Episode 83: Conversations about Building a Community of Purpose on LinkedIn

In this episode of The Community Strategy Podcast, John Morley shares how he built an online community on LinkedIn by offering awareness, bringing delight to the members, and offering value in authentic conversations. 

John is a self-proclaimed Serial Entrepreneur, International Professional Keynote Speaker, Podcast Host, Radio Personality on Drive-Time Radio, and Global Marketing Specialist

He’s the CEO and Founder of The JMOR Connection, Inc as a Technology leader, Innovator, Thought Leader, Engineer & Marketer, his company helps customize the right solution for their business.

The values of his organization are security, trust, integrity, and professionalism. Based in New Jersey, he serves small to mid-sized organizations in the area as well as offers remote solutions for organizations shifting to a fully-remote team.

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Transcript

hank you for joining the Community Strategy Podcast. I am Callisa and today we’re joined with Suzi and Kristie, we are so happy to have both of you LIVE.

Thank you for joining. And of course we have our incredible host, Deb Schell, creator of the Find Calm Here as well as John Morley.

John is going to share how he’s built an online community on LinkedIn by offering awareness, bringing delight to the members and offering value and authentic conversations.

I’m really excited to see what he has to share. So take it away guys, thank you so much for the great intro and this is our first announcement that Callisa has joined me as a Co-host with the podcast.

So we’re promoting that out on socials in the next couple of weeks and I’m excited that police is taking action role for us and supporting me on the podcast. But john welcome and tell us a little bit about your background.

Give us a little bit about, we want to focus on about building relationships with with people I linked in today, but I want to get a sense of like what brought you to the place where you’re at today. Sure, well, first of all, I want to thank you guys. It’s a privilege of pleasure and honor to be with all of you today to me, LinkedIn was always where it was at, but a little about me, I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’m an engineer marking specialist. I am a national talk show host. I’m also a first responder and a video producer uh, and I’m passionate about creating content that changes people’s lives. My mission in life is to become a better version of myself and everyone else I come in contact with and their loved ones become better versions of themselves.

That’s why I believe I exist every day, LinkedIn has gone through as you know, some transitions back a while ago, LinkedIn was kind of like this platform where everybody was just trying to spam and get so many connections, you probably have heard that the back now it still happens a little bit, but it was a lot worse back then at that time, my connections were not like four or 5000, they were only like maybe 100 150 because I didn’t see value in LinkedIn went to a lot of in person networking groups, but I’m sure we’ve all been around where, you know, you go to an event and it’s like, how many the event for most people is, how many business cards can I get?

And I have a different philosophy, it’s how many quality connections can I build? And so that’s what drew me to LinkedIn because I wanted quality, I wanted profiles, I wanted people that I could get to know a little bit and that weren’t gonna sell me that we’re gonna just like maybe be a mentor resource. So I went on LinkedIn a while ago. Can we define a while ago for us.

Oh, geez, when did you start this endeavor like more intentional intentionality on LinkedIn for us. So I put a LinkedIn user, if I looked at the time when I created Lincoln was many years ago, but when I got intentional like to get passionate about it and grow the group, let’s say that was about four or five years ago that I got serious about LinkedIn before that 150 connections and it was okay but that wouldn’t do anything for me. So Lincoln is a great tool, but it only works if you provide value to people and I’ll get to that in a minute.

Most people I know on LinkedIn, SEO

I want to sell this, I’m gonna sell that. I’m like well I’m not interested but thank you so much. I appreciate the message. And you all get these messages.

They come back say hi Mary, Hi Suzy, hi, Kristi. Hi Deb.

I was reaching out to you and I want to add you to my network, it’d be great, okay.

Or they come back and say, you know how is everything going at x, y z?

I want to see if I can talk to you about. So I reach out and say I am touched that you took the time to reach out to me and read my profile. So many people actually just send blind connection requests. What was it that drove you to me and wanted to have a conversation? Guess what happens? They go away. I think that’s so funny and it’s so true because I’ve got a lot of pitches from software companies recently in the last year and and they’re like, they have no idea about what my business even is or what I do. And and then when I explain why I don’t even need your, basically I don’t take time anymore.

I used to like try to like go back and forth with them. But now either I just I see it and I’m like, no, this is spam canned response that I just copy and paste from ipad that I just literally copy and paste. I wish there was, I told Lincoln and the team because I know you guys know this. Most people don’t know what kind of a secret Microsoft bought out linkedin. Yeah, I knew that a lot of people didn’t know that they hide it because some people that kind of has a connotation but I wish they had a spot where I could just click the common responses like, you know, press the one response to to respond to the three response because it would save time. But I block I will tell you at least 50, 60 people a week. And so if somebody wants to connect with me this is the advice I want to share with you first and you want to connect. I have no problem connecting. I wanna be a resource for people. And so when I get somebody first thing I do is I read the profile, I look at that and I see was there a connection and if there’s a potential like maybe it’s another talk show host or something and I see they’re not pitching me, they like want to connect and so I’ll usually ask the question what it’s great that you reached out to me.

