Episode 358: LinkedIn’s Potential: From Profiles to Audio Rooms

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:25 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, me, and Bob Woods as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show. Kevin D. Turner joins me today in the Social Sales Link Virtual Studios. Here on Making Sales Social, Kevin is celebrated for his trademark approach to eliminating personal branding, which in and of itself is trademarked, and equipping professionals with the sharpest tools to amplify their LinkedIn presence. Resumes, bios, profiles, everything that you can think of, which encompasses the things that I have typed in here and beyond.

0:01:19 – (Bob Woods): So there’s even more than that going on. Kevin has also taken it upon himself to be, in my mind, the leader of documenting LinkedIn’s changes and improvements. His LinkedIn posts are worth following for this reason alone. Combine this with all the other great content that he publishes and you’ll have a great quality addition to your LinkedIn feed. So with that, Kevin, welcome to Making Sales Social.

0:01:45 – (Kevin D Turner): Bob. Thank you for having me. I love being back. It’s exciting and so much going on in the world today.

0:01:52 – (Bob Woods): So you are back. We should do the SNL jackets for like two-timers because you’re one of a handful so far. It’s probably going to end up happening more often. You, you are a jacket guy. If you’re watching us on video, Kevin is Natalie attired as opposed to me looking like I’m ready for the football game that’s happening tomorrow. So our first traditional question for all of our guests, and you may remember this from the last time you were on, is what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:28 – (Kevin D Turner): Making Sales Social, I always look at it as it’s a really kind of a magnetic force you create that draws people to want to do business with you. And you do that through establishing that trust and the relationship. You know, it can be done with a lot of personality, it can be done with a lot of personal information, it can be done a lot with just what you provide the community. And I’m one of these. I give away a lot.

0:02:56 – (Kevin D Turner): And he’s like, how do you give all that away and people still come and do business with you. And I always say that that is the science, Right. Science is, you know, math and those kind of things. That’s the science. If you give it to them for free, they’ll come back for the art. And that’s what I do. I do the art part.

0:03:14 – (Kevin D Turner): I get all that tied together and you know, it is again a relationship that I build with people and they tell other people and I have people who just show up from nowhere and say, I want to work with you in the process. And so I know it works. And to me it’s, it’s fascinating. I did a presentation at Sony and this was turn of the century, right? In the 90s. Turn the century stuff like Victorian, right?

0:03:42 – (Kevin D Turner): A consultative sales presentation. And consultative sales is kind of somewhat part of social selling, right? Yes. You got to listen, you got to do a little talking as well. It’s a two way conversation to get to where you both need to be. And if there, that’s fine too, right?

0:04:05 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:04:05 – (Kevin D Turner): Where they can lead you from there. Find out why it’s not getting you there. All those things have great value. It’s not always the sale.

0:04:13 – (Kevin D Turner): Sometimes it’s what we learn along the process that makes that worth the time. And so there are no easy fixes in sales.

0:04:23 – (Kevin D Turner): Unless your product is really easy.

0:04:25 – (Bob Woods): Right, right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Which at that point is commodity. And probably a thousand other people are doing it too. But, but I think you hit on something important there in that. Social is a two-way conversation. And a lot of people don’t realize that because a lot of people think as social as just like another broadcast channel, which other people do use it as, as that. But those are people who are not in sales. Those are people who are not needing to develop relationships, I think.

0:04:53 – (Bob Woods): And, and so, you know, you can’t think of social as, as, as a one-way type of thing. And you’re only looking at metrics and things like that, which we’ll talk about metrics a little later. But you know, you can’t look at that as your success. You know, I always say if, if you get a thousand views on something and you get no conversations, it’s a failure. If you get 30 views on something but you get two or three sales conversations out of it, it’s a success.

0:05:23 – (Kevin D Turner): Absolutely, absolutely. There are vanity metrics, right?

0:05:26 – (D): Yeah.

0:05:27 – (Kevin D Turner): They don’t pay the bills. You know, you got to be reaching the right people with the right message and giving them a reason to kind of Follow behind you in that process.

0:05:37 – (D): Yeah.

0:05:38 – (Kevin D Turner): So many. Forget it. I actually love the fact on LinkedIn always, people are always talking about my reaches down on my posts. And a biggest piece of that is the way LinkedIn looked at this is LinkedIn is not a place just to post content, it’s a place to create conversations.

0:05:56 – (D): Yeah.

0:05:56 – (Kevin D Turner): And those whose reach have just dropped to the bottom are those people who are not engaging in a conversation. If they get a comment, they do what I call a drive by comment. Oh, thank you.

0:06:08 – (D): Yeah.

0:06:08 – (Kevin D Turner): Boom. And they’re out. They don’t add any value. They don’t ask a little more questions. They don’t develop that into what anybody could see. Just on a digital side, that’s a conversation ongoing.

0:06:20 – (D): Yep. Yeah.

0:06:21 – (Bob Woods): 100.

0:06:22 – (Kevin D Turner): To me, that’s the beauty about LinkedIn is it is a social site, whereas most social media is less social. Here it is about social and they reward you when you do that.

0:06:35 – (D): Yep.

