evening or on the weekends. I don’t feel like it’s a burden because I enjoy what I do, and I think that’s where the difference is.

Nice with that. It’s interesting because our morning networking meetings are like 800 in the morning, which is not too early, but they’re pretty early. So what is your morning routines? Your. Morning habits look like.

Yeah, I get up early. I’m usually up at like 630 coffee immediately upon waking up, and then I go work out in my basement. And that’s really it. So that’s why on our networking calls, I’m almost never put together because I’ve generally just finished my workout and I’m like racing to get my second cup of coffee. Bookstore 08:00 start. But I’ve always worked out that’s like a high priority for me just in life in general. And so now when COVID hit, I had to transition that from the gym to my basement. But it’s great because it saves me a ton of time and can just run down there, get my workout in, come up and get on with my day.

Nice. So, I mean, with that, this next question is essentially a three part question. And I think that you’re very astute and you speak about marketing, you speak about psychology indirectly, even though I know that you know way more psychology than you want to allude to. And then you’re talking about like, LinkedIn. So first part of this question is, what books have you read on your journey to get you to where you are? Second part is what books or audiobooks are you reading or listening to now? And the third part is, have you had an opportunity to author any books yet?

Okay, that’s a great question. So the book that really showed me that I was on to something, this was probably about five years ago was this book. It’s called “LinkedIn unlocked”. The author is Melonie Dodaro. So she’s out of the Netherlands maybe she’s Canadian, but she lives in Europe. So I read this book and I was like, everything that she’s talking about is stuff that I’m doing for that one client. And so it was so gratifying to be like, this is not crazy. This is not a crazy thing to be doing to help people with their LinkedIn presence in this specific way because a lot of it is not earth shattering. I mean, it is common sense to a certain degree. So this was really told me that there is a lot to be had here by following a specific methodology that I kind of was just doing organically. So that made me feel like this is the right path. The book that I think is really, really helpful, there’s a bunch of great books, like people that I know on LinkedIn that have authored books, and I already mentioned him once. John Espirian has this awesome book called “Content DNA” and what I love about John’s book is that he doesn’t just talk about LinkedIn, he talks about how your content has to have the same DNA across all platforms. So your website, your social media, your email, people need to be able to pull out and understand the building blocks of, like, who you are, what you do and what you’re all about and what you talk about. Consistently everywhere you are. And I think that’s such a smart way to kind of approach content in general, marketing in general. It’s a really good book. Plus it’s kind of funny. Right now I don’t know if I’m reading anything professionally. I’ve read like a handful of marketing books, but right now I don’t think there’s anything and I have not written a book and I don’t know, we’ll see. I mean, the thing is there’s like a lot of LinkedIn books out there and again, similar to like the first one, they all kind of say the same thing because it’s all kind of the same process. Everybody has their own perspective and the way they talk about it. But I haven’t seen one that’s like I never thought about it from that point of view. So I think for social proof it’s great. And I really admire people that have authored a book. Tremendously.

nice. So I mean, that goes into like my next question, like, you’re on LinkedIn, right? And it’s always a difficult task for anyone outside. Well, actually the people that are inside these systems. So prime example, if I was a Facebook ad guy and that’s all I ever did, and Facebook changes and then morph so much. LinkedIn is organic in that sense and it changes and then morph so much. Where do you see yourself in regards to LinkedIn in the next 20 years?

That’s one where it’s like, who knows where LinkedIn is going? But if things are going to continue down the path of like, really focused on relationships, I mean, they’ve just hired a whole team about around community and content creators. They’re really putting a lot of emphasis on creators because only like 1% of LinkedIn users are actually creating content, which is a teeny, teeny tiny amount. So if LinkedIn is putting a lot of time and energy into supporting one to 2% of its users, then that feels like a place where there’s going to be a lot of growth and opportunity. So I think that focusing on all of the components of the platform where you can disdifferentiate yourself. It’s always going to be used by recruiters. It’s always going to have a job component to it. It’s always going to have a sales component to it, period. That being said, in any of those verticals, the content piece and the creator piece can come forward.

Nice. So talking about like content creating, you’re talking about managing a particular platform that it’s a monster and it’s ever growing. You have to have particular tools in place, right? So as far as software applications, what tools outside of LinkedIn do you use that you would not be able to do what you’re doing without?

