Charlotte Kemp Futures Alchemist PSASA Midterm Convention

Charlotte Kemp is a professional member of the Professional Speakers Association of South Africa. She's also past chapter president for the Cape chapter. She's a past secretary to the Global Speakers Federation, and she's also been chair of the 2015 Annual Federation Convention. She has been training and speaking on social media for almost a decade and is a LinkedIn expert. She is reinventing her speaking career as a As a futurist, helping companies find better ways to allow their people to discover and create their preferred future. Would you all please join me in welcoming Charlotte Kemp.

Thank you. We're all speakers, trainers. We've been in front of audiences. Have we ever said to an audience, don't worry, there are no stupid questions? You know, when you're trying to get the Q&A right? Okay. Are there stupid questions? All right. Let me let me give you a few examples of some stupid questions. Richard has one of his daughters. You know he's got seven children. They're not all mine. All right. But one of Richard's daughters once when there were our power cuts here in South Africa. So the family's talking about what they have to do because there's no electricity, and she says, how are we going to flush the toilet? Now, Richard thinks this is— Apparently, you do as well. That's very funny. But, I mean, she was only a kid. If you don't know how the system works, if you don't know how the technology or the mechanisms work, you know, you've never thought about that, that would be a question you would ask. But for someone who's thought about it, it's a stupid question. I fostered a young girl a number of years ago, lovely young lady, and we're out in the shops one day and she sees those ice lolly makers, you know, those little plastic things?

Yes.

And she wants ice lollies. So I buy her the kit, we come home, she takes the ice cream out of the deep freeze, puts the ice cream into the ice cream lolly plastic thing, puts it back into the deep freeze, waits 2 hours and takes it out and says, why isn't it frozen like a lolly? So I had to explain a little bit of chemistry to her because ice cream doesn't freeze extra just because it's in a little plastic thing. So she didn't understand the science or the formula behind freezing items. Now, just in case you think I'm picking on other people's children, do my children ask stupid questions? No, because they're brilliant. You know the kind of kids who are born and they're just great right from the start? You'll know them in the Gauteng chapter. Steph Duplessis' grandson. And Douglas Kruger's son. I mean, those kids are just absolutely brilliant, everything's perfect. But my kids, they're also great. But their mom, not so much. So I'll confess this one. My morning routine was disturbed one day. And I've gone into the bathroom to do something, come out, and I come back in, and I want to put my contact lenses in. So I put my contact lenses in, and all of a sudden, I can see nothing. The whole world is blurry. And this is completely confusing. I think back, I walked in here, I could see things when I walked in, I put my lenses in and now I can't see. So I think back, this weekend we were at church, we had a special service. Am I healed? But that— it didn't ring quite true. So I can't see anything, but I'm kind of like looking around the basin and I discovered 2 contact lens containers that are open and empty, 2 sets. So I took one of the sets out of my My eyes, left one set in my eyes, and now I could see perfectly. So it was just, you know, just, you know, sometimes when we're rushing through something and we don't pause to think about how it works, then we make stupid decisions and it confuses us and we don't know how to respond. Now, just in case you think it's just women who do dumb things, We go overseas and Richard gets a little label machine and he prints out his cell phone number. And he slaps it onto all of the stuff we're taking with us, onto the suitcase, the back of the passport, the back of the passport wallet, the back of the computer, the back of the camera, the back of his cell phone, his cell phone number on the back of his own cell phone, so that when he loses it, somebody— okay. So, we all do— We all sometimes do stupid things. There really, really, really are Stupid questions. And we need to find out how to deal with them. So, when it comes to LinkedIn, some of you approach it— some of my delegates over the years have approached it with a lot of anxiety. It's a technology, they don't feel like they can understand it, it's very complicated, there's lots of things happening. But I want you just to pause and approach it carefully, you know, with some clear intention of what you're trying to achieve. We don't have time today to get into all the little technical things, so I want to offer this to you. I've— a client of mine asked me to design this comprehensive document, exactly step by step how to fill in your profile, the main part that we're mostly concerned about on LinkedIn. And I created this document for her and she's used it with her staff. And then I broke it down into, like Ross was talking about monetizing and all that kind of stuff, so I broke it down into 3 little parts. There's 3 different models, so if somebody can buy the course, get it in 3 parts, learn how to use LinkedIn, or they can buy it and I can give them an assessment afterwards, or they can buy it and I can give them an assessment and a 1-hour Skype conversation to look at their profile. And all of those have got different price points. And all of you can have it for free because I love you. So if you are interested, my email address up at the top, email me and I'll send you that course. Ian's gone through it as well, but Ian sat through a whole day of LinkedIn training. So, but That's the basic, how we present ourselves on LinkedIn. I don't wanna get into the nitty-gritty of these various things. I want to look at some kind of higher-level conversations. The very first one is that with anything that we do, but specifically when we're talking about social media, our online presence and LinkedIn, we need to be intentional. Because as we approach these platforms, we are very often overwhelmed by all of the things that we can do. We've already heard about rabbit holes today.