0:06:36 – (Bob Woods): Could not agree more with that. Could not agree more of that. So that, that actually kind of leads in, into my next question in, in a little bit of, of a different way. Because LinkedIn is, is apparently, and it depends on who you talk to. Some people think of this as a consolidation, some people think of it as eliminating. Just depends on what you’re talking about. And we’re talking about LinkedIn’s audio rooms.

0:07:04 – (Bob Woods): So, so first of all, just for those who are unaware, why don’t you just give your quick definition of what a LinkedIn audio room is?

0:07:14 – (Kevin D Turner): It’s a digital conversation place.

0:07:17 – (C): Right.

0:07:17 – (Kevin D Turner): Where you can join a group and you can speak openly. And for a long time it was unrecorded because this was supposed to be a feral kind of conversations. Right. You’re not supposed to be worried that anybody’s recording it. And just amazing. It built. I, I joined, I think it was. Can’t even think of the name of it. During COVID Clubhouse. There you go. Yeah, that’s. That’s pretty bad. I’ve even forgotten the name.

0:07:46 – (Kevin D Turner): And we had incredible meetings there. People.

0:07:49 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, we did.

0:07:50 – (Kevin D Turner): People like to listen, people like to learn. And that group of people that I worked with in that process, we, ours was called Fab four. We actually became like a family and we’re still really, really tightly connected. And it was because of all that kind of communication, LinkedIn was there on Clubhouse watching us and saying, we’re going to create this within this monstrous platform called LinkedIn. We’re going to insert it.

0:08:19 – (C): Right? Yep.

0:08:20 – (Kevin D Turner): The problem with LinkedIn is it was never designed to do what it does today. And that’s not that they didn’t have the foresight, that’s just kind of code based on code. Right. It was designed to be a database, basically, of resumes to sell to recruiters in the process. That’s why they separate us at six degrees of separation. They only give us three. Right. So they can sell the other three to us, or you to the other three.

0:08:46 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s the basis of that platform. Putting something like this inside the platform is much more difficult than it is to create a platform that just does audio events. And LinkedIn really thought that as soon as they put it on LinkedIn, it was going to explode.

0:09:05 – (C): Right.

0:09:05 – (Kevin D Turner): Everybody was going to do it. Just like Clubhouse. They were a little late to the game. Yes, they were. The other component about LinkedIn is it’s almost like having a conversation at the water cooler at your office that’s different than the conversation you have at the publisher. Clubhouse was the pub. Everybody needed to talk. Everybody needed to say things that you couldn’t say at work.

0:09:28 – (C): Right.

0:09:29 – (D): Yep.

0:09:30 – (Kevin D Turner): I’m depressed, I’m this, I’m that, I’m, I, I, I gotta find a way, you know, to get something else going and, you know, whatever it was, it’s not stuff you would say at work. LinkedIn is work in a sense of the way the community is built. The way people could come into that room and see you in that room and recording, that was always a big issue. LinkedIn didn’t want to record it just for that fact. The most popular audio events were about job seeking.

0:09:59 – (D): Yeah.

0:09:59 – (Kevin D Turner): Well, if I’m currently employed and I’m in this job seeking event and I’ve got my hands up, how do I do this while working and my boss is in the room. Yeah. Or if he comes back later, he couldn’t listen to a recording and find me in there because it’s not hard to see who went where. And that was the, that was the big issue LinkedIn had when this didn’t take off and there were some brilliant people behind us.

0:10:27 – (Kevin D Turner): And I, I know that they had the right vision. They were even going to go into video events where instead of that still picture of us talking, it was actually going to be video as well. So you could have 16 videos up on stage.

0:10:40 – (D): Yeah.

0:10:40 – (Kevin D Turner): That was really kind of cool in that, that process. They had a bigger plan, but because it didn’t just take off, LinkedIn basically defunded it.

0:10:52 – (D): Yeah, yeah.

0:10:53 – (Kevin D Turner): It wasn’t this year, it was years ago.

0:10:57 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:10:57 – (Kevin D Turner): That whole group disband, some left, some went to other places within LinkedIn and issues started to happen. Oh, you know, my event’s not going off when it’s supposed to go off. I can log in. Right. Nobody could hear me. Well, we know about that. All these tech issues and LinkedIn’s going, well, we funded this thing and nobody wanted it. Now everybody all of a sudden wants it. And then the other thing that they’re hearing from everybody on LinkedIn is, oh, this thing would be spectacular if we could record it.

0:11:30 – (C): Yeah, right.

0:11:31 – (Kevin D Turner): And if we could have a chat, like chat, you know, flow, so we could write conversation besides the comment tab, which was kind of asynchronous to the whole thing.

0:11:41 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:11:42 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s what we want. And so LinkedIn’s hearing, you know, we let that team leave.

0:11:48 – (C): Right.

0:11:48 – (Kevin D Turner): We haven’t put the funding behind this because it wasn’t that popular. Now we got to get a solution to give them what they want to make them happy. That was the option of, okay, we do this with LinkedIn Live. We have third party streamers, we’re going to do audio rooms with those third party streamers. So that’s where they decided to solve the problem of what everybody was demanding, right?

0:12:14 – (D): Yeah.

0:12:14 – (Kevin D Turner): To give them what they wanted. That was the only way they could do it because they weren’t going to go back in and redesign the site to fit it. They weren’t going to put more investment into it because it just, the, the feedback wasn’t there. The, the money stream wasn’t there for LinkedIn. Right. Think of them like a, like a venture capital group. You buy 10 companies, right. If two of them go big, right?