So what’s your show about or where do you think our shows connect or? And if they give me a decent answer like well thanks for getting back to me. Yeah, I would like to connect with you bam or if I want to connect with somebody I don’t ever request to connect unless I’ve asked you personally like hey Susie I dip, I’d like to send you a connection request, would that be okay or what I do is I send you a message, I like your profile, I like the way you started this 10 years ago and it’s really something that’s passion in my heart, check out some of the things I do. So you can see we have some synergies would like to connect with you. Would that be okay? You can send me a request and I’ll accept that’s what I believe linkedin is about. So several years ago I decided I needed to grow the linkedin platform and so I was growing it by producing good quality content but not putting a lot of hard into it, just being diligent about, not spamming people and things like that, and so I did that, but then I realized that in order to become, let’s say an influencer linkedin, I wanted to reach other people that wanted to get to know me and that I could help them and maybe they could help me, you know, it’s a two way street and so I said gee I’d love to create content.

So I did, I wanted to stream and they said, well I’m sorry you can’t stream because you’re not approved. So you were talking about when you said creating content, you’re talking about live streaming on. I was creating just, I wanted to create live content and they said no, because you know, it was open for a select audience, There’s there there was a system, how long ago was that, that you, you were trying to do that a Couple of years, a couple years ago, it’s gonna save me about two to three years ago, three years ago, Yes, so I applied for the program before and so somehow got instantly approved and then somebody said, oh you can’t, you know, I have to, you know, I’m not approved and I’m like, I don’t even know that was a thing, but apparently there is a process for that, there’s a process but they want to make sure you have value. So I said well how do I show you value if you won’t let me stream. So they said this other ways. So I said you know what, I’m just gonna create value other ways. So I decided to post content that was not sales. E but ask questions, questions, questions, questions, posts engaging people.

What do you think? Does this ever happen anybody? And then I said I’m a video producer, maybe I should produce some videos giving people advice And I did that and I had some mixed results and the reason I had mixed results is remember my content was going to my now three or 4000 plus people and these people were not all about my content, they just connected with me. And so I said I need to get to know my audience a little better. So I built john Seymour lee J cm Academy, which is, I’m also a keynote speaker. I spoke for Harvard spoke for Yale and I spoke to speak for a lot of small and large groups and so I said to myself, I need to bring this value to linkedin, but how do I do this? Because I can’t personally know four or 5000 people and they probably don’t even care what I produce. They don’t even, they’re not even into motivation. I look at all these people multi level, like how these people even get into my house, They even get accepted like this even happen. And so I started going through and started removing people that I thought were not gonna be good but I said this is gonna take too long.

So I said I can’t I can’t do this. I wasn’t as diligent. I was accepting connection requests. So the more connections the better not knowing that you have a limit on the connections you can have a link to. But I didn’t want to just have lots of connections. I want to have valuable meaning connect full connections with business cards. When I go to a business card event and someone says to me john you know they want to show a business card at me and I’m talking to let’s say Deb and they say to me, I’d love to get they just talking this person and then they come by and say, oh I want to say, well excuse me, I’m talking to lisa right now. Um I’d like to finish our conversation and then I’ll be happy to talk, oh great. Just take this card. I said well I’ll take your card but I’m gonna put it in my left pocket. Yeah, I don’t care where you put it. Well you should because see when I get off the boat, all these cards are gonna get thrown in the garbage, all these cards I’m gonna probably follow up and want to have lunch with and they looked at me and I said these people don’t get it. So I started realizing that I have to take my reputation more seriously and the people that I let into my circle. So I said, okay, about a year ago I got even more serious and I said I have a great connection but I need to bring more value.

So I said, how can I get Jason academy to linkedin? Got it when I build a community for linkedin for Jason academy, john c morally serial entrepreneur. And so this was a hard task. I, I created the group had four or five people and I wanted to get my street. So my streams got approved a while back. That did happen after I produced some valuable content and I pitched Lincoln again and they approved me to be a streamer because you can’t go above 10 minutes if you produce video content after that you have to be a stream and your stream has to be 15 minutes or more or they’ll ban you as a Lincoln streamer. And so when I got this information, I said, what I need to do is create a community. So I did, I created J N. C. Morally serial entrepreneur. J CM Academy community and I wasn’t looking to grow at large had a couple of people, but I wanted to stream to my community instead of my profile. So extreme to a page, a community or a profile. I want to stream to my community because they would be people that care more about the content I’m producing and so I applied and they said I’m sorry you don’t qualify.

