Janet Johnson and I am here today with, I have a special guest. Well of course we have Kimmy, Kimmy the salon owner.
Hey!
And we have a special, very special guest today, Mike O’Neil. Mike O’Neil is Integrated Alliances. I’d first want to go through a little bit about Mike and I appreciate your coming and then we’ll go get in to some details on what he does and he’s going to teach us a bunch of LinkeIn information today.
So Mike O’Neil is the LinkedIn RockStar. Social media pioneer, twice a Forbes top 50 social media power influencer and an internationally-acclaimed LinkedIn authority and futurist. Mike inspires audiences with his unique blend of classic rock music, LinkedIn and social networking taking a page from his LinkedIn book entitled “Rock the World with Your Online Presence.” He’s a 20-year B2B technology sales veteran. Mike has trained thousands of IT and sales professionals, chose LinkedIn for 7 more years. As president of Integrated Alliances, the world’s first LinkedIn and social media firm, Mike’s time for the LinkedIn program teaches you to fit in, stand out and convert to attract new business with LinkedIn and unique strategies and techniques. Integrated Alliances provide LinkedIn and social media consulting services, live training, on-demand learning and end-users support for firms and sales channels. Now Mike’s going to talk today about standing out from a crowded field on LinkedIn. Thank you Mike and welcome.
Hey, it’s great to have you!
Oh, it’s great to meet you!
Have you ever been interviewed by a puppet before?
I felt like they were puppets that were interviewing me.
But I’m more fun. I got cuter hair.
You are way both.
Well thanks for coming on the call today Mike, we’re on hangout.
Awesome. You all know how, what it’s like outside? Could you tell our audience what we’re doing this in the middle of in here?
Blizzard, minus degrees.
27 below for me last night, I have a screenshot of it on my iphone. I grab those things whenever I can because you know. You might say I may never going to see that again but you’d be wrong.
You hope, we hope. But some people I think around the country and the world don’t have a clue what it’s like here.
It’s affecting internet a lot, it’s affecting social media people. Let me try and break into a hot, hot new story. A lot of us are stuck at home, we’re not driving into the office and darn it if at home your internet service isn’t getting slow or down or something, making it even harder to do the things that we’re all kind of want to do the right thing, right? We’re not to watch tv, or want to get that work done and we cannot vpn, routers are getting broken, vpn tunnels are going down, it’s a good day to be stand alone writing, blogging. And I had a backup on the cellular network with wifi device just to kind of keep things going and stuff and held a webinar yesterday and had internet problems. Have to go back and forth find out if it’s a system-wide problem and GoToWebinar yesterday.
Yes and we’ve had a lot of problems and there’s been more than just even GoToWebinar. There’s been Aweber and Hostgator today, I’d heard just lots of different things so this is something that’s not, not even just because it’s in the cold but it just didn’t happen.
I’ve actually been down on those manholes where the routers are, I was a telecom sales engineer way back all those years. You go down into the manhole, you go on over here and all of a sudden you’re expecting there’d be sewage and there’s routers all over, underneath the streets, down there. That what happens. And I was doing it in the summer so it was more hot than cold, if you know what I mean. Anyway, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn, those are people I trained on LinkedIn by the way, I train those telco folks. They’re frankly wondering where are my next customers coming from? And when they stop calling me all they want is a bid.
I bet. I would love to talk to you about LinkedIn and I’ve really want, for me personally, and Kimmy has some questions for you, too. She has some very specific questions about her business also. We really want to hear about, let’s start with the profile. What is changing with the profile right now? It’s becoming more visual, sounds like.
You know that’s right. Frankly what’s kicking off the next version of our LinkedIn block is the visual aspect like you just drive. Where you on LinkedIn when there weren’t pictures?
Yes, it was awesome. It was like a directory listing.
And “Chris and Pat”, you were really wondering is it Mr. Chris or Ms. Pat, right? So we’re beyond that a little bit now and LinkedIn says have a head shot picture. Oh great! And if you don’t have a head shot picture you either not taking seriously or you’ve got the wrong kind of picture or something. There’s a certain formula that LinkedIn wants. So let me give you the 2014 formula for success on your picture. This is, pay attention, this is the big whahoo here.
Okay.