0:12:38 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, one or two.

0:12:40 – (Kevin D Turner): Or you combine them into one or you do something, you sell them off.

0:12:43 – (D): Yeah.

0:12:43 – (Kevin D Turner): But you’re looking for the big winners and the other ones you kind of let go. And that’s basically what LinkedIn is. It’s kind of a venture capital within its own kind of social platform. It’s looking to launch things that are hot and if they’re not, they’re going to find either a better way to do it or they’re going to get rid of them, you know, in that sense. Because all of this takes money to do and audio rooms take bandwidth.

0:13:09 – (C): Right.

0:13:10 – (Kevin D Turner): And if they’re not getting the right stuff back and they have to keep fixing the code that wasn’t quite doing what it was supposed to do, they’re putting money in and they’re not seeing the benefit. So this was the perfect solution. So sometimes we have to, I guess, appreciate what we have and stop asking for more all the time. Right. Because we pushed them so hard for more. We took something that we all liked and enjoy.

0:13:35 – (Kevin D Turner): Now we don’t get it in the same format. We’ve got a little extra hassle we’ve got to go through now to do this. So the big changes is in the new way of doing this through live process.

0:13:49 – (C): Right.

0:13:49 – (Kevin D Turner): You have to have a third party streamer. So you got to join that. You do gain the fact that you can record it and you will have this little chat room just like all lives do on the side that people can interact with.

0:14:03 – (C): Right.

0:14:04 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s already built in. So you got those bonuses. The minuses are you’ve got to then have the speakers click on a link and go into that streaming app to be able to join the stage. And we still don’t know. We know right now with audio the stage is limited to basically 16 in a host.

0:14:25 – (D): Yep.

0:14:26 – (Kevin D Turner): It will be the same going forward, but we don’t know if that’s 16 for the whole event or if it’s just 16 at a time. Right now it’s up to 16 at a time for audio events. We don’t know because we haven’t. The wording isn’t as good as it should be that we have. So we don’t know if that is going to be the same. But there’s going to be that extra hassle of clicking the link. Now you’ve got the platform, you can put the link right in the post and everything else so people know where to find it. They’ll be able to click in there. The host will still be able to say, hey, that’s Bob. Let’s bring them up.

0:14:58 – (C): Right.

0:14:59 – (Kevin D Turner): So the process is going to be very similar. From what I can tell. It’s just going to be that little extra step. Instead of raising your hand, you now going to go click on a link. I think people will get over it. And if they really wanted recording, then what they want.

0:15:17 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s really interesting way to look at it because. Because there are a lot of people out there who are running around with their proverbial, proverbial hair on fire about all this stuff. And, and I think that you’re just saying to, you know, calm down, let’s see where things shake out and then set your hair on fire if you.

0:15:36 – (Kevin D Turner): Want to taste it before you condemn it. Right. You got to get there before we can really find out is it really all the bad things that we think it is. And yeah, the other piece of that is, you know, a Post that gets people angry always does better than a post.

0:15:50 – (Bob Woods): Oh yeah.

0:15:51 – (Kevin D Turner): People thinking, oh, well that’s kind of cool. No, you want them fired up. And I’m gonna tell you everything I know. You know, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you how the cow ate the cabbage is the whole thing. Those posts always do better. So I think people have a tendency to go to the negative when something like this happens. And I always say, calm down. We don’t really know all the details, we just know some of them and we’ve got to get there before we can have those kind of conversations. That everything is dying, everything’s done, there’s no more audio rooms. Boom, boom, boom.

0:16:23 – (C): Right?

0:16:23 – (Kevin D Turner): We’ve gotta, we’ve gotta get the real information before we can say that.

0:16:27 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah. So, so, so this is definitely a, a work in progress and you know, stay tuned, learn how to do it because it does sound like that there are going to be more, more steps involved and, and let’s just, let’s, let’s see what happens. It may, it may end up being better.

0:16:50 – (Kevin D Turner): You never know. Every one of those streamers might bring something more to the table.

0:16:55 – (D): Right? Yeah.

0:16:56 – (Bob Woods): And, and that was the other thing that I was kind of thinking in, in, in, in the back of my mind is, is how do the stream yards and how do the restreams of the world react to this and maybe develop stuff on their own side so that, so people can use it through them and just kind of pipe it through LinkedIn and you know, so, so there may be more developments on, on that end as well.

0:17:20 – (Kevin D Turner): Absolutely. And I’ve already got, they’re, they’re involved already. They’ve been involved for a while in this process. So I’ve got a meeting hopefully set up next week with one of them to go through what it would be like when it launches. So I’m hoping to have more information on that.

0:17:36 – (Bob Woods): Okay. So depending on when this episode drops and I’m gonna try my best to get this moved up in the queue because we, we got a lot waiting right now. But I, but I definitely am gonna see if I can do that. Go to Kevin’s feed because I’m sure that Kevin will have more information when he is available or when he can talk about it I guess is probably the, the best way to do it because some of the stuff might be hush hush and Kevin’s a good guy. He will, he will not talk about things before he is allowed in air to talk about it. So. Yeah, so good. Well, yes, so that’s kind of the, that’s kind of the big thing with reverb happening on LinkedIn right now. Are there, are there other significant changes you can think of that, that have come down the pike lately that, that you see as either helpful or, or potentially hurting people when they, when they use LinkedIn?

