353: Elevate your Personal Brand, with Nina Blankenship
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Learn how to create and enhance your personal brand, and how can you encourage your employees to do the same.
Nina Blankenship, CEO of Let’s Brainstorm, is this weeks guest on the Conquer Local Podcast. Nina comes from a background at LinkedIn where she spent the last five years in Singapore, won two of LinkedIn’s prestigious awards, and is a contributing 2020 LinkedIn Learning Author “Video Strategies for High Engagement.” In this episode, Nina walks us through a viral video strategy, how to activate your employees to become brand ambassadors, and how to elevate your personal brand. She also brings a special treat for our conquerors: use promo code CONQUERLOCAL and receive Nina’s new book, Elevating your Personal Brand, for FREE!.
Nina Blankenship is an award-winning marketer and has five years of experience working for LinkedIn in NYC and the Asia Pacific Region. She has helped thousands of corporate customers to gain global recognition through media. Nina has always challenged her clients to be their best, and that helped her gain global recognition for the winner of the Open, Honest and Constructive award at LinkedIn. Nina is back in the USA and has started her own Viral Video and Marketing company called Let’s Brainstorm. Let’s Brainstorm’s mission is to elevate corporations through collaborative brainstorming sessions, our genius-level team curates’ custom video you’ve been missing for brand elevation.
Nina is Japanese/American and enjoys spending time with her family and eating delicious food! Now she is ready to share her secrets to help your company go viral!
Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.
Introduction
George: Welcome to this week’s edition of the Conquer Local Podcast. My name is George Leith. Today, we are being joined by Nina Blankenship and we were introduced to Nina here over the last month or so. She has been working for LinkedIn for the past six years in Singapore, and then COVID hit and like many other professionals, Nina was forced to leave her position. And she now has started her own organization called Let’s Brainstorm. And she’s bringing a lot of the learnings that she has from working at LinkedIn. Nina was awarded the 2018 Best Global Business Partner on Global Search and Staffing team for LinkedIn. She was nominated for the Global Leverage Award. And in 2020, she won the LinkedIn Learning Author for her “Video Strategies for High Engagement.” She is an expert in how to leverage video on LinkedIn. And we’re gonna learn all about Nina Blankenship’s history at LinkedIn, how you can utilize the platform to grow viral video for your organization and how to elevate your personal brand in just seven days. Nina Blankenship, the CEO of Let’s Brainstorm coming up next on the Conquer Local Podcast.
George: It’s the next edition of the Conquer Local Podcast and joining us all the way from beautiful Orlando, Florida, Nina Blankenship, the CEO of Let’s Brainstorm. Nina, welcome to the show.
Nina: Thank you. Thank you for having me. What a nice, warm welcome.
George: We’re very excited to have you on the show and learn a little bit about you and your journey. I do wanna mention, 2020 LinkedIn Learning Author for “Video Strategies for High Engagement,” that’s one award number two 2019 nominated for Global Leverage Award and awarded 2018’s Best Global Business Partner, Global Search and Staffing team. So congratulations on those three awards.
Nina: Thank you. And I’m really gonna be giving the inside scoop of why I personally believe I was recognized for those awards because, at LinkedIn, the talent is phenomenal. You know, so nowadays it’s, how do you stand out from not only your competitors but how do you get promoted internally within a company and also how do you gain global recognition? So I hope to be able to share that with everybody today.
George: Well, I, and I was looking at the bio and going through it, you were at LinkedIn for six years in Singapore. Tell us about that experience.
