Brew Your Brand: Authentic Storytelling on LinkedIn with Julie Livingston

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host, Brett Deisser.

But this week we're going to be talking about, oh, many different things.

LinkedIn, quiet quitting, which is a phenomenon, I think that almost went away, but it come back a little bit because that's 2023 and almost 2024.

Why not?

And just PR and LinkedIn in general, but just like the co mingling of it and how to do better at it too, because we all don't like those annoying messages about people trying to sell us stuff.

And so let's help you do better messaging through LinkedIn.

But with me, I have Julie Livingston with me and she is a leader and she helps companies stay highly competitive in a crowded market.

She does counseling for C suite leaders, companies, brands on their marketing, public relations and LinkedIn strategy.

So welcome to the show, Julie.

Great to be here, Brett.

Thanks for having me.

You're welcome.

And the first question to all my guests is are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I'm actually a tea drinker.

I got my tea right here.

I'm drinking jasmine tea today, but I do like certain kinds of coffee.

I would say like iced coffee is good with lots of milk for me, but I wouldn't.

I'm not a coffee drinker in general.

So you kind of like the colder side of the coffee drinks, the less acidic?

Because they usually are less acidic.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm such a tea drinker that I usually travel with tea bags in my handbag because I don't know, people in my life don't seem to have tea in their cabinets for me.

That's fair.

So you just like specifically jasmine or do you do.

No, I like all kinds of tea, but today I'm going with jasmine, which is a type of black tea because I wanted that caffeine boost.

That's fair.

And I gave a brief summary of your expertise.

Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Sure.

I've been in public relations for more than three decades and doing everything you would expect from a traditional public relations agency perspective.

Getting my clients mentioned and featured in the news outlets that matter to them as subject matter experts, guiding leaders on how to speak to the media, how to work a press interview to their advantage, how to also providing strategic communications counsel, just generally to companies, whether I've been on the inside in a corporate full time job or as a consultant in my own business.

And that includes helping companies to figure out the best way to engage with their target audiences, whether that's employees, the board of directors, investors and the media, as well as other niche groups that have now been becoming more and more important.

So I've done all of that and I've also served as a national media spokesperson.

I've done a lot of on camera work.

And more recently in the last few years, I started developing my expertise on LinkedIn.

I bring to it a very different background because I'm not just a social media expert, I'm a publicist.

So I really know how to help companies and professionals to leverage their expertise on the platform to develop thought leadership, which really helps them to stand out in their industry and to position their company's competitive advantage to tell their story.

That's what I'm an expert at.

Gotcha.

And then so LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has, for the most part, in the beginning of its life cycle, been, is basically an online resume.

People signed up, they put their resume on and then they left for a while and they didn't really care about it.

Yeah, you're right, it has been, but it's really changed a lot.

There are more than 600 million LinkedIn users from 200 countries around the world.

So if you're not on LinkedIn, you're really missing the boat.

If you're in business today.

And it used to be a resume, more of a CV, but now really LinkedIn is a storytelling platform and you should really build your profile, build it out more as a landing page, one that really tells your story with more descriptive language, that really tell your story and what makes you uniquely you.

That's how you should use it.

So that when people look at your profile, they get a sense of who you are as a human being and why they should want to connect with you or reach out to you for an opportunity, etc.

Gotcha.

And so how can you help CEOs actually stand out?

Because I know it's for everybody, but CEOs seem to be more important about this and I feel like a lot of them just sleep on it because no one really talks about LinkedIn.

Like it's like the cool new thing.

It's always TikTok or X slash Twitter or Instagram, but LinkedIn's kind of like in the background of we're cool ish.

I think it's changing.

I think that LinkedIn is actually becoming the most.

It is already.

It is the tool for which CEOs, leaders and managers really, to any level that you are in your career, must be visible on it in order to showcase Their credibility and their value in business today for CEOs and other senior leaders, it is absolutely pivotal.

And I'll tell you why.

Because people who want to do business with companies, they have a lot of choices today.

But if you have a LinkedIn profile that's really built out and that really tells your story and a lot about your personality, really showcases who you are in photos, video, articles, certainly through the posts that you, the content that you put out there, that could be the reason why they want to connect, that could be the reason why they become your next client or strategic partner or why a journalist.