Yeah.

But we can get distracted. People will ask me, I've been training social media for over a decade. One of the reasons I'm kind of reinventing myself is because I age every time I have to do a live LinkedIn presentation. You know, because LinkedIn will change something in head office and not tell me. And then I'm presenting to you and I go to this next screen and I go, and on this screen, have a tea break while I work this out. So it's very, very stressful. But But we— LinkedIn is trying very hard to produce, to provide for us a platform that we can really use powerfully for what we're trying to achieve. But it means that we can get overwhelmed by it. So I need us to pause, be very, very intentional before we even go onto LinkedIn, before we go onto any social media platform, before we open up any device. What are we actually trying to do? What are we trying to achieve? Now, if we're going onto social media, you tell me, what are the kind of things that we're wanting to do when we go online, social media, LinkedIn? Facebook, Twitter. Sorry? Increase brand awareness. Brand awareness.

Networking.

Networking.

Generate leads.

Connecting. Marketing.

Generate leads.

Generate leads, marketing.

Conversation.

Conversation. Any of you research your clients? Okay, great, great place to research your clients. So there's the list: brand awareness, reputation building, lead generation, networking, research, and learning. LinkedIn is an incredible learning platform. I'll give you one example. I'm not a Toastmaster anymore. Great organization, but but I needed to streamline every part of my life, and I became area governor, and I had a whole lot of questions. I don't know who's a Toastmaster. Great manuals. Did you ever sit and read the manual all the way through? No. So I wrote down the questions that I had. I knew they were in the manual, but I didn't feel like that. So I went and I joined the International Toastmasters. Organization on LinkedIn, the official one. I had my list of questions there and a big cup of coffee, and obviously I'm becoming area governor at the same time as everybody around the world is changing, shifting roles. And I joined this group, sat down, and before I could ask a question, I just read all of the correspondence, joined in the conversations, and they were asking and answering the same questions with insight and experience. In our part of the world, we do it this way. We tried that, it didn't work, but I've heard somebody else has done it. By the way, the manual says this is how we do it. So you can learn so much And like Ross was saying as well, anything that you need to learn, there's, there's a tutorial for, there's a video, or there's a group that will support you. And LinkedIn has a lot of that. So a lot of learning can happen. So as we're, as we're sitting down to do something, the idea is write down on a piece of paper, really old school, what do you want to do for the next hour or 2 of your life? If it is networking, like I want to network, Maybe you could spend that time on LinkedIn. Maybe you could spend that time on Twitter. Maybe you could spend that time in the room with us today. Okay, it's not about the platform, it's about your intention. If it's brand awareness that you're trying to build, if you're trying to allow people to know what it is that you do and to establish your reputation, then maybe you can post something to LinkedIn. Maybe you can write something on your own website. Maybe you can write something for an old-fashioned physical magazine, you know, the ones at the airport that they give away for free, write something and submit it. You probably won't get paid, but your name will be there, and people that you don't even know will pick up that magazine, read it, and come back to you. So there are plenty of things that you can do. You need to understand what it is you're trying to achieve for the next hour and then choose the tool. Don't say, in order to further my speaking career, I should be on LinkedIn for an hour a day, because you could be on LinkedIn for an hour a day and make no no progress at all. So be very intentional before you even start. The second thing we need to understand about LinkedIn is that we should not be shy. Gentlemen in particular, okay, that is not attractive unless we are teenage girls, okay? Having a shy teenage boy is like really cute, you want to rescue him and take care of him when you're teenagers, okay? But no, we grown-ups, we're not, we're not into that. It's cute for kids, it's cute for animals, But not professionals. And I know that there are people in the room, and I've said it myself, you know, there's a lot of arrogance and ego in the speaking world, but not me.

Really?

It's not true. I have ego and ambition. And if you don't have ego, you actually don't have enough guts to be in front of an audience and to take their attention and time for, you know, the 40 minutes that you have. So, so we can't be shy. I'm not sure who it was. It was somebody in this room talked about when we post things about I'm so humble. Speakers do this all the time. Yeah. Okay. So I'm so humbled to have been you know invited to be secretary of the Global Speakers Federation. Oh shucks me! I'm so humbled to be on the stage with this great speaker. I'm so humbled to have this opportunity. We're not humble. We're humbled. Okay. When we try to do something and we do it wrong. And we go, oh wow, I thought I was better than I was and I've actually really fluffed that. I've been humbled in this experience. I'm going to go back to the drawing board, improve my skills, make sure I'm better next time. What we should be is proud. Folks, we should be proud. We've worked hard, we've developed our material, we've developed our content, we've learned our skills, we've done the work, we know that we still have more work to do, And when we get given an opportunity, it's because somebody else values us and believes we can deliver. We're proud of that. Let's own that.