Nina: Yeah, so basically what, how I even got there just to give a little bit of a background. I first started out with LinkedIn in the New York office and I ended up being top sales in North America for our media products and within the Search and Staffing division. And then I ended up moving to Singapore as they created a role for me to consult about 17 sales and, you know, relationship managers that their job was providing consultation to all LinkedIn products. So my division was really just focusing on the media solutions, but the goals of our corporate clients were to generate leads, create an awareness. They wanted to have a buzz for their brand, many of the leaders within those corporate companies, they wanted to be viewed as thought leaders, as trusted advisors, you know, people that were well-respected. And through that, once LinkedIn in 2017, ended up launching video to its platform it was really exciting being on the media team because I just initially took, you know, a love to video and just trying it out on my cell phone initially while at the same time advocating and consulting for our clients to try video on LinkedIn. And so in the combination of consulting our clients with viral video strategies and actually enabling their employees to do video from their cell phone, because a lot of, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that companies think that they have to have a professional video that may have cost 20, 30, 100,000 dollars. And it’s not true. My job at LinkedIn was analyzing the click-through rates and the performance rates of all the videos. And it’s pretty much 50-50. 50% it can be just organic using your cell phone as long as it’s done correctly. You can have just as much of a high engagement for your video as a professionally produced video at the same time. So, long story short, what ended up happening is I started, I was scared, I wasn’t sure what was gonna happen, and I just started doing videos from my cell phone, started posting them, trying to educate our clients. And also internally at LinkedIn, what I was doing, what are some tips? How can I help people? How can you improve engagement? And what are some just overall best practices? And from that, I ended up getting a lot of likes, a lot of views to my profile and through that traction, it ended up snowballing. And through that, I ended up, I believe, why, for example, a company like LinkedIn has so much great talent, and I’m competing against other people for these internal awards at LinkedIn, why are they gonna choose me? And I believe that personally, it’s because I took the initiative with my cell phone. I was in top of mind. So when they logged into the LinkedIn platform, they saw my videos that had thousands of likes and many views. And that ended up enabling me to be able to be a LinkedIn Learning video author, as you mentioned for the course called “Video Strategies for High Engagement.” And then I also, you know, it planted the seed to be honest for Let’s Brainstorm, which is the company that we actually launched on September 8th and I’m excited to be here.
George: So the new organization that you are CEO of is called Let’s Brainstorm, the big launch on the eighth and taking from those years that you were at LinkedIn earning those awards and learning how to use viral video, that is now the core of the new organization. And you also have authored a book as well.
Nina: Absolutely. So just going back to, I wanna share some really cool stories that, even in my LinkedIn learning course, just to give you a little bit of behind the scenes of how that was done, I have two specific examples that I think are really unique. And one of the mistakes that I feel like many corporate companies or even small businesses don’t do is they don’t, you know, leverage their employees enough. And what I mean by that is actually using the face of their employees in video and having their employees post that video content, out from their individual profiles out to their network. So for example, one of the strategies that ended up having a huge success with one of my favorite clients, his name is Martin, he works for Korn Ferry, which is an international executive search firm that you may know of. And his goal was he wanted to generate leads to a webinar. So what we ended up doing, my favorite coworker Radhika Shankar and I, we went over to the Singapore office and trained 10 of his employees, how to do body language for video, which many people are scared in front of the camera because they’ve never had that training or many corporations will say, “Hey, everyone, I want all of you to post,” but they’re never given any direction or strategy or what’s the overall objective that we’re gonna be doing together as a group. Another big pitfall is that many CEOs will say, “everybody needs to post,” but then they don’t post themselves. So when you go about a strategy together as a unified group, which is what Korn Ferry did, Martin was the head of this. And a lot of people also just have a big misconception that at LinkedIn, everything that you need to do needs to be, 100% professionally orchestrated. And a lot of people are scared to try new things. And so what he did was really innovative and, you know, we helped to consult him on this, is that through leveraging his employees’ connections. So for example, if you’re a small company, like just do some math here, right? If you have 20 employees, on average every single one of your employees has 500 connections, right? So that’s 10,000 first degree connections on LinkedIn. That doesn’t even include like your second or your third-degree connections. Once that video starts getting some likes and some engagement some comments that are gonna go out to even more people, right? So that’s what we did. We created a strategy that harnessed those connections of your employees with the overall goal of gaining attendees to the webinar. And the result was within eight days, he ended up generating 1,900 leads to his webinar, which, and then it was, the majority of that was through the organic growth, which was fantastic. So that’s one client example that I think, more, anybody can do this, right? Any of you that are listening can absolutely do this.
George: Well, the one thing that I find fascinating is, you have a set of skills from inside LinkedIn, and you have these lessons that you’ve learned over your career. You mentioned a couple of great stories. I’d love to get to the second one here in a moment. With Let’s Brainstorm and as you start to move out into the corporate world, you’ve had to move into this business because of this thing that we’re all dealing with, the COVID item and come back to the US, do you feel that LinkedIn’s prominence is bigger now with the fact that more of us are online and, you know, what we call the COVID effect it’s had a number of different types of effect, but, you know, are people consuming more information through LinkedIn?