Certain journalists are increasingly surfing LinkedIn for subject matter experts for their articles and television or radio shows or podcasts.

By positioning yourself as the expert in a particular subject, you are really setting yourself up to win and to stand out above your competitors.

And so how do you humanize yourself on LinkedIn?

Because I feel like we're trying to do this perfect.

Like I'm a great thought leader, I'm a great professional or whatever, but people don't really want just like perfection.

No, not at all.

You're absolutely right, Brett.

In fact, when I so I develop, I work with companies and executives and I develop their LinkedIn content strategy and then I ghost write their content in their voice so it sounds authentic and I think authentic is the word here that when you compose your content, first of all you have to pick, you have to know what your personal brand values are, what are the things that you stand for?

The non negotiable.

So for me for example, it's ingenuity, creativity, integrity and resourcefulness.

So everything I post about has to communicate that in some way.

So once you know your personal core values, those basic things, you can develop content pillars that those are the themes that you are going to return to in every post consistently because you need that repetitive repetition factor so that people get it and they identify you with certain topics.

That's those are the things that I write about consistently and what I'm known for.

And that gives people a hint at my humanity and my personality.

But in your content position yourself as human and as vulnerable.

There's no reason why you can't share stories and I think sharing real stories, things that actually happen to you in your day to day business life that have interest for other people.

How did you approach a problem?

Now I don't wouldn't expect any leader and you shouldn't share private or proprietary information, but you can capture a story from 100,000 Foot View, right.

And have general things that really show what kind of leader you are, how you approached an issue or a work challenge, how you brought your team together during the pandemic, show your vulnerability.

And that really is a wonderful engagement tool.

It draws people towards you, it draws people in.

People then want to are prompted to share their own stories and respond to you.

And so I do think that showing your vulnerability as a professional is really a critical factor in gaining traction on LinkedIn.

It's certainly one of the most important things.

And the other thing is having a call to action message at the end of every post.

This sounds so basic, but I can tell you how many executives I work with when I first start with them and I look at their history of posts, they have nothing in there that really engages the reader.

So what do I mean by a call to action?

You have your content and then the end of the post you add a question to prompt the reader to respond or comment or share your post.

So example, for example, if I was writing about best tips for CEOs to stand out on LinkedIn, I would close that post with how often do you post on LinkedIn?

How do you.

How have you raised your executive presence on LinkedIn?

So that will get people to think, oh, maybe I'm not really posting enough on LinkedIn.

Or let me share, I want to share.

I'm posting twice a week on LinkedIn and I'm getting some traction.

And here's why I think I am.

It really is so simple, but often missed.

There's another avenue of this because LinkedIn, like for power users or like normal users, it's like once a month posting or publishing things, which is interesting because most social media are like, no, it's like once a day.

You have to post once a day.

I don't know, I'm not sure where that comes from.

But that's not enough.

Once a month is not enough.

You have to really be post to get the, to get visibility.

You have to post at a minimum once a week.

And I, when I work with clients, usually it's two to three times a week on consecutive days, with one of those days being a Wednesday, which is the most highly trafficked platform day of the week on LinkedIn during the golden hour, which is between 8 and 10, 10:30 in your time zone.

I think it wasn't like you're posting regularly.

I think they said like their actual normal users or normal cadence is about once a month because people haven't really caught on to it quite yet.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's really.

That will not get you much yeah.

And I think for business podcasts, it's Wednesdays too, or the golden hour for business podcast.

So it coincides.

There you go.

Yeah.

But for pros, how do they avoid annoying people on LinkedIn?

Because I get a lot of those messages where I'm like, I think the biggest one is LinkedIn promoters trying to get me to get their services to artificially inflate my downloads because that's the easiest way of doing things.

And I get a ton of those.

And I always, just once I see it in their little like bio title, I go, nope, nope.

Or it's hey, I want to be your friend.

And all of a sudden they sell to me and I'm like, I, that's not what I'm why I wanted to connect with you.

Like, I get that you're trying to run your business, but there is a timeframe on like when you should sell to people and it's not the second message.

I think those individuals and companies are really missing.