0:18:36 – (Kevin D Turner): Well, I would say one of the things that is really going on at LinkedIn right now is they’re spending time cleaning up the spaghetti wiring.

0:18:45 – (C): Right.

0:18:45 – (Kevin D Turner): The site that created itself not with a plan in mind, but adding pieces. Right. They’re cleaning that up and that’s why sometimes when you get on LinkedIn it loads a little funny and it looks a little different when it loads now. It’s got like a kind of a chromium look to it. They’re cleaning up the wiring and hopefully the way they’re doing it sets them up to be much more adaptable to new features.

0:19:09 – (Kevin D Turner): So that, that’s, I think, a big piece. The other one is in somewhat conflict with what just happened in audio rooms and that is native video. So it is already beginning to happen. If you have an Android phone, you can now go straight to video and basically create a video, right. Live onto LinkedIn and post it. So, you know, that’s a different piece. So this ability to do live video will change quite a bit. So third party streaming won’t be necessary for lives.

0:19:49 – (D): Yeah.

0:19:50 – (Kevin D Turner): What does that mean for audio events? I don’t know yet. Yeah, that makes it confusing. But we know that they’re putting native video into process now and I think that’s got huge opportunities in the long run. So very excited that that’s going on. The other thing I always tell people is you got to start thinking about LinkedIn as a database and as a business.

0:20:12 – (C): Right.

0:20:13 – (Kevin D Turner): It’s got a what, a million or a billion? Pardon me, 300 million profiles.

0:20:20 – (C): Right.

0:20:21 – (Kevin D Turner): A profile is actually a resume, believe it or not, in the code, it is coded as a resume. You used to be able to print somebody’s profile and it would say resume when you, when you downloaded it.

0:20:32 – (C): Right.

0:20:33 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s what it is. LinkedIn’s business is selling members to other members.

0:20:39 – (Bob Woods): Sure.

0:20:40 – (Kevin D Turner): Its biggest single customer is recruiter.

0:20:44 – (D): Yep.

0:20:44 – (Kevin D Turner): They are 65% of the 17 annual billion dollar revenue.

0:20:50 – (C): Right.

0:20:50 – (Kevin D Turner): There’s their $11 billion. And one of the things is you got to think about LinkedIn as a database in this sense. When it gets that large, you’ve got to fit the database to be found in the database.

0:21:03 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Because it gets unwieldy.

0:21:05 – (Kevin D Turner): Most people don’t realize that as you’re building a profile, if you go down that profile very slowly, things like location, titles, companies, degrees, when you start typing in those little boxes, there’s a dropdown box that appears. That drop down box is called a market value filter. That is what everybody else would call that. And if you select the market value filter now, you’re sortable in this huge filing cabinet of a billion plus files. Right now people can find your file.

0:21:39 – (Kevin D Turner): If you end up typing your own stuff, it’ll accept it. It won’t tell you you’re wrong, but you just kind of put yourself in the other category.

0:21:48 – (C): Right.

0:21:48 – (Kevin D Turner): The shelf back by the bathroom, you put all the dusty, dirty, dented stuff, you know.

0:21:53 – (D): Yeah.

0:21:54 – (Kevin D Turner): It’s not where you want to be. So make sure that you’re embracing those market value filters in this process. And if you do, has huge ramifications. If this site has that largest customer, everything is really built around servicing that customer.

0:22:11 – (C): Right.

0:22:11 – (Kevin D Turner): Makes sense. If we had a store, 65% of our business went to one type of customer, we’d align the store for it.

0:22:17 – (C): Right.

0:22:18 – (Kevin D Turner): They’re doing the same thing on LinkedIn. When you become the perfect product for that customer, then other things happen on LinkedIn. When you post, it goes further. You know, when somebody’s looking for you, they find you easier.

0:22:32 – (D): Yeah.

0:22:33 – (Kevin D Turner): So, you know, embrace that. And most people don’t. It’s not a new feature. Right.

0:22:39 – (Bob Woods): But it’s.

0:22:40 – (Kevin D Turner): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Most people have never really thought about LinkedIn as a database, as a business and do we fit as a perfect product so they can promote us? And so that’s, I think, really key.

0:22:52 – (Bob Woods): Right? Yeah. And that actually takes me back to when Microsoft first announced its acquisition of LinkedIn. And I was on. Was it an investor call or maybe a press call or something like that? I forget what. But Microsoft just came right out and said one of the big reasons why that it bought LinkedIn was because it considers the data that it has on all of its members to be some of the most accurate data out there. And they wanted that data and they recognize this back in.

0:23:21 – (Bob Woods): When was the purchase? 2016, 2017, something like that. So I mean, this was years ago and LinkedIn has just exploded in terms of its user base since then. So. So that’s a really, really keen observation there, I think.

0:23:36 – (Kevin D Turner): And, and to me it’s, it’s fascinating to think that they know the accuracy of the data is there. It’s because it incentivizes us to get it right.

0:23:44 – (C): Right.