Nina: Absolutely. LinkedIn ends up being the number one most trusted platform, time, and time again. And one of the things that’s really interesting that I think has really evolved from LinkedIn is that initially it was viewed as a place for people to connect and for people to look for jobs. And now it’s really changing where people go there to learn. And that’s why I think everybody as a business owner can really take advantage of their knowledge from their own experiences and teach people something new. Every single one of us has our own experiences and something unique that we bring to the table. And you probably, even yourself, George, you have like three tips that you can teach somebody about whether it’s a podcast or just entrepreneurial lifestyle people want to learn from you. And so if you’re able to package this up, you’ll be surprised how many followers, how many new conversations that are inbound that you’ll end up generating for your business.
George: No, I’ve been a big proponent of LinkedIn for a long time. And I’ve noticed in the last six, eight months that, when we do some video and to your point, it’s actually interesting the professional stuff and then the stuff that is, a couple takes in because Colleen’s particular I’m gonna use Colleen. No, but it does, it doesn’t matter. Both versions, the real pro stuff, we bring John Miller in and the big camera that gets good engagement, but the stuff we just pull off with a selfie, type video that gets great engagement as well and it’s very authentic.
Personal Brand Development
George: So we’ve talked about the viral video strategy, big believer, we’ve talked about activating employees and getting that network effect, and then this idea of elevating the personal brand. And I’ve pushed this for a long time. I believe that salespeople take a page from real estate agents, they build a personal brand, but I find that a lot of corporations are, oh, do I really wanna build Johnny’s personal brand because then Johnny might leave? How, do you have an answer for that? And I know we’re gonna talk about building personal brands, so I’d love to get your take on it.
Nina: So just to clarify, to let everybody know what we’re talking about when we mean personal brand, your personal brand is the public’s perception of you. Right? And as a corporation, as you mentioned George, many companies are really scared to invest in their individual employees in fear that they might leave. It’s kind of like, a really good analogy of this is when I first started working at LinkedIn back in 2015 and clients would say, “Well, I don’t wanna tag my employees to LinkedIn because then somebody else is gonna steal them, on the company page.” You’re in fear of that, right? But at the end of the day, what ends up happening is when you look at just like when you’re creating a logo for your own business, right? The logo that ends up having the best logo that impacts your engagement rate, which impacts the cost per lead, which impacts potential revenue for your company. So the content that you create for your company is really important that you’re creating content with a high engagement rate. And one of the best ways to do that is by leveraging your individual employees. Your individual employees by your audience are trusted more than your company name usually. Nine times out of 10, I’ll say, people know that person and they’ll trust what they say versus for example, a CEO. So it’s really important to be able to leverage not only that person but also, as I mentioned earlier, with activating employees, that person’s individual connections as well. But you gotta go about doing it the right way. So I wouldn’t just say, go ahead and, you know, you wanna elevate the personal brand of all employees of your company and just push them out there and let them say whatever they want, because that’s another big fear that people are worried. I don’t know, I don’t trust that person, or I don’t think that they’re camera friendly. Well, chances are, you probably have never trained them on how to talk like you, right? Not everybody’s a professional podcast or public speaker such as yourself and also many people, as I mentioned earlier, body language, huge fear, and also a third fear is people don’t know how to post for social media. They don’t know how to write. They’ve been taught how to write in school, but not for social media. So this book really covers that. To really teach people now in this digital age, working from home, as you mentioned, how can you stand out? Now we’re all working from home. So whether it’s, you’re wanting to stand out amongst your coworkers so you wanna gain clients, or maybe you just wanna work smarter at scale, right? So what are the best tools that are needed? So for example, the book goes over which apps to use from your cell phone, which you can take video that auto display captions at the bottom. How to write, how to use, what kind of body language works best, what kind of images, what topics work best for LinkedIn and for all the listeners, for Conquer Local I just wanna be able to give a free gift of the book called “How To Elevate Your Personal Brand.” And till the end of 2020, if you type in CONQUERLOCAL as one word, as a promo code, you’ll be able to receive a complimentary copy of my book.
George: Oh, well, thank you for that. I’m sure our listeners will love it. I wanna ask a couple of questions. What shouldn’t we put on LinkedIn? What’s like just do not do this?