How to use LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a relationship building platform and so if you're using the inmails, which are the internal emails that you can send on LinkedIn, you need to first connect with a person and give them a reason to trust you if you come out of the gate.

I get those messages too and I just delete them because I don't know this person very well.

If I am a connection of theirs, they I don't know.

Very often the email will say something like, oh, I see you.

Don't you need a new truck?

Why would I need a new truck?

They obviously don't know anything about my business.

It's just not, it's not really how you form a connection and a relationship.

I usually help clients to build their following and their connections by reaching out first to people who are second degree connections so that there's already a mutual contact, which adds to the trust factor.

So if I reached out to one of your contacts, Brett, and said, I'd love to be a connection of yours and explore synergies, I'm going to say we share mutual connections.

I'd love to connect to explore synergies with you on LinkedIn, they're more apt to accept my invitation because you're also a connection.

And it seems like LinkedIn is more about soft selling and not hard selling.

And I think people like misconstrued that.

For me, it's like soft selling is showing your expertise and then maybe people want to eventually use your services.

Instead of saying, I got services, let's take A phone call and figure out if my services work for you.

And I'm like, I, that's, I didn't even ask.

That's not, they're not, they're misusing the platform.

That's not what it's for.

It's really for connecting and building your network based on trust and relationships.

Got you.

And then do you think businesses are sleeping on LinkedIn business pages?

Because I feel like for a while LinkedIn didn't really focus in on it and now they're trying to refocus and get a little bit more, I guess businesses trying to do it.

I think they're testing out like the E commerce side of it.

I think that was one of them that I saw.

So do you think businesses should like really look back into business pages and making sure they're posting and doing everything they can to optimize it?

People in general want to connect with other people on LinkedIn.

Again, it's that whole relationship building thing.

But you should have a company page and this could be more of a landing page for company announcements, important company news, things like that.

But I would focus on your personal page for sure.

And then what does PR have to do with LinkedIn?

Because it seems like that's more of like a digital marketing, social media type of thing.

So where's that connection between the two?

Public relations is an image or reputation building tool under the marketing umbrella.

And LinkedIn is a prime platform to build your reputation on, to build your credibility, your industry position and stature, to promote your competitive advantage and really express who you are.

So it is absolutely a public relations platform.

It often goes misused or underutilized as such.

But I think it's one of the most important public relations platforms today and you can control the message.

That's the nice thing.

When you do an interview with a reporter, you're taking a bit of a risk because even though you can provide them with information and you could give them statements about what you want the story to say, they will ultimately, they ultimately write the story from their perspective and they can say whatever they want.

But on LinkedIn, this is more of an owned media platform where you can control the message that you put out.

So it's a wonderful tool for building your reputation.

In a PR.

Using PR, you can publish articles on LinkedIn.

I just did that for a client the other day because she had a longer piece that wasn't really suited to be a post, but thought that it was an article.

We've done newsletters, which is also another wonderful engagement tool.

And A great way to showcase your expertise and build an audience.

Gotcha.

That's my next question.

Great for thought leadership.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question.

How do they do that thought leadership?

Because recently I've seen that they.

LinkedIn has these questions for like podcasts or something, and you can answer them through their own, like, thing.

They have like random questions or like, how do you get guests on podcasts?

Or anything like that.

I've seen that actually popping up everywhere.

So would that be another avenue for that?

Because they said if you answer three of them, you could potentially get Top voice.

So.

Right, not Top Voice.

Not Top Voice.

Top Voice is really a very specialized category.

I have one client that just graduated to Top Voice, which is amazing because you really get to amp.

You get amplification features from LinkedIn.

But this is somebody who has almost 20,000 followers on the platform.

However, LinkedIn recently introduced their collaborative articles.

I think that's what you're referring to.

And these are generated by artificial intelligence.

They're AI generated.

And they provide you with an opportunity to contribute to articles on an area of expertise.

So you might get a request to contribute.

And I recommend doing that.

It's a good way to start building your presence on the platform.

And if you write three or four sentences, that's plenty.

And then if you contribute, I think it's at least three times, you can get a badge of a top contributor, which is certainly worthwhile.

It's definitely a feather in your cap.