0:23:44 – (Kevin D Turner): We’re making Choices. And so we’re providing that accurate data, we’re not going to provide stuff that’s not accurate, because what is the old expression, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

0:23:56 – (C): Right.

0:23:56 – (Kevin D Turner): We’re not going to claim we did $1 billion in sales if we didn’t do $1 billion sales, because somebody’s going to call us out. So they know the data is going to be accurate because we’ve got to be comfortable with it in the sunlight.

0:24:07 – (C): Right.

0:24:07 – (Kevin D Turner): So that’s a big piece of it. But to me, the. Just the concept of that accuracy is based on what we provide. And yet on LinkedIn, they try to serve us with what they think we need. As opposed to 10 years ago on LinkedIn, you used to pick what you wanted. So in your feed, you used to pick, I want to see things about financial business, or I want to see things about insurance or whatever it was, or I don’t want to see insurance and financial business.

0:24:42 – (C): Right.

0:24:42 – (Kevin D Turner): You could take that out of the check mark.

0:24:44 – (D): Yep.

0:24:45 – (Kevin D Turner): It was a much more accurate site. So I wish LinkedIn would take the same approach. The value that we created as individual members allow us to create that same value for ourselves in what you serve us, because then we’re doubly rewarded to come back. But it doesn’t sound as, I don’t know, it just doesn’t sound as sexy, I guess, right. To. To ask somebody what you want as opposed to saying, I can create the AI that will give you what you need.

0:25:16 – (Bob Woods): Right. That will give you what you need. And then sometimes it just is wild.

0:25:21 – (Kevin D Turner): What I think you need. Yeah, exactly.

0:25:23 – (D): Yeah.

0:25:24 – (Bob Woods): Based on, you know, cross fingers is, is. Is what you need there. And, and then you throw in the.

0:25:30 – (Kevin D Turner): The revenue component of that. Also what you need, that somebody’s paying me for you to need.

0:25:36 – (Bob Woods): I would kind of bring that up because I just read a recent study saying, saying something that advertising in the feed is like, up to as. As. As well. Which, which I’m. I’m sure you probably noticed. I, I certainly have noticed it.

0:25:50 – (Kevin D Turner): Well, you know what? Know what you do? Go into your privacy and settings. There is a component for advertising and take all the buttons and take them all off. You’ll go from having, you know, five ads out of ten posts to having one or no ads at a time. It’s an immediate effect. If you tell them, I don’t want to have all this served to me, they’re not going to do it.

0:26:14 – (D): Yeah.

0:26:15 – (Kevin D Turner): Which makes sense. So most people will go in there and they’ll find they’ve got all that stuff checked, thinking I’m going to be a good, good member on LinkedIn, I’ll take all your stuff. Well, they got too much stuff now, so we had to be good members to ourselves and go in there and reset that, do that and that feed will clean up. Now. One of the things that I love about LinkedIn is there’s always different ways of using LinkedIn.

0:26:38 – (Kevin D Turner): And the smartest thing, and I started doing this many years ago, they give you a lot of search filters, right? So you can go in, you can set these search filters up by, you know, last 24 hours, I want fresh stuff, right? You can set it up by location, you can set it up by industry, you can set it up by authors. Yeah, that’s a great little search tool. But then don’t leave it there, bookmark it, give it a name.

0:27:03 – (C): Right?

0:27:03 – (Kevin D Turner): I’ve got target clients, I’ve got prior clients, I’ve got authors that I like, I’ve got insiders, people inside LinkedIn that I like to keep up with and I can click on those bookmarks and immediately get only their posts only in the last 24 hours, no ads. Plus in that stream, different from your normal stream. If I want to comment or react, it doesn’t take me out and I have to come back in. It just keeps me writing that same stream.

0:27:35 – (Kevin D Turner): Much more effective way to use LinkedIn. And then the key is there. You’re creating these content lists. You got to make sure every now and then you pop your bubble and you go back out into the open feed, swim in the open ocean and see what else is out there. You might add a few more names or a few more things to those bookmarks.

0:27:56 – (C): Right?

0:27:56 – (D): Yeah.

0:27:57 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s the other nice thing about it is once you click that bookmark and it opens, you can then adjust that bookmark, you can add a couple more right in the process and you save again. And it’s still designated as the same bookmark.

0:28:11 – (D): Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:28:12 – (Kevin D Turner): And shrink whatever it needs to do. And that’s, you know, a brilliant way to use LinkedIn. That LinkedIn is never going to tell you because they lose advertising revenue. Right?

0:28:23 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and, and, and that’s all done because whenever you do a search, it creates a static unique URL. So, and, and the other nice thing you can do and, and, and, and we do teach bookmarks as, as well, but you can bookmark something, send that URL to someone else and then they’ll be able to use it too. Now it’ll be Filtered by like their first degree connections and everything else. So they’re not necessarily going that you do, but you can give them, you know, a really good feel of, of, of whatever your feed looks like or whatever it is you’re trying to do with that feed with, with the search filters. Just by sending them that URL.

0:29:05 – (Kevin D Turner): Yeah. Oh, and I, I have people all the time. You say who are the top 10 people I should follow on LinkedIn about LinkedIn.

0:29:12 – (D): Yeah.