I said I’ve already got thousands of people. Yeah, no, that’s great. But you can’t stream to your profile because you don’t have enough people. And so I realized that I had to do this, but I’m like, well, how do I grow from? Nothing I do. I just ask people for my other profile. I said, no, I need to target some people. I need to post some content organically in the group. And that got some in there about, I’m gonna say maybe around my birthday. And it was like, it was this, it was actually this year that the, that the group got approved to be streaming because I was a streamer for linkedin, which I still am, but I now got a groove as the group stream and I use streaming artist one of our platforms. And so, um I had a a wish for my birthday. I wish out to my friends and I said, I have a wish it was my birthday on my birthday because I’ve been working on this on my birthday. I said, have a wish for my birthday, would you make me a happy guy, would you let me reach my account so I could become an approved streamer on my group? It makes me so happy. My account started growing and kept going up and up and up and I made more posts and things like that and that helped and that day was over.

I remember coming back from Capitol Grill and I remember it being around 10:00 at night and I think I had the required amount, which was like 1 50 or 1 65. I was like, oh my gosh, I got it. So I went into link because I was already approved and I went to click on it and they only let you stream to either your profile, your page or your group. So I clicked it and I was immediately approved and I said, hey everyone, it’s johnson morally serial entrepreneur from Jason Academy. First of all, I want to say thank you and I’m so grateful to so many of you. 165 of you and I’m sure there’ll be more that have taken the time to click one button and approve me as somebody you want to see producing content for you, that means the world to me. And I want to let you know that I’m going to produce great content that’s going to just inspire you to become better. And then it just kept growing. I think we’re now up to like 2 50 or 2 75. So it’s not meant to be thousands meant to bring people together that want to be on my channel. I get authors that pitch and say, hey john, can we talk, I’m like, well what do you talk about Self improvement?

Well that’s kind of vague. Well, can you give me a title? Well, I can talk about anything. Well, why don’t you watch a few of my shows and see if we’re a fit and then I find that they want to sell their this or sell their, that we’re not a sales show, we’re about inspiration. Have you watched one of my shows? No, but we’ll watch it later, like just book an interview. Well, that’s not how we work. And I say no, thank you. So it sounds like you’re validating through the whole process of you’ve given some different steps along the way. So just to do a little recap of takeaways for Todd who thinks Todd for just joining us, because we were just talking about the steps involved in creating content intentionally on linkedin, being able to start a group and how to do a little bit more digging with when people reach out and do the pitch or something and say, you know, I want to be a part of your group or I want to be in your network and then asking the deeper questions which we know is really important to community validation of understanding your audience and that your audience understands you.

So I just want to bring that in a circle back for us. It’s important because a lot of people want to grow one of my goals is I produce daily content for lots of other things that I do and now we do Tiktok and stuff and our goal is to reach a million. And so, but I don’t want to reach in 24 hours. I want to reach it with meaningful content. So just to give an example, I went to 7 11 the other day, you know, 7 11 had a birthday. I’m sure you guys know, and if you’re in the air, you get a free slurpee 160 calories. So I don’t advise doing it every day. So I went there, I had to download the app to get the free slurpee, just like I had to do for Mcdonald’s yesterday. I don’t go to Mcdonald’s in 30 years just to get french fries. And so I got the slurpee and um, I just showed the machine and I did the content and I told people’s national slurpee day, happy birthday said, lady comes up to me, who’s the store person? So my gosh, what are you doing? I said, I’m just shooting a quick selfie, it’s gonna go on lots of different networks. Oh my God. Um, do you think it’s possible that I could join you?

I said, well, I’m gonna shoot this one first and then I could do another one. Oh, don’t worry. She said, I’ll give you the other flirty for free. Don’t worry about it. So I’m taking a picture from, hey, I’m with Laura. I’m at 7 11 here in Warwick. I’m so pleased to be with her. And I’m getting another, I’m getting a slurpee here. Happy birthday, Laura, Happy birthday 7 11. She goes happy birthday. She goes like gosh I’m gonna be honest with you. So I appreciate you guys and all you need to do follow like support but you know, calm down here, say hello to laura, get yourself a free slurpee and dollar for the snacks. And then what I did was I says what’s trending? And I went around and I said what are the corporate companies doing? Let me put a spin on that. Well snacks are very popular. 7 11, I’m not a big 7 11 guys, but I become big whatever the day is, I magically become that day. You’re like kind of your strategies is to identify like what’s the trending topics for the week? Were very good. I have a whole team now that I have 22, just do this for me. But I used to do it myself.