Get a nice picture with a really nice smile where you’re wearing something that fits your business, you know. Well for me, concert t-shirt fits my business. For you, I don’t know Kimmy. A new paper towel for around-wrap, I don’t know. What matters are these few things. First of all your picture so get it cut out. Get your picture cut out, and do an .png file, okay. It’s transparent and I can put whatever I want behind it. Here’s me and look at me! See, that’s a background that I might artificially put in, if it wasn’t real. But it is real, see! That’s really, really there. But it doesn’t have to be. You can take a picture and put that in Afterworks. And if the things behind you are interesting and reinforce you that will cause people to give you a little bit more attention, maybe click on you instead of someone else in that list of 10 people or 20 or however many come up on a list, they’re going to go poof, that picture speaks to me, I want to know more. That’s my biggest tip and the whole bit is find a background that works for you, get your picture cut out and put it in front of that background, that combination. You can blur out the background a little bit. I’ll share what I think is one of my favorite pictures. The gentleman’s name is Ron Noden, N-O-D-E-N, Ron Noden, okay. Look at his picture, take a peek at it, it’s unbelievable. I’ll share one more so let’s kind of one, that’s a guy. I’ll give you a woman’s picture, Pam Demmer. Pam Demmer, D-E-M-M-E-R. Both of these pictures were taken with this philosophy. In one case it was a real picture that had the back blurred out. I think he really was in front of that background with Ron. But with Pam we did it with an iPhone and you could do it for 5 bucks on fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.com. You can have someone create just 1-2 picture sort of thing. So there’s the first part. But have you noticed you can put more than 1 picture now? Kimmy have you noticed?
Yes, you could put pictures all over.
Put pictures all over. There’s probably a better way to do it and a less better way to do that, don’t you think?
Okay, yep.
So I’ll share with you, I just had a blog post on this actually. It’s called Sex up Your LinkedIn Profile with Additional Pictures and it’s a killer post but I actually will go over it. When you put pictures in a section of your profile, you could put up to 5, at least have 5 showing. You got the top row which has the 2 pictures and there in that 16×9, like that high def tv, you know, wider on top. And then below it are 3 more pictures and there in the old tv set 4×3, they are not so wide. It’s exactly that aspect ratio so you should understand it. Old tv on the bottom and the new tv on the top.
Frankly when you put pictures up, I’m only going to talk pictures on this part here because it’s a little bit different with Power Point and other things. Once you upload them into there, there’s a little upload link, you upload them in, you can drag and drop from over here. I want this one at the top, I like that over there, kind of get it the way you want it.
Nice. That reminds me a little bit of the Pinterest board that you can drag those around and same thing.
And don’t you love that about Pinterest board, huh, like the Pinterest board, they do that! But when you do, you take something that might look good in a 4×3 and it doesn’t look so good in the 16×9. See! So there’s a way to draw a picture that works for both and that’s were the post on integratedalliances/blog, the blog on integratedalliances.com, essentially.
Perfect, yep, we’ll log into that.
It’s one of the best post I’ve done recently because it really takes it to a science of making it idiot-proof. Like you have a, I’ll share an idiot-proof for you, how’s that? I won’t ask you if you’ve ever colored your hair but I have, okay.
What color did you do?
A Revlon-92.
Oh, awesome, I love that color.
What do you think? So you can have a 94 next time. So they give you a mittens to put on your hand so you don’t get your hair all messy. Is there a left mitten and a right mitten?
Yes.
No.
There’s two, in mine. But I’ve never colored my hair, no I’m just kidding.
There’s no difference.
In the color box it’s just the same old plastic mitten.
Yes, works a leftie or a rightie, it’s a Boy George club, right? So there’s an example for you, kind of easy. So you want to draw a picture that could be on the top or the bottom and what you do is save some area for buffers like when you go to have your business card printed, they’d say don’t set an outside line, don’t go within that card range. It’s a similar principle to that, okay? And if you do it right, when you click on the picture you get a nice view of the picture where you can scroll around instead of a tiny view, as well so that post will really help a lot.
Absolutely. This sounds like it will make a big difference for people that not to take a guessing game on how to do it.