Nina: Yeah, absolutely. So I would just say, anything that maybe your boss doesn’t want you to post, you have to think about, if you work for a very conservative company, you do wanna go ahead and get corporate guidelines, but just so you know like LinkedIn, if you’re, LinkedIn doesn’t control the content that you post on your company page in terms of your employees’ corporate brand guidelines, just so you know, right? So if your company ever goes and complains to LinkedIn, “Oh, so and so didn’t follow our brand guideline.” Like LinkedIn is not really gonna care about that. It’s really more so about making sure that you’re posting things that follow our content rules, which, you know, or making sure that you’re not posting things. For example, you may not know this, but we don’t allow things to be posted in terms of the paid side related to cryptocurrency, things related to alcohol, related to gambling, those types of topics. But if you are speaking from your own perspective, giving out tips and advice related to your professional career, your own personal opinion. Another thing that I would recommend is that a lot of people think that they have to know it all, and that’s not true. You don’t need to know it all. And you can actually ask a question to your network if you don’t know the answer. You can just write something to the extent that, question or survey. And now people are going to be doing like polls on LinkedIn as one of the new features. So you can always survey your audience, survey your connections and ask them if you don’t know the answer, just be yourself is what I would say to that.
George: It’s not Facebook though. It’s a professional lens. And I find, you know, there is a bit of a train wreck on there every once in a while, but I also find that LinkedIn kind of polices itself where you, somebody will post something and you’ll see the comments underneath and go, “Don’t post that here, this is a professional network.” And that’s just happening virally. We’re seeing online.
Nina: Yeah, I mean, that’s something that I think LinkedIn trains our community to do because we don’t want junk. And if you see the little three dots on your post or any post that shows up on your newsfeed, and you could train that algorithm of what you want it to display to you, by giving the feedback that you don’t want this type of content to be shown towards you. But absolutely we don’t want, you know, professional content to be, I mean, unprofessional content to be displayed on our network. So, yeah, I would want to make sure that we have high integrity and ethical content and not something that’s spammy as well. If there’s something about your weekend that is not related to your work that goes somewhere else, not LinkedIn, right?
George: Absolutely. And then that professional photography, not the picture of the beach and that type of thing, having something that is, it’s almost like the photo on the back of the business card that, the real estate agent gives you it’s professional and it represents your professional brand. Now what about this that happens and it, I’m sure drives you as much nuts as it drives me where you get the message, “Hey George, how’s it going?” And then the very next message they try to sell you something and it comes through InMail, you know, definitely, a do not do.
Nina: Yeah, I get a lot of those. And, for those people that are doing that, if you’re on the call, they’ll know it themselves because they’ll have a low and middle acceptance rate, and then eventually they’ll end up getting blocked. So-
George: Right, the algorithm is built to protect against that type of thing and you used the word spammy earlier, that’s a spammy thing to do, and your chances of success are quite low.
Nina: Right, so what I would recommend maybe instead is why don’t you just post a video, giving some tips related to your services, or maybe you can contact Let’s Brainstorm we can try to think of a fun way to promote your services or your product rather than just spamming. One example, I’ll give you, LinkedIn, even our own relationship managers, this guy, his name is Richard Sexton that I worked with in Singapore and I, once I got comfortable with video, I trained all my team to do video themselves and enabling them go ahead and try it and imposed it. And what had happened is that in the past, there’s an actual screenshot of this WhatsApp text message it’s in my book, but he received a message from his client that said, “Oh, Rich, I’m really swamped right now, I’m not interested.” And then Rich actually did a video from his profile, explaining the three benefits of purchasing a LinkedIn corporate product rather than using the online version of a product called Recruiter that we have. And then what ended up happening is that he ended up generating inbound leads. And that same client that blew him off previously sent him another text to say, “Hey, Rich, I saw your text message and let’s chat. Are you free for a meeting next week?” So for all those people that are spamming the network, what I’d recommend, if you see that you have a low InMail acceptance rate, which for example, in the US is like anything below 20%, then you would wanna maybe change up your strategy to instead educate your network, giving them some tips and benefits, instead of always just asking. If you’re always just asking, and you’re not giving anything in return, you kind of come across selfish.
LinkedIn and Learning
George: Well, we’ve now come full circle because at the very beginning of our interview, you were talking about LinkedIn as the place that people go to learn. And I’m seeing more and more these beautiful certificates of people who have completed LinkedIn Learning courses online. It’s one of the core pillars of the platform, but by delivering that value from a learning standpoint, and that’s right in your feed. So it’s by having the right content there, that is that nurturing, teaching, building that brand. And then you get that inbound demand where they raise their hand and say, “Boy, I’ve been following you online. I see some value there. I’d like to learn more. And I’m finding a really nice chunk of inbound leads coming through my own LinkedIn profile now.” We invest, we because it’s not just me, there’s a team of people that are working inside that profile. Do you find that in larger organizations where it’s, they’re, you mentioned the whole staff, but there’s this congruent effort to use this channel properly to engage that audience? It’s growing, but is it everyone’s doing it, 50% are doing it. I just like to kind of set the stage for our audience that if I haven’t done it yet, I’m not late to the party or, you know, where do you think it is something that a business owner or that one of our listeners should be adopting?