0:29:12 – (Kevin D Turner): And I’ll send them that URL and I’ll say bookmark it.

0:29:15 – (D): Yep.

0:29:16 – (Kevin D Turner): And they’re going to get those. Even if they’re outside of their third degree, they’ll still be able to get the posts.

0:29:22 – (Bob Woods): Yes.

0:29:23 – (Kevin D Turner): In that process, if it’s author based. Right.

0:29:26 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:29:26 – (Kevin D Turner): I don’t have to go through a list, I don’t have to give them 10 links. I give them one and say bookmark it, click on it every day. You’ll have the best of the best. It’s about using the system, it gets a little smarter.

0:29:38 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So, yeah, and LinkedIn will never tell you any of this. So.

0:29:46 – (Kevin D Turner): Again, we kind of circumvents that revenue stream. So yeah, they don’t really want us out there talking about it, but that’s what we do.

0:29:54 – (Bob Woods): Right? Yeah, it’s like with, with the hashtags, the, you know, with them not being as, as promotive, I guess of that I’m not exactly sure. But, but you know, was, and I think I heard this from you, if it wasn’t from you, it was definitely from, from someone else. But one of the reasons why that they are supposedly allegedly depreciating hashtags is, is that it takes you away from LinkedIn’s algorithm and in other words, it LinkedIn’s control. And guess what? LinkedIn doesn’t like that.

0:30:25 – (Kevin D Turner): No, there’s, there’s money in control.

0:30:27 – (D): Yep.

0:30:28 – (Kevin D Turner): You have to eat what they feed you or you change the feed and the hashtags. Change the feed. So if you search by a hashtag or you click on a hashtag, you’re going to get just that. And they’ve lost control.

0:30:42 – (D): Yeah.

0:30:42 – (Kevin D Turner): It’s why they are doing their best to push them down, you know, make them, make them believe. And then there’s always those same people who panic.

0:30:51 – (C): Right.

0:30:52 – (Kevin D Turner): As soon as something happens, you know, the world’s imploding. They got rid of hashtags, you know. Yeah, they love that, they encourage that, you know, they cultivate it because it gets done exactly what they need to have done. And that was get less people to use hashtags so we can make more money by controlling the feedback.

0:31:15 – (D): So.

0:31:15 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:31:17 – (Kevin D Turner): No, it’s always anytime you look at it from the other side.

0:31:21 – (C): Right.

0:31:21 – (Kevin D Turner): The old follow the money equation. A lot of things that happen on LinkedIn, they start to make a lot of sense. Usually look at them from our side.

0:31:30 – (C): Right.

0:31:31 – (Kevin D Turner): What’s a social platform? You know, all this great stuff’s going to go on. I’m going to make connectivity. And so we’re like, why’d they do that? That doesn’t help me. This is not about helping us. We’re the product.

0:31:44 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, exactly. We are the ones. If, if, if you’re not buying something and, and you’re using a service, you’re the one being sold. I mean, you know, that’s, and that’s.

0:31:54 – (Kevin D Turner): Why you really think about it. Until you get into like Sales Navigator or Recruiter or beyond, there is no phone number for a member to call. There’s no person for the number to say, hey, I’m having some trouble. It doesn’t exist unless you’re into paying the larger dollars.

0:32:14 – (C): Right.

0:32:14 – (Kevin D Turner): Those become the customers. The rest of us, members, even if we’re premium. Right. We’re yet. Because all we get is premium chat, which is now kind of. They’re practicing their new AI. Robot chat.

0:32:28 – (D): Yeah.

0:32:29 – (Kevin D Turner): And it’s, it’s kind of wild.

0:32:33 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. LinkedIn’s AI is definitely. It’s, it’s like I never use chat GPT, like three or whatever. But I feel like that it’s like at that phase right now, as opposed to, you know, 4O and 1 or whatever that’s called or, you know, things like that. It’s just, you know, it’s just getting started. I’m sure it’s going to get better. I can guarantee you it’s going to get better.

0:32:58 – (Kevin D Turner): Yet the biggest issue was it was trained, I’m sure on previous help interaction, which LinkedIn help. That’s an oxymoron, that word.

0:33:10 – (D): Right.

0:33:11 – (Kevin D Turner): It doesn’t actually help most of the time. And I remember there was a time where they, where they always say, well, did you unplug your computer and plug it back in? Did you clear your cache? Did you stand on your left hand, Right. And balance your computer with your right foot?

0:33:25 – (D): Yeah.

0:33:26 – (Kevin D Turner): They had just crazy stuff they would put you through the mill for, and they were like, are you sure this is really happening? Like you’re trying to just soak up, soak up their time.

0:33:34 – (C): Right.

0:33:35 – (Kevin D Turner): With fake stuff. Yeah. So if it’s been trained on that, that’s not a good start point, you know, Data. Right, right.

0:33:44 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. And then if, and then if you’re a premium member, you, how you, you have access to AI to help you write things like headlines and about sections and things like that. And, and as of right now, and you know, AI is still growing and things like that. This isn’t a criticism because like I said, I’m sure things are going to get better. It’s just, it’s not there yet.

0:34:04 – (Kevin D Turner): Yeah. And the biggest issue with that is that that whole headline and about section rewrite AI called Enhance, that was launched very early.

0:34:13 – (D): Yeah.