Yep. So there’s part of the question, that’s the mechanical part. The other question is what kind of picture should I use? You know that kind of matters, too, are really great view of something that does not belong there. You get the idea! So what do I want to feature? What are things that I want to feature here in particular because I can do this with the job description down below, I can do it with the employment thing down below. But I want to talk about, the place to look at what did you just say above? What did I say in my summary and what pictures go with that to support that? Or substitute for, you can just get a quick glance and see what you got. Mike is a speaker, I see he’s got a book. It looks like he trained in front of audiences, I see his into cars and concerts – 5 pictures for you.
Great, yeah.
So there’s a how-to-do-it, done that later instead of a first. How to do it comes after you figure out what you want to do. And these are pictures that it really does pay to do a little extra, a little extra Photoshop or little oomph in that fiverr.com place. You can find people to update your pictures there or have it done by all kinds of people. Don’t shed it over too much but it’s worth the 5 bucks.
And it’s worth to sit down and kind of draw it out I would guess like on a white board or maybe paper just to get a good idea of what you want.
Yeah. You got and realize that you can make all the changes you want. Just get it up there and see what goes on top, top matters more than bottom. The 16×9 is where you feature the stuff that’s most important. If they only saw that, those top 2 pictures then think about that. Then I got 3 more.
Nice.
The key is the png file, remember that not the jpeg.
With something in the background that’s going to stand out. Now what about like PR say, that’s a big thing out there right now like when you’re featured on different things, would you suggest that in the background?
Explain that to me one more time.
When you’re featured on entrepreneur.com. places that you’re featured across the web – PR stuff. Would that make sense to put that behind you?
Yeah, you’re talking about like a media wall?
Yes.
Great.
Okay, let me give you another really great person to see. This gal was on my radio show, we did her picture. In fact she’s featured in that article, okay. Look at the gal that’s featured in that article there, she’s in front of a media wall holding a microphone with the media wall behind her and it’s perfectly blurred.
Got it.
I’ll share something a little generic that I’m doing. I’ve got a client that I’m courting, okay, he works for Honeywell. Really cool guy, really busy guy. I have to chase him down all the time but darn it if I’m not going to do business with Honeywell. I took his picture out of LinkedIn. I blew it up so I got the 400×400 one, I sent it to my graphics guy, we cut him out and put a media wall behind him that had Honeywell logos on it and blurred them out and I just sent it to him. And I sent it to him actually with about 7 pictures. We started here then we did this, then we did this, then we did this and then this and then this and here’s what we came to, and by the way here’s the png file for you to upload. I spent half an hour on that and then 2 people for half an hour. I invested some time and money in that and I’m expecting I’m going to close the deal with him sometime within the next month or two and he had hundreds and hundreds of sales people under his area. But I’m making him stand out. Do you think the industrial controls division is a stand out business?
Not typically but your making him stand out!
Yep and it’s very, in good taste.
I did another one for a friend of mine who works at the data center, my old boss. Payback time boss, Don Coufal, payback time, there you go. And his in front of one of these backgrounds that looks like you had it at Walmarts or the wedding picture something. You know that blurred, gray background that kind of looks like someone threw up a bunch of paint on the wall.
Yes, yes.
Well I cut his picture out and went to Google and found a good data center picture, routers and all that stuff. Blurred it out and had his picture like pointing off the screen like he’s looking away disinterested as opposed to looking in and interested, flipped his picture around, put the data center behind it, blurred it and now he’s going to put that up. We’re doing a call together and he’s going to put that out. He now looks new and edgy and fast and moving and exciting instead of like he was at the wedding.
Yep, that’s great. So you didn’t get his head shot at at series then, right?
An iPhone does an amazing job. The Pam Demmer picture was done on my iPhone. I took that picture and do I look like a photographer? Come on, look at me.
Not very.
Mister photographer. Now I hardly know what’s one the iPhone that’s why I have an iPhone, I need an idiot-proof phone. My mom has a jitterbug phone, have you ever heard one of those?
No.
It’s for seniors. It’s the idiot-proof phone. It has yes and no buttons on it. Do you want to answer this call? Not like press the green button, it says yes. And the question says ‘do you want to answer the phone?’ That’s where were getting by the way. We’re getting that in social media, we’re getting that in LinkedIn and other places. It isn’t how much power you can do but how you bring it really easy to understand and implement it, too. You put the features they have to be easier to use, for the most part.