Yeah, exactly. So linkedin is a little different, I gotta be honest with you. Uh it’s very different. The type of content they want. So I don’t share as much of the daily content there, I share other content. Still meaningful content, but they’re not interested in a lot of those quick tips. The reason he should get a lot of people now I’m the first person to tell you that I don’t know everything, I have to be honest and tell you that I don’t know everything and I might be wrong on some things, but when you do that on linkedin and you become humble, uh, they don’t like that. Oh, I’m better than you. Okay, No problem. Well, how come you told me about that? When you could have done it this way? Well, that’s just the way it works for me. You know, it’s like a tarot reading, tarot card reading. So take what works for you and just throw away the rest. Okay. I won’t be offended. So how does that come back to the value of either the linkedin community or does it give you your time investment? So here’s what happens, linkedin doesn’t return directly from linkedin immediately when they see you on other platforms and they see you’re doing something that’s more, let’s say unconventional Lincoln supporters like, oh, I remember john he was on Tiktok or he was on facebook.

Yeah, yeah. You guys got to talk to him. But when you come out of the gate on linkedin and I have separate groups that I post things to non spammy, they are very picky what they want. So when I post coaching information, when I post tips, they sometimes want that. But when I find the best receipt of my posts are in my private group because those people are not trying to pitch me, those people are coming to my group because they want to learn something 80% of linkedin. I hate to tell you this is here to sell you something, I’m sorry to tell you that, but they’re here to sell you something. So, so you have to get to what means something, then what’s their value? So I always say to them, you know, what’s your challenge? So why do I do all these other things? Well, the reason I do that is like produce content and I know that you can’t sell content to people if you can’t first be an example. So I say to people, look, I understand you’re iffy on the fence. I don’t promise you anything I under promise and over deliver.

But if I’m getting views to visit McDonald’s in one day for over 5000 or something, I must know what I’m doing my average post. I tell people on linkedin, get 50-100. The one thing I want to point out there, the two things I I I’m getting I’m taking away from this so far is that you are going to larger brands like 7 11 Mcdonald’s you mentioned and you’re building a relationship with the small business owner that runs that business or that location and then you’re sharing an experience on social media and encouraging your audience to support these brands, the local businesses. Yes, I tell people shop local all the time. So the focus for you is really the mission and the and the drive behind this is to really promote relationship building through connecting brands a 100 and 50% because I tell people if you don’t like the content don’t fall but if you like the content, I’m not for everyone.

All right, I’m gonna pause you there because there are some questions in the child. I want to reframe us a little bit more focused on community building at this, talked a little bit about in person event, a little bit about networking on linkedin, but a lot of the people that are joining us are leading their own communities or community consultants. And when I say community, my my definition is off of social media. So we’re not talking about linkedin communities. In fact, this community of people is people who are building on mighty networks platform, which intentional platform. And so one of the questions in here, I think Susie, did you want share your question a little bit to give us some context so that we can have that for john Sure, well, thanks Deb you set that up really nicely. Just that all the people here run communities off of social media. So, my question for you is why should we take the time to start a community on linkedin? I never have done that before.

And how do you use it specifically? Um, all the philosophies you’re describing, like make it meaningful, have real dialogue, provide value. I think this community is well versed in those basic philosophies. So what is it about linkedin that might be different from how we’re doing that in other spaces and excellent Excellent question Susie. So, first of all, linkedin is a long term game, that the first thing I want to tell you, it’s not it’s not going to get you your your prize in 24 hours. The people in linkedin, you have to build an integrity of community respect. That’s number one. So why linkedin? They’re harder to get the people on linkedin, but I can take myself, for example, Alright, people want a picture, they want to reach out to me. I make connections with people that I feel we’re going to be mutually beneficial. So when you go through linkedin, you’re not gonna find that quality, you’re not gonna find that ceo you’re not gonna find a talk show.

I just talked to the head person of Good Morning America and I’m not gonna find that on facebook. So when I build that integrity on linkedin, they’re gonna transfer that to me because now they know that my group is doing it. So yes, it takes time. But let’s say, I don’t know what the topics you cover up, but let’s say you cover something that’s about mental health for example, and you’re talking about mental health and when you’re talking about it, you’re not pitching, like, hey, you know, I make everything. So one of things I teach is something called open ended versus closed questions just to give you a quick synopsis and when people post things that about opening questions, we get dialogue, we get we get a different flavor people on linkedin and see you day in day out. Yes, I just wanna say I love the open ended questions versus closed questions, like because that again opens up dialogue and I, I did want to like just just clarify there, I think that from my experience on linkedin, what I like to do is I take the approach of, I’ve joined virtual calls, just like this one and then I build relationships with people.

So say, I didn’t know any of you and this is a new call where I was getting to know people um building relationships on a virtual call and then I reach out on a onto linkedin and say, hey Susie, it was great chatting with you this morning in this session. I really love some of the key points you said or just just a short like sentence and then send her an invite and then I start to build relationships and that’s kind of what john was saying about in the beginning of just kind of reaching out, building relationships individually. And then once you’ve kind of established, maybe uh following over time, then people see you as an authority and you know, a leader and then people are more interested when you’re asking them a question, like a proposing, in fact I asked a question yesterday on linkedin, I said, what is the one thing you wish you knew before you started on your community building journey and from that response, I got a whole a whole myriad of people, because I tagged a lot of people.