Mine are pretty simple. I mean, Google Docs for organization. So that’s, again, like what I said earlier, that’s what I use when I’m helping clients craft their profiles. But then I also have, I think, my documents, like 70 pages long now where I have basically like a library of all my content, so I can go back and look at posts and switch them up a little bit, repurpose them, because a lot of the stuff I talk about is evergreen. So LinkedIn doesn’t do a great job of letting you kind of search through your previous posts. So popping them all into some sort of library, whatever that might be, is important if you’re going to create a lot of content. So Google Doc and Canva got to have Canva, use Canva for every design component of my brand down to my logo. But I use Canva all the time again, to create banners, to create graphics, to create carousel posts. I think they just rolled out a video component where you can film videos through Canva, you can create audiograms. So canva is so great.

Nice. So going into final words of wisdom, right, let’s niche this down a little bit. Let’s say I’m an executive on LinkedIn and I’m listening to you speak and I’m like, okay, everything she’s saying makes complete sense to me. What is one bit of word of wisdom that you would want to deliver to that person to help them to understand the next steps they need to take on their LinkedIn profile?

For a CEO, I’m going to answer this from two different CEO. The CEO of a large company with multiple employees and a marketing department. The advice would be LinkedIn for your company is going to be more effective if it goes beyond the company page. Meaning you have a role through your own personal profile to connect, engage and build relationships with your potential customers, targets, referral sources, fans, whatever those might be. Too often in larger companies, the strategy is throw content up on the company page and direct the employees just to like those posts or share them. And then boom, boom, we’re done. But it’s just not that effective as a strategy. So that would be sort of for big CEO, for CEO like me, who you are running a small company, whether it’s just you or you have just a handful of employees, you are your company’s best face. You are the face of your company. Nobody can talk about your company with as much excitement, passion and enthusiasm as you can. And so utilizing LinkedIn to build relationships, to get people to see your love and enthusiasm for what you do and why you do it, will only benefit the growth of your company in the long run.

So depending there is a role for company pages are important. They really are. And so they shouldn’t be neglected. But when the emphasis is imbalanced, where it’s like company page and then the personal is just like here, it needs to be the opposite. It needs to be the personal has the more weight to it, and the company page can support the personal profile.

So how could somebody get in contact with you. I mean, obviously LinkedIn, right?

Yes, sir. They should find me on LinkedIn. I look very much like my picture, if you’re listening, there’s a few Rachel Simons out there, but my picture has a very bright teal background. So connect with me on LinkedIn. You can go to my website, , https://connectthedots.digital.com But those are probably the two best ways. I mean, I’m on LinkedIn all day long. I have a post going right now, and it was about a poll because I got a weird connection request. So I was asking a question about it and someone was like, I’ve got work to do. I don’t have time for this stuff. And my response was like, LinkedIn is my work, so that’s why I’m asking the question. This is what I do. I’m on here all day long, so I tend to never miss messages and things like that because I’m always there. But it’s such a great it is such a great platform and people should just take advantage of it because they’re missing the opportunity to really just connect with people that I have friends all over the world. I’ve not through LinkedIn. Like, I could go on a world tour and have places to visit on every continent. Like, how cool is that?

Yeah, definitely. It’s cool. I mean, it sounds a lot like podcasting in a sense. It’s kind of like the more and more you get engulfed into that core niche and you reach out outside of your local network, it becomes, you know, the world becomes really, really small when you think about it.

Totally. I mean, and there’s so many, like, amazing, smart people all over the world you can learn something from. And I think that that’s an important way to look at it, too, is that it’s not just about what I’m sharing. It’s that I learn something every day by engaging with content in the newsfeed or from people who I know, tips that I will save and bookmark to use later. There’s so much knowledge there to take full advantage of. And sort of the last thing that I would want to kind of share is that the real key to LinkedIn is about is give to get. So if you just throw content out there and you’re like, okay, I did my post for the week by LinkedIn. See you next week, it’s not going to be as successful. And then if you take the time to comment on other people’s posts and comment consistently and always, always respond to comments on your content, because if someone is taking the time to engage with your post and you don’t respond to it. It would be like if somebody struck up a conversation with you at a networking event and you just kind of turned around and walked away. So responding, engaging, just be giving, and you will see the benefit. It just takes time. Time and patience.

Nice. So with that, we’re going to go to the bonus round, right?

Oh Bonus round.