Yep, disability. Very easy.
And images is simple finery thing where it’s grabbing people’s attention fast and it’s good that LinkedIn is moving in that direction and I think they’re obviously realizing from what’s been happening with the Instagram, the Pinterest and all. How all the sites have become image-based. I think I actually, this is just an opinion, but it’s like LinkedIn is one of the last really bring that in. Well Twitter, too, I guess, if you look at both of them. But it took them awhile. It’s taken a little while for them to bring in all that imagery.
Yeah, I expect it to continue and to expand and go beyond it. Maybe with a player or upload area or file upload or something like that. We used to have box out and some of these other apps that would do some of those things, Google docs, and stuff. And they took those away and frankly I think LinkedIn’s been on the wrong path. They’ve been taking more things away than they’ve been adding. LinkedIn answers is gone, all the applications are gone. A lot of these hooks, I used to use a plug-in for my Outlook called Xobni. Xobni works with everything but LinkedIn now and just on and on. They’ve been cutting here and I think they’re going to get burned by that sometime. That’s going to come back, as long as there’s not an alternative to Comcast, as long as there’s not an alternative to LinkedIn, you know for example, there’s the monopolistic sort of thing, that will continue for awhile but senses change. The big one to watch, here’s the one to watch salesforce.com. They’ve got the clout to do something big, bad and awful that could affect LinkedIn. They own Jigsaw. Jigsaw’s data.com now. Well, gee, what would to take jigsaw and now data.com and have it be datasocial.com? And incorporate those folks. Your data are already in there, would you like to socialize while you’re here? We’ve got your data, do you want to come and play here? Or has LinkedIn not met your needs? You know that’s the one I’m betting on if there’s some successor that comes along, if it’s something we don’t see and quickly comes up. They’ve already got the user base, they’ve got the huge convention. How hard would it be? It’s like IBM coming out with a PC, how hard is that! It’s an extension to their big audience already. And we so what happened there.
That leads me to another question and you may be kind of answer this, where is LinkedIn headed in the next couple of years, would you say?
LinkedIn is headed down the path of being a big data provider. The data and user behavior information that they have has lots of interest from vendors to makers of B2B products, as well. I’ll give you an example, everything you’ve ever done on LinkedIn has been catalogued. And how long you did it, when you started and stopped and where you were before and where you went later is all known by them. So they have a pretty good idea if someone’s interested, for example, in buying data center services because you’ve been doing data center searches. And you looked at this vendor for 5 minutes and you’re going through this vendors after 30 seconds. If you’re that vendor that they saw for 5 minutes, that piece of information is worth something.
Oh, it’s extremely valuable because now you know exactly which target market is looking at you versus you having to go find them.
And you’re one click away from looking at their profile and two clicks away from sending them a message. That’s where I think it’s headed – the big data elements. The other area where it’s headed is that LinkedIn is going to be hidden behind a dashboard that’s also sitting next to Facebook and G+ and all these others. It’s the dashboard that we’re going to be talking to. The dashboard will have a universal inbox, I don’t care if you sent me a note on messenger on Facebook like you do or came thru Skype as a message to me or came through my Gmail account or my Integrated Alliances account or came as a text message, I don’t care where it came. There’s one inbox and that’s over here in the corner.
Yep.
There’s also 1 profile that has a variation and splits out ever which way. So if I decide I’m the founder and not the president of the company anymore and I make that 1 word change on both, so let’s just say I make a 1-word change. I mean to push that out to all those platforms because there are essentially got to point back to this. So I make a change here, the universal place where they pull from and look from, and it changes everywhere because it’s virtually there. It’s really just here and they point to it.
So you’re saying that LinkedIn is, you feel in the future, the hub for all?
No. You’re dashboard will be the hub. The dashboard could be a FAT application, an exe file on a PC or an app that runs. It could be a portal. It could be a www dot you know mydashboard.com-kind-of-place. Google can put a plug-in in the Chrome and have it be there. It could be a whole new browser. There’s a lot of different forms that this could take. And it also is something that I believe very much it’s going to have different skins. Like you can have skins on your audio players. You can say what, I can feel the LinkedIn look and feel so give me my dashboard that looks like a little LinkedIn-ish. You know I like those colors, I think that way. Let my inbox look like the LinkeIn inbox but behind that actually is the Facebook, Twitter, and the other stuff all coming in to one spot. I call it social media 4.0. I actually started a book on it and the co-writer of the book has taken ill so I got a book that’s parked on the side about this. Social Media 4.0, the return of the dashboard, the revenge of the dashboard, I don’t know what the obvious but the word dashboard is on the subtitle.