So just strategically wise, I’ve tagged some people, I’ve asked a question that’s open ended, I wanted to give an example right to back up what you were saying about open ended questions and then sharing their experiences as they’re going in there. Now, I, I don’t think to answer your question directly. I don’t think for us, it’s to build an entire linkedin group. I think what might be more beneficial is for you to be a part of other linkedin groups via building relationships with people than identifying, I’m sure they’ll invite you their linkedin groups, like john’s inviting you to, you know, to peoples and then they’re gonna say, oh Susie come join our linkedin group and then that’s where you can start to cultivate some more relationships. And then when somebody says, oh, I’ve been really trying to get on more, more podcast, I really wanted to do a workshop and Susie’s like, oh, well, you know, that’s what I do. So let’s talk. I think so, I think there’s there’s there’s there’s there’s steps, right?

So when you walk, you have to start. But I want to say one thing before I answer that question before you could be taken as a linkedin authority. Forget, whether it’s linkedin or its other peers in your in your in your business or people you connect with here internationally, your profile. I did a whole podcast on your profile, your profile is key. You’ve got to make sure it has the right points. It has a good picture that you have recommendations in your profile. That’s something that helped me quite a bit. Oh, you know, such and such the way that happened. I got the man the first man to ever talk on a cell phone. Pretty good guest. He has about a three year waiting list. Now, how did that happen to talk on a cell phone was one of those big ones, like, yes, he was the inventor of it and they were having a fight between two people, his nemesis who was a friend, but he was like, I didn’t invite you. He did because he was not, he invited that. He invented it. So what happened is I talked to another guy a while back who was on my show about the internet of things and he was from europe and I said, okay, I just, you know, I’m nice to everybody and I take from all over and he’s like, john, he says, I have somebody and I was reading your profile and I said, would you give me a recommendation?

So, you know, I clicked the button and I always ask everyone a guest to give me a recommendation. And so I did that and he reached out to me and he says john he says, I have somebody else. I think that’d be great for you. I was looking at your things. He said you’re really credible this and that. And so he says Martin would love to talk to you. So I reached out to Martin Martin to respond. I said jim Martin never got back to me. Oh yeah he’s a busy guy. He’s with a large pr company and they don’t they he probably doesn’t know you yet. Let me make a personal phone call to him, tell him who you are and um okay so next thing I know the pr company is calling me. She says well let me get you the engagement agreement and let me get you the whole thing. I said wait a minute. I said I’m not ready to hire him. What do you mean? Well she says we hire speakers. You know I’m looking to bring him on the show as a guest and somebody told me he’d like to come on. She’s so um that’s how we work and that’s okay. That’s right next day, Martin calls me and I said Martin said how are you? He says I’m fine. I said uh I talked to your P. O.

I apologize for that. What’s the matter? Yeah. He said they gave me a contract I owed you like $18,000 to come on the show and I said that wasn’t what I was bargaining for. No no no no. He says. He says I do speakers all over the place. And so what happened is the profile that I built had convinced martin because his friends to take a look at me, and he’s like, well, I’ll think about it then. He says, he looked at the program, well, you had this guy, you had this game, this weather and that built my credibility. So the group thing, here’s the thing about the group that it takes a lot of effort. I do a stream every single night called I. F. Y. L. Inspirations for your life. It’s a lot of work. I produce 400 hours of content every single month. Um, but I will tell you that when I go to bed every night before I go to bed and it’s 12 o’clock at night, like, hey guys, you know, I promise to get I. F. Y. L. Out. This whole week’s master series starts on saturday and on friday, it’s free and it’s called How to enjoy the journey, how to have fun along the journey of success.

Now, I will tell you that establishing a link to community is not step one, step two, step three, but because there’s a lot that you packed in a couple of minutes and I want to break down a little bit of what you’re saying. So what I was hearing was is that you’re also talking about a couple different things. The linkedin profile being one um I’ve worked extensively on my linkedin profile over a number of years. So I think it takes time to build a really great linkedin profile. And one of the things that I’ve learned in my journey of linkedin is that recommendations are a really great thing to have on your profile and and as well, I didn’t really think about this until recently, until about a year ago, but you can actually use, if they’ve put it a recommendation on linkedin, you can use that on your website, promote that on social media, you can share that in a lot of places, you can send that to clients. The other tip, I will say, is that one of the clients that I talked with and a couple of people that I work with have a hard time getting back to me with a testimonial or a recommendation.