Nina: You know, that’s a tough question because it depends on the target audience. From my perspective, just working there from 2015, I would say that how it initially started is, you know, people from a sales point of view, they would be the ones sending out the InMail messages. And now it’s completely evolved where you get people like Gary Vaynerchuk, who is a media guru, who now is saying, “Forget all other platforms. I now wanna invest all of my time on LinkedIn,” ’cause just like you, George, he’s saying, “I’m noticing I’m getting a lot more quality leads.” And I really enjoyed my time at LinkedIn. It was so valuable because, and rewarding, and the reason for that is ’cause many people would say, “Hey, I’ve invested on other social media platforms, and yes, the cost per lead on the paid advertising side is more expensive. But when you actually look at the conversion rate of those leads, that’s where LinkedIn ends up being the cheapest.”
George: Well, it’s interesting you bring up Gary V because a really good friend of mine, Jim Thompson, who used to run audience over at Billboard magazine and Hollywood Reporter is actually doing analytics for Gary V right on his senior team. And he was telling me the other day that, that is a big chunk of the lead gen that they’re doing and the brand building that they’re doing on LinkedIn. So it’s, it really is a prominent platform. And I’m interested to take you up on that code for your book because I’d like to learn more about things that we may be able to do it better, but, having an insider view, it’s really been, it’s been getting my brain rolling here about how we could help more organizations utilize this. Is it just the viral video, or are there other things you’re starting to see the LinkedIn platform being used for just, this is a right out of the blue question, but I’m wondering what you see around the corner?
Audio and Video: The Perfect Pairing
Nina: I think that now with everybody working from home, video is going to remain number one for a long time, and it’s not just going to be, the prerecorded videos it’s going to be live and such as someone casting, to multiple different platforms at one time. LinkedIn has announced this already, but in the future, you’re gonna be able to use lead generation form for your events. So virtual events, as now are really popular, but that’s just gonna become increasing in the future. And the more integrations as well, that LinkedIn and other social media platforms create, that’s gonna be able to make things more user friendly and bring everybody together. But what I would say that I would recommend for every single small business is to not only think about video but also think about not only audio but music. Music and sound take up 65% of their overall entertainment experience. And that’s huge. And like that Pavlov’s dog type of concept. If you can connect custom music to your brand, that’s gonna be huge, whether that’s through the podcast or through these little mini videos that you create. And that’s one of the strengths at Let’s Brainstorm; we create custom music and sound for our customers. And I’m really proud because one of our first customers, we have a team of 14 people including customers down team, and they ended up purchasing the IP from us because to this day, this song that we ended up creating is stuck in my head. It’s so catchy and it’s going to go viral. And that’s where I feel like the future is gonna go playing more in particular to audio and video when combined all together.
George: So I think I get where you’re going with this. Are we talking about an audio signature? Like, let’s use Intel because it’s, where they play that little sound clip and you’ve got our sound engineer, Mr. Brent, here, he’s nodding and smiling because he’s a big believer in this. And are you also talking about a theme song or is it both?
Nina: It’s everything it’s from the jingle, a lot of companies, they don’t spend any money on creating custom music or sounds for, unless they have a professional podcast, so for example, every single company that’s on LinkedIn, they should have custom music and sound with a little jingle for every, every single, whether it’s a product or for their company, when you’re on the home page that people can either opt into to turn on. Nowadays I think people aren’t really taking advantage of that. And when you look at what videos go viral, it’s the ones that have good sound and good songs related to it. So that’s what I-
George: Right, and it’s had an emotional connection as soon as you get that sound there?
Nina: Absolutely, and not only emotional but sometimes through sound, you’re able to just pick and do some storytelling that you’re not able to do visually or vice versa that compliment each other really nicely. So I would challenge every single business owner who’s looking at this to really think about, hey, well, when was the last time we refreshed our music to go together with our video? And that’s really something that’s gonna be a game-changer for every single company in the future.
George: One other thing that, if we’ve got somebody online as a LinkedIn expert, worked there for a number of years and behind the curtain, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and one thing we noticed is these organizations purchase SaaS startup companies and bring them into the fold. There are more tight integrations there with the mothership. Is there more that we can expect that LinkedIn is gonna work better with Microsoft Teams and with the Microsoft platform? Like what do you see coming there?