I think it would simply our lives, I mean that just sounds like it’s hard to jump from here to there to here to there. I mean we’re all busy and any time-saver we could possibly have is going to be helpful.
It’s like friends and Google circles, all those sort of things kind of determine who gets access to me and who doesn’t. On LinkedIn right now all your connections have equal access to you for the most part. If you’re connected me, you can send to me. Now it might be that we’re down the road here and I don’t think we’re too far down the road with LinkedIn on this, by the way, is where we got called bucket one, bucket two and bucket three for our connections. This folks I know, I can vouch for them. These are hundreds of people maybe but not thousands of people there. These people in the middle are the people that I kind of know and trust but I haven’t met them. But you know, they are not strangers. I would be inclined, you bet I’d retweet that for you. I wouldn’t retweet it and add words to it like I would in bucket #1 but I would retweet it. And then the third bucket are people that I don’t know, I won’t say I don’t care about them, I just don’t know them yet. They haven’t crossed over the first chasm and certainly nowhere near the second chasm. And that categorization, I don’t mean tagging on LinkeIn and being able to go back and add tags to records, you can do that now. I mean, which are you, by default, you are in bucket 3. Do I want to take any people from bucket 3 and upgrade them to bucket 2 or bucket 1 and there needs to be a tool to make that happen, because I am not going to visit 30,000 profiles and do that. They can come up with a tool that’s wonderful and if you have to do the one-at-a-time thing like you do with tagging…
Not going to happen. Mike, are you familiar with the Rebelmouse? I think of that system as aggregator where you can pull in your social media content.
These things that we’re describing, are the way those tools are coming out right now that you see is around content. It’s not around inboxes and inboxes is the killer app for it, it’s not content because not everyone does content. But everyone has an inbox and that’s the thing. Janet said she sent me the link and what did I say? What box did you sent it to? Where did it go? Where do I look for it?
I was actually Facebook messaging you because that’s where we typically message each other but we’re doing this on Google+.
And you’re Facebook messages come to me thru Skype. I was answering you thru Skype.
See, crazy.
So if you have a dashboard it wouldn’t matter where those messages come from and you’re instantly connected.
That’s right. You have to have the right kind of plug-in to all of those sources for the message and that plug-in has to be two way — send and receive. And those are the gotches, those are the gotches there, not just reading but writing. And if you send me an email message or how about a messenger message and I in turn return that through a different means. I send you an email in return to the buck that came in thru messenger, that’s the stuff that’s going to happen and we’re not too far away. We’re 2-3 years from now.
That’s busy.
Well, this has really, really been informative but I want to give you a minute to talk about your, or a couple of minutes or a few minutes, to talk about your new book. Let’s talk about what you’re creating right now, your working on, your project and what’s it all about.
Okay, 1 second then, here we go. I am an Eagles fan, Hotel California will be up on the back here before the end of the day. Rock the World with LinkedIn Version 3 is coming out. It’s our LinkedIn book. We’re short on the title a little bit. It’s about standing out on LinkedIn, fitting in, getting in the game by having keywords so you get on that list but getting the one that gets plucked from the list and it has a lot to do with the very things we just talked about. Everything we just talked about regarding profiles is in the book. But that’s not enough, who needs another LinkedIn book, another bunch of tips more than anyone else? You know, that’s not what’s going to inspire someone to buy this extra LinkedIn book or maybe it’s the first time they ever do. It will work with some people but I infused it with the work of the Eagles. Now about 25 Eagles songs and whole bunch of great little trivia things like how did the Eagles get their name? And has to do with a peyote experience in a city called Joshrichary, how’s that for a little highlight? Yes they ate peyote at the wee hours in the morning and they saw an eagle soaring above them and they named the band the Eagles, this was before they were even formed. They were Linda Ronstadt back up band at that time.
Cool.