So what I’ve been doing is reaching out to them on linkedin and just saying, you know, if they’re not responding to my email about hey, it was great working together, would you write me a testimonial? I just asked them on linkedin, would you recommend me? And then I give them some, maybe you could share, you know, this is either an example or here’s the key things that I I think would be great if you could share about share about how the experience was working with me or something because a lot of people for some reason feel like that linkedin recommendation is like the cover of the best book you’ve ever written or the top of the new york times quality stuff and in reality, all the person is asking you of a recommendation or you know, to be recommended, they just want you to say something positive so that people know that, that you’re a valid awesome human being that somebody has worked with. And so I feel like people spend a lot of like they just don’t want to reply because they’re like, well I don’t even know what I would write.

So that’s another tip is like if you would like the better way that I saw to get testimonials for your business clients is to go on linkedin, connect with, make sure you’re building relationships with them on linkedin, thanking them for working with them after your project is finished and then saying, hey would you recommend me? Here’s some great tips of how, you know, the takeaways of what I thought was a great experience. And if you honestly like just if you want to, you can just copy and paste it and that’s fine too. So that makes it really easy. So the key things, they’re just making it easy for them and and then getting them and then over time I’ve just targeted certain people to ask through my business. And so now I have, I think 20 something recommendations, I have a lot on there. I mean I have a pretty decent amount over my career of different places I worked in different things I’ve done. So I think it’s a good tip to say that you know, the profile is a good place to start. Either whether you want to build a community or just, you know, build a business. I think, you know, as far as if you’re working with B two B and not B two C like business to business instead of business consumers, Lincoln is much more of a space where there’s gonna be people that are gonna be interested in the messages, you have your business to business person.

So I just wanted to make those comments. Absolutely. And I think that I think it’s great advice. The other thing I want to tell you is that so Lincoln is going to be probably a harder place to establish those connections than anywhere else. But what you’re gonna find is that the quality of the relationship of linkedin is going to be a lot higher. I have a lot more integrity and people that you connect with on linkedin are gonna do what they say, they’re gonna do more than 90% of them. I will tell you so, I mean you get flakes anywhere. So that’s important thing. The other thing that I find it’s very useful is using the linkedin search feature and being able to search by different geographics, different areas, different communities. I build it’s an offline community. But I build my build our chamber a lot by searching for different executives and companies that are in our towns and I reach out to them. That’s the other key point I wanted to mention is you talked about specifically looking at people who could elevate your existing business or brands. And so one of the things that we’re working on with the community strategy podcast is bringing on guests and talking with people who are doing different things in the industry who can bring and elevate the community strategy podcast and our brand.

And I think it’s a good way to build and establish authority is when you get people that are interviewing or talking to you that work for larger organizations and building those relationships. I recently just started talking with circle and and building relationships with the people that are working for the Circle platform in addition to the muddy networks platform. And I’m working on building relationships with other with other community builders and I’m Todd is in the community consultants collective. It’s one of the groups that I’ve been leading for almost a year now, believe it or not, to bring together people in this new and continually changing space of consulting for enterprise organizations or small nonprofits or startups or entrepreneurs on building an online community that is on a different platform other than social media, but like benefiting from everything. What you just said to recap is just benefiting from having an authority online, establishing that for relationship building and that just takes time, right?

Community building takes time. So everybody on this call knows that community building takes time. It’s it’s a long game, it’s a journey and building relationships. And the key takeaway I think I would share with you is that linkedin has helped me to better understand who I want to work with and then the industry that I enjoy working in connecting with other people that are a little ahead of me as far as in consulting, like that’s how I met Todd, that’s how I met a lot of other people in consulting in the community industry was because I reached out to people who were ahead of me and said, hey, I I would really love it and sometimes just asking and building that relationship, that can be a mentor mentee relationship is a great way to cultivate connections. And then now I’m starting to get people who are recommending me, oh, I’m too busy, but Deb might have some time and she’s probably a good fit for you. Yeah, and I think we all, we all know about the value of of of constant great content. I think I think we can’t stress that enough. And so one of my, I’m gonna call it one of my cases or one of my pluses as I’m also a video producer.

So I know that takes time. I know, but if you can’t do it, you can have teams do it for you. The point is in order to motivate people, There are basically three things. So there’s something called an inbound model you guys might be familiar with. So inbound works for communities as well as businesses inbound means that we’re more concentric focused on the people and the challenges that we solve. And there’s three points to that, which is basically we need to, I call it AD we need to acquire, we need to engage them and we need to delight them. So how we acquire them today is different how it was 20 years ago. Um, I say this to you, if you don’t take those steps through social media, through video, whether you’re gonna do to hire someone, someone else will get those people and build that community. Um, and that’s what people are right now, they’re busy. You have to get to peel before they’re making decision to join you. When they think about, oh my gosh, I gotta improve my health, I gotta do this. That’s why you’ve got to be in front of them not to sell them, but to say, hey, this is a challenge.