Bonus questions. This is a question that this is one of my bonus questions. I usually don’t ask because sometimes I don’t see the value in asking it, but today I definitely see the value in asking you this particular question. So if money wasn’t a factor, would you still be doing exactly what you’re doing right now?

Yes, probably. But I could do it from, like Fiji or something, right? I could do it from anywhere.

Yes. It’s pretty cool. You’re so passionate about LinkedIn. It kind of goes back to our networking group. And Donnie had made a comment one time about you want to hire someone that is not only passionate, but they only work on that one particular platform. So you’re not necessarily saying you’re marketing on LinkedIn and Twitter, you’re marketing and teaching, educating 100% on LinkedIn, which makes you a LinkedIn professional to where you could have more insight than someone that’s diversified across the board. And so that’s why I wanted to ask you that question, because I knew your answer is going to be, yeah, hell yeah, I still be doing what I’m doing. Because you love what you’re doing.

I do love what I’m doing, yeah. I mean, there is obviously, like you said, there’s marketing sort of like basics that go along with everything. And so I can certainly speak to how it fits into the overall marketing strategy, because that is one thing that I have reiterated with clients multiple times, is that LinkedIn is awesome, but it cannot be. You have to have more than one tool in your bucket. You cannot just focus on one. LinkedIn cannot be it because it has to go in concert with whatever other marketing tools you are using, whether that’s your website, email, marketing, other social platforms, podcasting, whatever it is. It’s a great clubhouse, but sometimes people kind of put it all like, okay, LinkedIn, we’re done, right?

Yeah, got you. So my next bonus question for you is, if you could spend 24 hours with anyone, dead or alive, uninterrupted, for those 24 hours, who would it be and why?

Oh, that would be as easy as my dad. I would spend it with my dad. I lost my dad almost 17 years ago, and so I think he’d be pretty amazed at what I’m doing now. And I think we’d have lots to talk about, about everything. So that one is an easy question.

Yeah. Definitely interesting to think about when you lose somebody and have an opportunity to go back and to communicate with them again. I think it goes back to just building legacies. You not only want to see your predecessors grow up to be bigger and larger than you are, but it would be really interesting to communicate with them after you’re gone. I think anyone that’s into legacy, they always think about that. What would it be like 100 years from now if I can talk to my great grandkid 100%.

I mean, and my dad never was able to meet my kids. Missed the majority of my true adulthood. So I think that he would be pretty proud. I’d like to think so.

This is the time of the podcast that every time I interview somebody, I like this part because the microphone becomes yours, you become the host, and you have an opportunity to ask me any questions that may have come up during this interview.

How do you feel about LinkedIn? Do you feel like it is? Where does it fit into your strategy?

It’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of my strategy because I’ve had dozens and dozens of conversations about LinkedIn. I’ve worked on LinkedIn profiles before, more so from the automation side, like creating content, posting content, and then following that up based upon the content that you post. But because LinkedIn is becoming more of a social platform, which originally it wasn’t, I’m more of a social integrated guy. Like right now, Facebook is my platform. Second to Facebook would be instagram. And I’m using the podcast to fulfill these two platforms. And then I’m moving more into YouTube because I can get more animated. But LinkedIn, it’s taking pieces of the pie and leading from examples of what Facebook has done and what Twitter has done and what YouTube has done. So not like you can put videos on. I got one guy that interviewed, his entire profile is based on LinkedIn, but he’s streaming all his content from YouTube to LinkedIn. So it’s becoming more and more as a larger facet. The only thing I don’t like about LinkedIn currently right now, it’s still kind of spammy in nature.

It is, yes. And that’s actually what that poll that I have going on is about because I got this like spammy connection request that was the exact same one that I got six months ago and I was like word for word from the same person and the spam is annoying. I host a clubhouse room every week with a couple awesome comeds and it’s on that topic, it is about bots and automation on LinkedIn because it’s a problem. There’s a lot of fake accounts, like a lot of fake accounts, and it ruins it for the people that are looking to build real relationships, which is unfortunate, but I think it’s getting a little better. LinkedIn is cracking down on those automation tools a lot, like significantly. And people, unfortunately, if they’re utilizing them, are risking their account. They could potentially lose access to their account if they’re using a third party automation tool. So buyer beware.