I’m infusing it with a lot of these kind of stuff because my audience, our audience are classic rocker, classic LinkedIn folks enjoy that stuff. It breaks it up after one page after another, here’s another LinkedIn tip I better do that. Let me read that story about Joe Walsh, they’re on the tv now and out of the hotel window and he wrote the song Life’s Been Good to Me so Far next week. Those are things that I think are of interest. That’s how you stand out by having relationships with people who might think like you do or at least like the way you think. I used that term — I’ve met some of the most amazing people these last few days and when I do I go, I like the way you think. I like your mind. I want to know more about you because an hour is not enough for us. I have scheduled second calls for these people. And they just happen to be influential folks. Both of them, these last two, in San Francisco they cater to the CEO crowd and the Fortune 500 / Fortune 1000 audiences. And I met them and because of the Eagles and the way I lay myself out there personally.
Well you stand out. I mean it’s a unique experience with what you’re doing. It’s unique, it’s different, it’s going to stand out. It’s exactly what you talked about with LinkedIn. It’s something that, for instance, we’re doing, we’re doing something a little bit different — we’re using Kimmy, the social media puppet. It’s different, it’s unique. We interviewed Sebastian Rusk, he wears a bow tie. It’s unique, it’s different. So I think in this noisy world of social media nowadays, people need to do something that’s going to make themselves stand out from the crowd.
It really helps that you’re the real deal and you both are, the real deal. You can hide behind a shtick and still a shtick . But you know when you’re not. Andrea Bohl is a friend of ours, Andrea Bohl B-O-H-L. She’s a grab-on, she does a cool grab-on and stuff out there, lots of great stuff. You know if she was just confident and really good, she can be really the best one in the world, I wouldn’t mention her name just now.
Right, because she just didn’t stand out. There’s a lot of great, confident people.
That’s right. What else you got? So what, that’s neat, what about you, why would I spend extra hour with you at the bar instead of someone else? I don’t want another hour of LinkedIn tips, or Facebook tips or social media bloggy-waggies stuff, you know. Is the next hour with you as interesting as the first hour otherwise maybe I’d do business with you, you know, maybe. But I’d sure would love to do business with you if I really like that second hour we spend together. The game is won on the fourth quarter, on an overtime.
Absolutely. And that’s being transparent and being fun and allowing people to step in to your life and that’s where your sales are made and we make those good connections.
Lucky people, and a lot of cases, are just open to being lucky and we’re in a business one person away from meeting the right person if you’re looking in the right way, if you’re receptive, thinking about I want to know that person, not what they do. You’re not looking at their wall, I’m looking at their shoes. I look at their shoes, in fact the second section on those shoes are in the Eagles-inspired LinkedIn book. Your going to want to read that because it talks about where are the shoes, they’re at the bottom, aren’t they? And you look at someone’s head, head to toe, you look at their shoes. Well down in the LinkedIn profile your shoes are where your interests are. Look at their shoes, look at their interests on their LinkedIn profile, see what inspires them, work it into a conversation and there’s my tip of the day. Make the picture bring them in and put something at the bottom that really inspires them and yet tease them with your summary a little bit, tease them with it that will read the bottom of your profile if they like the top.
Thank you, great tips today Mike, thank you so much.
Love it. Love the analogies. Great analogies. Well let’s finish up give us your two different, how can people sign up so they know when your book is out? Do you have some place for that, we’ll put it in our notes.
They can, integratedalliances.com you can get it for free fi you sign up now, actually.
Wow.
It won’t be out for 3 or 4 months, so you know I’d be reminding you. It’s a New York publisher that picked this up. So Mark and James is doing it with us, same person who does Joel Comb and a bunch of other people’s books, that’s how we got in by the way. All three event, new Joel Comb already, Judith Bryle’s the one who runs it and David Hancock is there and we hit it off with him. He’s a rocker.
That’s awesome.
And so we got picked up by a New York publisher. So integratedalliances.com. You can sign up to get a copy for free and in the meantime integratedalliances.com has some links in it for free videos and all kinds of great stuff. Scroll down, remember those shoes, go down. Amazing stuff we have down there including a whole bunch of free video lessons and stuff.
Awesome. Well thank you so much for your time today and we’ll get that all in our show notes. Thank you very much Mike.
Thanks to both of you.
See you later, bye.