So I recommend that as a way to start building your presence, participating in the collaborative articles and also commenting on other people's posts, including people you want to get to know, because that's how you start the relationship building process.

Gotcha.

And then moving on to the quiet quitting phenomenon, which popped up, I think it was the pandemic, because weird things happened.

The pandemic.

But I think it really popped up there.

And so how do companies still attract and retain that talent?

Because if people are like, you know what, I don't like this job anymore.

I'm not treated very well from their perspective, may or may not be true, but from their perspective, they may not be free.

Well, how do you retain that and keep your employees motivated in this hybrid, remote, and sometimes in office environment?

I think one of the things that, that leaders and managers can do on LinkedIn is to talk a lot about company culture, about their company culture.

And this is a really important talent attraction tool.

Because the more you talk about company culture, you show videos, photos illustrating that people are going to Be drawn to your company and they're going to want to work for you.

The quiet quitting phenomenon, I guess is still happening.

I'm not sure.

But I think that the more you use the platform to give shout outs to your team members to make them feel that sense of belonging and sense of community.

I do that currently for a client and we've over time we've gotten people from across the organization, which is a Fortune 500 company.

They're talking to each other on her feed.

That is fantastic.

When people feel part of a team that can help prevent quiet quitting.

So talking about culture in a positive way, showing how it works in your organization and presenting yourself as a leader who really cares about their staff and how they care, showing how they care.

These are all attraction and talent retention tools.

Gotcha.

And would that for the quiet quitting or just making employees feel like they're welcome, would that include like a more robust internal communication process of like you said, videos, newsletters, like pictures of people having fun and hanging out or.

I think you need to come up, the company needs to come up with a, an internal communications policy which many have, and how they think about, think deeply about how they communicate with their employees and team members.

And you may not use all of those things, but you might use some of those elements in developing a sense of community and belonging within an organization.

Absolutely.

And giving people a chance to contribute because everybody wants to feel that they matter to an organization.

They want to be heard, they want to be seen and heard and they want to be able to contribute their ideas in an internal communication program that might include providing employees with a chance to brainstorm or be win an award for coming up with a new way to do something.

You could do some of that on LinkedIn where you're inviting people to comment and express their perspectives on a particular topic and even share photos.

I've done things where there are company promotions and we've shared photos of teams doing team building exercises and having celebrations and doing really fun things that help their local communities.

And that's a wonderful team building communication tool as well.

And it could also help build trust among stakeholders, key stakeholders, because you have your employees, but you also have the public or your customers.

And you might have actual investors if you're a public trade company or if you're a startup.

So is that part of the process of building trust or keep or maintaining the trust with your.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Transparency is so important in employee communication today.

People who work for you want to know what's going on.

They Want to know that they matter to the organization.

Which leads me to how do you control that brand narrative?

We have a certain type of control, but sometimes it's beyond our control.

But how do we maintain it?

The as much control as we can on that brand narrative.

Having a solid communications strategy in place at the onset and then custom having sub plans for internal communication, external communication, media outreach is really.

Those are your guideposts that you set up for the year and then you could.

You can identify those platforms.

A mix of platforms, I should say.

So it's.

If you use the peso model, which is paid media, there might be.

You might want to pay for some social media advertising or advertorial articles in key business publications.

So you have paid, you have earned media that those are the articles where you might be mentioned in where a journalist is writing about you or including you as an information source.

Shared media.

Right.

Because you want the.

One of the great things about digital media is to get.

If you could get people to share your content, that builds tremendous brand momentum.

And then using your own media platforms.

These are the platforms that a company has total control over where they can fully control their brand narrative, including their intranet communications platform, any internal newsletters that they publish or video series, lecture series, learning programs, professional development.

These are all owned media platforms and I would say LinkedIn as well.

Because you can control what you put out on LinkedIn.

You can control how people respond to it, but you can control what you put out there.

And who are the best brand ambassadors for your company?

It really depends on the company.

Typically the top brand ambassador is the CEO or president.

However, that person may have, may not.

It depends if they're a people person and how well they communicate publicly.

And some people are better writing, they come across better in writing than actually doing a media interview or giving a speech.

Also, there might be other subject matter experts within the organization who are also excellent ambassadors for different things.