Now they know it’s a problem. Now they acknowledge that in their head now they’re like, okay, how do I engage that person? So they’re going to take a step and then how do I continue to delight that person? It’s like, oh my gosh, they’re amazing what they do for me, Really, you’ve got to try that. Yeah, I’m glad you shared a little bit more and I love that. There’s so many different ways to engage and connect with people in, um, in linkedin and different ways to do that. Suzy was asking about a video that sparked your engagement. What do you feel like? Um, I know you said about that. You gave some examples around like the like fried french fries. They are Like 7 11. Like I do differently did my parfait thing. I mean, I went shopping and stop and I just do crazy things and the best one. Yeah, that’s part of, that’s part of me. I’m just created. I mean, I think it should be called creative john I, I had my, I’m also first responders. So I went to dairy queen and for national ice cream cake day. I bought an ice cream cake and one of my companies designed the cake.

You can, you can see it online. But basically I went to the franklin police Department and I did something most people will not do. I walked in there and you should never walk into a police department and kind of surprise them or try to record them. That’s something that you can get a lot of trouble for. But I know that and I’m also, I’m also a member of the United States press, but I had my press badge, but I didn’t think I was gonna be trouble. So I went in there a little surprised and they were like, they came in there. They think, oh my gosh, thank you. Three days later I got a letter. I said, okay, this is either a warrant for my arrest or it’s a thank you letter. It was a thank you letter from the chief who, who knew me. But the one thing that had the biggest engagement was when I had a birthday party. So j moore, one of the shows that I do tech talk, we decided that all my tech channels, I have so many checks and I said we were going to live in person birthday party and I told people what they’re gonna get balloons cake and you gotta make things fun now if you can’t, Yeah, I think it’s a good point to just say, not only making things fun, but finding little simple things.

Like it’s not complex, right? It’s pretty basic to talk about like a birthday party. Everybody can get grasp the concept. Like if I say birthday party, people know exactly what I’m talking about. They can visualize it in their head. They can see like they’ve been to at least one birthday party in their life, right? Or they had several of them maybe as a kid. So I think that the take away from me right there is for susie to just talk about something that everybody can relate to. Like is there one thing in your industry or what you’re doing that every single person can automatically visualize that thing, and that’s a great way to use a story or an example of something that’s common and then being able to create content off of that. And then being able to have that experience Now a birthday party would be an experience with not just one person or two people, but a bunch of people. So that is its own community, but that, but that’s what you guys do online. People, like, if you go to Disney and I was through Disney Institute when I was younger, really great not to get into that, but people don’t go to Disney to go on a ride or to eat.

People don’t come to your class for just information. People don’t go out to dinner to eat. Now, let me tell you why I say this, they come to you, you ready here comes for an experience. If you don’t deliver an experience, they’ll get the information somewhere else. So you’ve got to create that experience. I don’t have uh, anniversaries at my companies, we have birthdays. I like Christy’s question here, we’re running out of time. We’re coming up against time. So I’m trying to keep us on track, but Christie was mentioning, and I’ll share first, and then I’ll ping over to you, john about personal and business page currently she’s got both and she’s wondering where she is Christy, They might understand you weren’t trying to figure out where you focus your time on which area? Yeah, I was just curious on how to like leverage. So my personal account is where my like past experience and connections have been but since created more recently my business and then this business page.

So I was curious about how to like maybe leverage my personal page and then eventually to my business. Your personal page is good. But realize your personal page has a lot of people that you probably don’t even know or connect with or don’t even care what you do. Unfortunately, I just want to connect for numbers, create your, use your personal page to find those group people. I recommend a search function. You can use the advanced search function or find people targeted either in your geographic, find key leaders that are gonna be able to funnel you down to those people. Like if I talk to the head of nursing while she’s gonna know people who have chronic issues and things like that. Hip is a little different. The thing I would tell you to do is take create your company page, create a group post content in though and and draw people to your group do different raffles giveaways. You see when you provide a consistency of content and how often you guys provide content. Um we have one group that does content several times a week but stay consistent when people know they can go to you for that, they might find you six months or a month later and then take those people and drive them now.

The last thing cost a few dollars but I do recommend it. It does work but it’s not cheap. You can do a linkedin campaign. It works if you have a specific purpose. Uh for example you can do a minimal campaign, they lower the budget to $50. But I will tell you be very careful in your targets because you can blow through that like that if you use it and you tailor it correctly, you’re gonna get people. That’s why did a group. My group is almost 200. Some people, those people care about motivation. People on my personal profile don’t make sense. Yeah, I get you. I think to what I’ve done and I seem to find really great experience in this is that I have a business page. I started I started to invite my contacts to like the business page but I’m still not seeing that people are liking or commenting or connecting on my posts that I put on the business page unless I share them on my personal linkedin. And so I typically have posted.