0:34:13 – (Kevin D Turner): The issue with LinkedIn is their owner, right. Microsoft, Microsoft has always put this quarterly bonus out there for new feature development. They don’t have a quarterly bonus for fix the old features. So once they release, they rarely fix them unless they can call it a new feature.

0:34:37 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:34:38 – (Kevin D Turner): And so whatever you get at the time, that’s probably going to stay like that until basically they drop it off because they say nobody wants to use it. And that’s what happened with that particular piece. It is rotten at best.

0:34:51 – (C): Right.

0:34:51 – (Kevin D Turner): You can take a very creative headline and it will turn it into title at Company. Yeah. You can take a really creative about section and it’ll write something you can’t even read.

0:35:04 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:35:04 – (Kevin D Turner): You know, so now, and that’s the biggest issue is this kind of their bonus to create new features. They’re not bonus to fix old ones. And that’s why you, you don’t see, you know, messaging could be a lot better, you know, should be a lot better. But it’s an old feature, so I’m not going to get a bonus on that. I’m going to spend my time here in the bonus zone. Can’t blame the people in charge, you know, once they’ve been handed those marching orders.

0:35:32 – (Bob Woods): Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. I did not realize that about the bonus structure. So, so, so maybe the AI won’t get better, but it’s got to get better. I mean they, they’ve got to realize, I mean especially because they are that one.

0:35:50 – (Kevin D Turner): It’ll fade off and then they’ll come back with it again as like a whole profile.

0:35:55 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, they have done that as a.

0:35:56 – (Kevin D Turner): Whole profile writer and hopefully then it’s the latest, greatest and it’s actually going to do some value. Yeah, yeah. And I think they’ve already started that with the resume rewrite tool. So they’re using AI to do that. And it’s actually Doing a decent job.

0:36:13 – (D): Yep.

0:36:14 – (Kevin D Turner): Not an incredible job, but much better than that Enhance ever did. So you can upload resume and it’ll help you tailor it for a job position. So I think the profile is going to be next in that same kind of what they’ve learned in that process. That way Enhance will go away and it’ll be a full profile fix. So.

0:36:34 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean some, something there is improvement that is needed there and hopefully, hopefully that will, hopefully that will happen. So you know, with that I, I hadn’t necessarily planned on, on just sticking on just, just LinkedIn stuff for this entire conversation. But you know something, you get two LinkedIn salts together and, and, and you put live mics in front of them and that type of thing just, just tends to happen.

0:37:07 – (Bob Woods): So just so you can talk really quick about, about the other thing that you quite frankly make money off of, let’s talk about personal blanding really quick, what that is and, and, and, and how people can, can benefit from what it is that, that you do in that, in that specific mindset.

0:37:27 – (Kevin D Turner): Absolutely. You know, I started with kind of giving out guidance and how to build your LinkedIn profile.

0:37:35 – (C): Right.

0:37:35 – (Kevin D Turner): Many years ago I used to do, you know, settings where you had 600 people in a room. They’re all in transition. I was teaching them how to build those LinkedIn Prof. Files. And in the process, what I found was that people were just taking everything they had and shoving it into the profile.

0:37:52 – (C): Right.

0:37:53 – (Kevin D Turner): Calling that a brand. And what it was was just a mishmash, unorganized Jack and Jill of all trades shoved in there.

0:38:02 – (C): Right.

0:38:02 – (Kevin D Turner): So because I want every opportunity to come to me, so I’m going to shove everything I know in there. And that’s what they were doing. And that’s where I came up with that term of personal blanding. They basically had blanded themselves because nobody’s going to sort through that kind of pile of.

0:38:19 – (C): Right.

0:38:20 – (Kevin D Turner): They’re not going to sort through it and pick what they need. If you don’t deliver it in a very, very focused way and what leads you forward to your goals, they’re never going to accept it. They’re not going to dig through it. You know, our moms might, right. But the rest of them, they’re not going to take the time to do that. So that’s where, that’s where personal blending came in. And you know, I always have a famous line that nobody hires Jack and Jill of all trades.

0:38:45 – (C): Right.

0:38:46 – (Kevin D Turner): Masters of none. Unless you’re running a convent. Right. That’s that’s it. Those are the masters of nuns. Go. You know, but we gotta realize that. And, you know, that’s part of what I do. I help get that message. Right. To get them to where they need to go. And a lot of that comes into play. It’s. It’s not just in the. The textual form.

0:39:11 – (C): Right.

0:39:11 – (Kevin D Turner): Because that’s important, but it’s also the visual. Everything from the background banner to the picture to how things flow, to how you incorporate in particular colors to stimulate things. Where you use emojis, what kind of emojis, all that stuff comes into play. There’s a lot of psychology behind what makes somebody devour content. And if you’re not putting that into that profile, you’re losing a huge opportunity.

0:39:37 – (Kevin D Turner): So, yeah, those are the kind of things that we like to do. Things as simple as what direction do you face when you are taking that picture? Right. For your profile, if you’re looking straight on, and that’s what most people do, that’s the easiest picture. I can grab it, click it. I can make passports and driver’s licenses from it. It’s a huge ID theft issue because you’re giving me a lot of information I can also use.

0:40:00 – (C): Right?