Nina: Yeah, I mean, some of the things that you may have already seen already are, for example, when you log into Microsoft Word right now, and if you’ve ever updated your resume, it’ll give you recommendations on words, based on what other people on LinkedIn have put onto their profile. And that actually is going to increase the member overall member population as well, as long as, as well as for example, in some countries like Japan, we’ve got the QR code ’cause everybody uses QR codes in Japan to be able to connect with other people in the network. So absolutely, you know, LinkedIn doesn’t really discuss a lot of its future plans or that I would be able to share publicly, but I’m really excited about everything related to video that they’re planning and with events and all of the integrations related to those combined. I think that one of the things, if anything, LinkedIn has the most powerful paid media targeting out of all platforms. So, if you’re thinking about whether you should be investing in what platform, if you’re a B to B company I’d highly recommend, I’m not getting paid to say this. I no longer work for LinkedIn, but I’ve looked, I’ve done ads on Facebook and other platforms for my, getting ready to launch my own business and I’m just really disappointed with some of the targeting capabilities on other platforms. And it’s really incredible. So if you can combine all of these things together, a strong marketing strategy, a fantastic video with really great sound and you get it in front of the right audience. You don’t need your video to be in front of everybody, but just your one specific audience. It can be very powerful.
George: Well, Nina Blankenship, the CEO of Let’s Brainstorm joining us this week on the Conquer Local Podcast, really appreciate your insights around LinkedIn and video. And thank you for that very, very generous offer of the, “How to Elevate Your Personal Brand in Seven Days” with the promo code, which is CONQUERLOCAL, all one word for all of our listeners. We really appreciate that. And I’m sure that our listeners will love learning from you. And those years of experience that you have working at LinkedIn and all the best in your new company, it’s exciting to see this and it’s, you strike me as an entrepreneur, so I’m sure that you will do very, very well at this and help a lot of organizations with the, Let’s Brainstorm organization. So congratulations.
Nina: Thank you, George. And if anybody here is listening that’s interested in a viral video for their company, please reach out to me. We’re looking for testimonials and examples for my website. So I’d love to collaborate,
George: And we will have all of the information that you need to connect with Nina, producer, Colleen, will get it into the notes here on the episode. So thanks for joining us and enjoy your day out in Orlando. I hope you stay safe there and really appreciate your time Nina.
Nina: Thank you, George.
Conclusion
George: Some great learnings from Nina and her new organization, Let’s Brainstorm. We’ll give you all the contact information in the notes and the book is entitled “How To Elevate Your Personal Brand In Just Seven Days.” Let’s look at some of the takeaways. One that I really liked was where Nina talked about the InMail function. Where you can send out the InMails and a lot of people do it wrong where they just, you know, buy my stuff. What she was recommending is using the newsfeed and using the information that you, the content that you publish as a way to build your brand. And then you will get the inbound demand of someone going, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let me connect with that author or with that person on the video.” You can tell that she’s very bullish on video and with the awards that she’s won, she knows how to leverage these video strategies. She has that three-step process in the Let’s Brainstorm organization and in her book. Viral videos, activating employees, and then elevating the personal brand and particularly in activating employees. I think that a lot of organizations just think that we all get it. You should post on LinkedIn and then the CEO doesn’t even post on LinkedIn, but her math makes a lot of sense. So let’s say that you got 20 employees, they each have 500 plus contacts. You now have this audience of 10,000 that you can reach in just that first-level contacts. I use LinkedIn all the time to make connections and to network and to drive the brand for this podcast. And it has been very effective. I can tell you from personal experience that by activating employees and elevating their personal brands and utilizing that video, you can increase your positioning with the folks that you’re trying to influence. And one of the final lessons is rather than spam because nobody likes spam, use the LinkedIn network as an education tool. In fact, we all know, and we’ve been telling you this on the Conquer Local Podcast since we started that selling is more about teaching and it’s more about helping the prospect. And you can do that through an education type process, again, not in InMail in the newsfeed and in your content that you’re delivering through LinkedIn. So thanks to Nina for joining us. And thanks for that very generous offer with the promo code using CONQUERLOCAL, all one word, and you can get a copy of her new book, “How To Elevate Your Personal Brand In Just Seven Days.” The Conquer Local community is where you can reach out and speak to Nina and any of our other guests. Since we brought in the community, it gives you a forum where you can speak to them and ask questions. It is at conquerlocal.com/community. My name is George Leith. Thanks for joining us, I’ll see you when I see you.