I like the automation in a sense. And this is what I use the automation for on LinkedIn. If it’s someone’s birthday, automatically send them a birthday reminder with my face general information. Happy birthday, I hope you enjoyed day. Nothing work related whatsoever. And then I may do that 100 times a week or maybe 1020 times per day based on the son’s birthday. But then maybe 1% of those people will respond. And the people that respond, then I’ll start communicating. Then I’ll follow back up and say, did you have a good birthday? What do you do for your birthday? Hope you had fun. And then we start a conversation and build into more of a a relationship from that. That’s what I use it for. In addition to that, when people get new jobs, when they transfer, or they get new opportunities, telling them congratulations, that’s what I’ll use the Pod for. Congratulations on your new position. I wish you the best happy and successful new career, and that’s it. And the people that respond, then I’ll communicate with them. But the people that send a spam like, oh, I see you got a podcast. I would love to monitor your podcast and market it for you.

It’s kind of like I don’t even know I don’t even know your name. Like, who are you and why are you trying to market my podcast not knowing that my podcast talks about marketing, right?

Yeah. Well, it’s basically like the equivalent of you walked into when we go to the Badass Business Summit in September. If you walk up to somebody and just launch right into a sales pitch without saying hello, you just wouldn’t do that in person. So why people do it on LinkedIn through messaging is beyond me. And what’s worse is when they do it in a connection request. I mean, I guess maybe it’s better because then you know what you’re getting and you can just ignore it and move on with your day. But it is really frustrating to get those spammy messages, especially when it’s so obvious. They didn’t look they don’t know who you are. They didn’t look at your profile. So the best thing to do is to report those. Just report them because LinkedIn needs to know that that activity is going on. People sometimes think that’s a little harsh, but I think that you need to use the tools that they have given us in order to make the platform better.

So, I mean, going into closing, my last question is, what are your thoughts about the way I’m using automation as far as just contacting someone to say Happy birthday, or contacting them to say congratulations on their new position?

I think the birthday ones is innocuous, but the new positions can be tricky. And I’ll use an example. I got one of those because I added on my profile. The main club that I’m connected to on Clubhouse did a whole big launch. They’re really going all in on Clubhouse, and they had a website, and they have a LinkedIn company page. So we were asked to add lead moderator as a new position. So I got a message like that. Congratulations on your new position. Of course, it was followed with, like, a sales pitch from a financial planner so I think you just have to be careful of that because sometimes things may get pulled into your search where it’s not really a new position.

Got you.

You know what I mean? And my response to the guy was like, I have a new position. That’s news to me. So just I would be well aware of that. And again, if you’re using a Chrome extension to send those, LinkedIn is scraping people’s profiles to see if there is code from any certain third party tools. And so I guess the question is, is it worth the potential risk to your profile to save a little bit of time?

Something to consider, I think on that note, I think that’s a solid question to close out the podcast on for the listener listening to ask yourself that question and pose it, the reality is it okay if you lose LinkedIn or you want to keep LinkedIn? That’s really what you’re saying. You could save some time, but maybe take an extra five minutes to keep your account active, maybe more worth your time.

Again, we are at their mercy. Just like every platform. We are the user, we’re also the product. And so it is their discretion. And technically, if you break their terms of service, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they can take it. They can take action against your account. So if you’ve taken the time to build up thousands upon thousands of connections and you suddenly didn’t have those, what would you do? I would cry personally.

You make me think I need to go and export out all my contacts right now just in case.

That’s a good thing to do. Cool.

Well, I definitely appreciate you coming on the show and taking time out, your busy schedule to drop the nuggets that you drop. I think you definitely gave some people some more insight about LinkedIn outside of the Monday and everyday resume stature that LinkedIn is originally known for. And I definitely appreciate you for that.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was really fun to talk to you.

SA Grant. Over and out.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Boss Uncaged. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming an uncage trailblazer. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share the podcast. If this podcast has helped you or you have any additional questions, reach out and let me know. Email me at ask@sagrant.com or drop me your thoughts via a call or text at 762233boss. That’s 762-233-2677. I would love to hear from you. Remember, to become a Boss Uncaged, you have to release your inner beasts. SA Grant signing off.

Listeners of Boss Uncaged are invited to download a free copy of our host SA Grant insightful ebook, become an Uncaged Trailblazer. Learn how to release your primal success in 15 minutes a day. Download now at www.bossuncaged.com/freebook.