So they may have particular specialty expertise that are right for a particular program or event or news article, but the CEO or president really does assume most of the responsibility because they are the face of that organization and they are the ones that are overseeing company policies and the positioning of the organization.

And they really have to.

They should be.

They should be cultivating their public presence and their executive visibility at all times.

Gotcha.

And then where do you see just the future of PR and LinkedIn in 2024?

Where do you see it all going?

Because we've seen like a bigger increase in people actually using LinkedIn as you said, but what do you see in 2024?

We're going to see even more of that on there.

We're going to see people posting videos using more of the newsletter feature, using more of the top contributor feature with the AI type of questions.

What do you see with all that?

I think that in 2024, LinkedIn is poised to make a lot.

They're always making changes.

There'll be a lot coming down the pike in 2024, particularly using artificial intelligence AI tools.

So the collaborative articles are just the beginning of that.

But I know that they're working on some new features coming down the pike.

I think that video is amazing on LinkedIn.

It really gets a lot of traction and it doesn't have to be a Hollywood production video using your iPhone is.

It can be just as powerful in getting your story across.

So I think they are going to come up with other graphic tools that you can use to enhance your posts.

They have unfortunately removed the profile video feature which I had been using and now it's gone, it's going to be gone forever, which is a real kind of a bummer.

But they are also now working, they have an agreement with Canva so that you can actually publish on LinkedIn on your LinkedIn profile from the Canva platform.

So I think that says a lot and I'm sure that's only going to increase in terms of the tools that you'll be able, the graphic tools that you'll be able to use.

From Canva to LinkedIn.

I have been using the newsletter tool for a while and it really has helped me to build my following and my audience and establish my credibility and my knowledge.

So I think that will continue.

LinkedIn articles are also a very good tool for that.

And so I think that the platform will continue to be a vital PR tool for raising executive visibility.

It's just that some of the elements will continue to change and be refined and they're always experimenting with a lot of new things.

Yeah, I just wish they actually made it more the videos longer than a 15 minute time frame.

That's what gives me, I don't know how long people.

I think that people may not be sitting on LinkedIn that long to watch that kind of a lengthy piece.

But certainly you could have short video content.

And there's nothing wrong with slicing and dicing your video content to get micro content.

And I think that micro content will continue to reign supreme on LinkedIn.

But there are, there are, I do actually one of the new features of LinkedIn is LinkedIn Audio and I use LinkedIn Live to do my live broadcast every week, which is called PR Patter.

And it's on Wednesday mornings in Eastern time zone.

And I love LinkedIn Live.

It's been great.

And I can edit that content and create micro content out of it.

So there are a lot of benefits to it.

And LinkedIn audio was just introduced this past year in 2023 and that is like a podcasting feature that is only audio.

So it's more of a casual kind of tool.

You could do something on the fly or maybe you have an event or panel discussion where it's just that and there is no.

No imagery but you.

It allows people to participate from wherever they are.

And I've done.

I've participated in a lot of those.

What's interesting is the latest podcast stats that I looked at this week said that audio podcasts are good for the morning, but video podcasts are good for the nighttime.

So people will actually watch either Joe Rogan does extremely long podcasts or anything like that for large periods of time.

So I think they should actually look into that because yeah, you're right.

I think during the day it's not going to do very well, but at night time it actually could do very well because people have time to sit down.

Yeah, but where can people find you online?

Well, guess what?

They can find me on LinkedIn.

Julie Livingston, want Leverage Communications.

They could also Visit my website was, which is want leverage.com and you can then download my free tip sheet how to make your CEO stand out on LinkedIn.

Also, you could watch my PR patter podcast on Spotify.

You could watch it on LinkedIn or YouTube and you could listen.

I meant you could listen to the audio podcast on Spotify.

All right, any final thoughts for listeners?

Get out there on the platform.

Don't forget about LinkedIn as one of your primary marketing tools and increase your executive visibility.

Update your profile so that it really gives insights into your personality and how you lead and what you do.

Thank you Julie for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on PR and LinkedIn.

Pleasure.

Thanks for having me and thank you.

For listening as always.

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Get to understanding LinkedIn and using it a lot more and see you next month later.