0:40:01 – (Kevin D Turner): Yeah, you don’t want to do that. So we always have a term. It’s called one ear, and that’s a government photo term, believe it or not. If I can only see one of your ears, then I can’t use that as an official document photo. If you’re going to turn just a little bit and it could be as little as 5%, doesn’t have to be cheeky like mine, you know, doesn’t have to be that far. I just do that anyway. But just making that little turn then also changes the direction on your profile. And people don’t realize. I look at some of the LinkedIn experts out there and half of them have it wrong.

0:40:36 – (D): Yeah.

0:40:38 – (Kevin D Turner): Turn a particular direction and they’re either looking off their profile or they’re looking into their profile. Classic advertising, right? You open up an old magazine, you see the car in the middle. If the people are looking away from the car, you’re not interested in the car at all.

0:40:53 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:40:54 – (Kevin D Turner): They’re running. Right. If they’re looking and staring and looking, moving towards that car, now you’re interested.

0:41:00 – (D): Yeah.

0:41:01 – (Kevin D Turner): So some of those classic principles have to exist within that LinkedIn profile. And people don’t like that feeling. You know, you kind of productize things, but it’s tapping into those bits of knowledge from. From advertising, from psychology. Everything else that really, really set a profile up to make somebody want to devour it and reach out to you. And that’s key. And that’s what we do.

0:41:26 – (Bob Woods): Cool, cool. So along those lines, I always love those immediate takeaway, one thing you can do right now, types of things. So to get them from personal, to get them started, I guess is probably the, the, the best way to do it. From, from personal branding to personal branding. What’s like one thing they could do right now to, to help them get started on that road?

0:41:52 – (Kevin D Turner): I think get focus.

0:41:54 – (C): Right.

0:41:54 – (Kevin D Turner): Understand what you do well, what they want to pay for.

0:41:58 – (C): Right.

0:41:58 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s always key. And focus towards that. So the profile shouldn’t be just a chronological dump of everything you’ve done. That’s blanding. Right. It should be a focus to move you forward. So yeah, somebody gets there. If they devour that content, they want to know, I know exactly why Bob’s here. This has all been building to this point where we need to have him do this for us. That’s the main thing that you need to start.

0:42:24 – (Kevin D Turner): And then everything else fits. When you start picking backgrounds and you start picking pictures, does it fit the focus? It fits the focus. It’s going to get you farther down the line. And so that’s the kind of things I think is the first start is to figure out what is that focus, where do I want to be? And then everything else will start to line up and then get rid of the stuff that doesn’t fit. People, you know, they have a real problem with that.

0:42:50 – (Kevin D Turner): But if it doesn’t fit, it’s not going to help you. You know, I look at, they have been doing sales for 35 plus years. It’s different than what I did 35 years ago. I’m not going to put up something that is 35 years old anymore.

0:43:03 – (C): Right, right.

0:43:04 – (Kevin D Turner): The, the natural, I guess timing of any skill is, is usually within the last few years. Last 10 years at max, you’re in cyber security, it’s probably the last 30 minutes. Right. So make sure it’s timely and focus it and, and have it move you forward, but also make sure people are hiring for it because yeah, I’ve seen people focus stuff that nobody’s going to hire for.

0:43:28 – (Bob Woods): Right. And hire for also translates over into the sales side and you know, people are buying obviously. So, so it’s.

0:43:35 – (Kevin D Turner): Yeah, same concept.

0:43:37 – (Bob Woods): Yep, absolutely. So Kevin, how can people find out more about you and maybe even reach out to you?

0:43:46 – (Kevin D Turner): I’m always on LinkedIn, so it’s Kevin D. Turner. I throw The D in there because it was a guy at Microsoft, a legal guy at Walmart and a football player. I now out SEO them whenever you put Kevin Turner in. But it’s Kevin D. Turner, you’ll find me easy end to the URL. I picked it very early on, so it’s just like everybody else. LinkedIn.com in President. I love that every search on LinkedIn for President of LinkedIn. That’s me, @ least digitally, right?

0:44:21 – (Kevin D Turner): That’s where you’ll find me. And then I’ve also got a channel on YouTube called Keep Rocking LinkedIn. You can look it up by Keep Rocking LinkedIn or you can look it up by Kevin D. Turner and there’s 90 videos in there. There is some stuff that will change your world on LinkedIn and definitely get in there. I always think it’s, you know, it’s a master class for free and I’d rather somebody be knowledgeable at that level before they come to me because we can do so much more when they’ve got the right day set and so that’s there and available.

0:44:53 – (Kevin D Turner): Love people to join in, subscribe, follow. I always say do that first before anything. And if we start to engage, we might connect.

0:45:03 – (Bob Woods): You never know. I love that. So branding and LinkedIn strategies expert and tracker of as many changes as he could find on LinkedIn, Kevin D. Turner, really, really appreciate your time today. It’s been fun.

0:45:17 – (Kevin D Turner): Absolutely. Bob, thank you.

0:45:19 – (Bob Woods): And thank you for streaming this episode of Making Sales Social. So remember, when you’re out and about this week, be sure to brand yourself effectively, keep up with LinkedIn changes and make your sales social. Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned and what you want to hear from us. Next, register for free [email protected]

0:45:51 – (Bob Woods): you can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.