What I do is just to give you the workflow I post on buffer to schedule out content ahead of time. I have it go to linkedin to my business page and then on the day but it comes out so I have it scheduled to go out at nine a.m. Every day and on the day I re share that on my personal page and tag a few people that I feel like might be a good person who would enjoy this content and then I put a whole bunch of hashtags and then I’ve tagged people maybe in responses sometimes, and the more I’ve done that, the more views I’ve had on my posts and one of the things that takeaways that I went when I went to podcast in Orlando, the conversation was really about people want to work with other people in the in the current economy that we have and going forward. People want to know other people and work with other people. So when you’re focusing on it’s great to have a brand, I still have a brand, but it’s also good to build relationships with individuals who then no debs behind you know, Debs brand is find calm here, so we understand, we know who Deb is and we also understand that her brand is fine come here and we know why that is and those are communication points that you establish over time with people, but like, you know, you, I met you, you all in two years and you kind of like understood like the differences between who I am and my business and I think linkedin wise while groups can be helpful, I think for our purposes because we have so much time we’re spending in the mighty Networks for example, you’d want to just have and I think Christie did really well with this in the last couple of weeks is just sharing what’s going on inside your community with linkedin, Like saying, hey, we’re really excited to share this new trip for our linkedin members or not linked to your community members, you know what I mean?

So I think that what you’re doing Christie has been really good and I think it’s just a matter of figuring out how consist that you can be, that’s gonna be doable for you. So if you can’t do a video, like john every day, that would be way too much for me. I don’t even like doing videos, number one and number two to do it every day would be like really hard. So that that wouldn’t be me, that would not be me. But I know that I can write blog posts once a week and linkedin newsletters is another really good feature that you can get people to subscribe. And then if you post a newsletter once a month or once every week or whatever, it could just be repurposing content from your blog, which is what I started doing. So I took content from my blog and posted on linkedin newsletters and then tagged a couple people. So I thought those were other helpful things todd mentioned in here. Free monthly invites to business page. Todd. Can you expand on this a little bit for us real quick.

Yeah, so this is something that it’s not immediately obvious, but when you go to your, when you go to your business page and there’s an ability to invite other people to the to the page, people from your network. And you get like 153 invites every month. It increases as you get more followers onto the page and most people don’t even go in there and take advantage of the full invites every Month. And so just going through inviting people, I just hit the 500 mark today. I was really happy about that from my branded page and then thank you and then I don’t actually see a ton of interaction yet getting a little bit better. I think what has the potential to continue to build that for me is I’ve been running my linkedin live events through my branded page rather than through my personal following. That’s what I did. Yes. Yeah, it has a better you have a better integrity and the people coming, even if they don’t come for the live there more wanting to come from my follow up. But I have a lot of the economist your show, but I want to watch it when I put on my personal it doesn’t have the same integrity because I’m branded as an expert.

That’s why I said join these groups, become friendly with the people in the groups, become an expert. Once you’re comfortable enough, then start your own group, hire an intern and run a successful group where you are the expert. Well, I’ll talk about this here. But if you want more details come to my group and I’ll give you the whole scoop or I’ll give you this and I think that’s what I try to do. I’m just gonna say we’re gonna wrap up here. Thanks for your sharing. Thanks for all the great questions from Suzy and Christie. Yeah. For people who want to join your linkedin group, tell us how to do that. So really easy. I’ll go ahead and pop that in the chat. I’ll just pop it in. But the two things I just want to share with you is definitely gonna be the group, which I’ll pop right in the chat here right now, I’m just gonna pop the link. But the other big thing that I would tell you to definitely check out with me is gonna be all my great content, which you can check out. It’s all free. Believe me achieve dot com and whether a Tiktok person or you can click on it and click on john’s daily days and you can see all the crazy stuff I do, I’ll leave it with the last thing cause I know you guys like to give things away for free and people like things for free sometimes.

So on friday, it’s national giveaway day. I would try to incorporate something in your marketing or your plans that does something free and captured into some blog post so the community can know that you gave back. Yeah, great tips. Great! Thank you so much for everybody for being here. Great to connect with everybody. If you’re not connected with me on linkedin listener, please connect with me on linkedin. You can just go to linkedin dot com backslash Deb shower if you just search my name and put find calm and find calm here, LLC you can also follow me there. I am having a linkedin live, although this will, this recording will be after my linkedin life, but my goal for myself for this month is to do one linkedin live, which I’m planning to do on friday with with thank you with the signature talk that susie so graciously helped me organize and collaborate on. So thank you for that support and promote that talk.

And you schedule that talk and you have a good thumbnail, yep, I put it together and I’m super excited about getting it out to the world. So thank you so much for all your tips, john uh everybody’s listening, hopefully you’ve liked this episode. Please send me an email or let me know if you have any challenges Deb at com here dot com and until the next time I hope you’re finding calm in this day morning, evening, afternoon. Today’s Thursday at one. Come until the next time. Take care and thank you everyone.