All right?

And specifically, we have to own that on LinkedIn. So there's a bit of a LinkedIn bragging formula. For example, I started my career in the financial services industry. I started at Liberty Life, but I'd worked in Standard Bank before. My father was from Old Mutual. I worked for So the bank, the insurance company, a boutique financial firm, and a brokerage. I have a lot of experience. At one stage during that career path, when I really was planning a financial career path, I did some exams with the Insurance Institute of South Africa. And I won first place, first in the country for this set of exams. And I got invited to a special awards ceremony at Sun City. And I put that onto my LinkedIn profile. And then I am now training people on social media. I'm doing a whole lot of things about LinkedIn, about brand awareness and everything else using social media. And one of the clients that I'm looking at is somebody in the financial services industry. And I can take them this whole thing. You know, here is my history, here are my awards, here is my experience. I want to say I'm not bragging here, but I mean, I put this in so I could brag. But, you know, I could take this to the client and say, I know about your industry. I know about your industry, and this is my experience in this industry, so I can help you. I can put these 2 things together and help you to achieve what you want to achieve. We cannot afford to be humble on LinkedIn, especially when we are professionals who work for ourselves. Some of us have, you know, PR agencies from time to time, but we can't afford a PR company to keep promoting us. We don't have our moms around anymore because our moms would say to us, don't brag, it's not nice. You know, let somebody else say something nice about you. But if nobody else is saying something nice about us and mom isn't there and we can't afford a PR company and we don't have a praise singer walking in front of us, we have to say to people what we can do. Now, if you are great at what you do and you have a solution to deliver and your client or your prospect has a problem, you have to deliver it for them. Because if you don't deliver it for them, they can't make progress. They can't solve their problem. They're going to lose their best people. They're going to have people underperform. Performing. They're gonna lose money. It's your responsibility. It's your honor to help them, but they don't know that. They can't talk to you if you're all kind of like, yeah, so I do this and I've got a bit of work in this place, but I don't really want to put myself out there because it's not nice. Okay, the bragging formula on LinkedIn goes like this. This is my experience, the work that I've done. These are my qualifications and how I can prove them to you. This is my model or my thought pattern or my values, and this is how I demonstrate it to you. These are clients that I've worked with who've said that I've done a good job. I know I am great and I can deliver for you. If you don't include that last part, it's just bragging. It's like, look at me. But if it's Because of this, I can deliver for you. I can solve your problem. Then you've turned it around and you have elevated that client and you can solve their problem. It's all about them, not about you, but you just had to build up your, your value to them. So that LinkedIn bragging formula, you can use it on any platform. You can use it on your one-page document, on your website. It's not all about you. It's about this is me, which is why I can deliver for you. One of the things you want to do is have a look at your websites and see how often you're talking about your clients. So I'm doing this whole reinvention and I just wiped my Charlotte Kemp website clean and started again from scratch, you know, like homepage, took down all the blog posts and only put them up if they are actually relevant. And I would write content and go to post it and then stop and think, that's about me, that's about what I want to do rather than what I want the client to go through or to experience. So I had to turn it around. I had to take that back. Donna's leaving because she's so inspired she's gonna go and update her LinkedIn profile right now. Bye.

I apologize.

It's okay. I had a client once that I worked with and his entire website, he knew he had to demonstrate his value and his experience. His entire website was about him and I could never get him to understand to turn it around. And I'm now really frustrated working with this client that the relationship is not going well and I kind of want to fire my client and we had this email correspondence In 11 sentences, 9 started with I. All right? And the other 2 sentences had I and me in it. Not once could he swap the conversation around to talk about what I was doing or what his clients needed. He was so focused on himself, and that's not healthy. So have a really good look. And one of the best techniques is to ask a colleague, To have a look at your LinkedIn profile, to find out if you're being too humble, if you're leaving things out, if you got the tone right. Okay, so that's your LinkedIn bragging formula. The third thing I want to talk about is that you want to ACE it. Okay, it's just a little acronym that I came up with because apparently you have to have an acronym in every PowerPoint presentation. It's a rule. So, so we want to ACE it. When we sit down, we got an intention, we want to do something, you want to, you want to act and connect exponentially. And this is something I'm only just learning now. I've wasted so much time, you know, going to these networking meetings, finding a whole lot of other little small businesses just like mine that are also struggling to market and with cash flow. And we do like little trade exchanges and we're all happy and we, I got another client, I got another gig, I'm speaking at another Rotary meeting. But we're just, you're kind of operating at this survival level. We want to ace it. We want to be exponential in the work that we're doing. So just the next, just a couple of slides from LinkedIn, a couple of suggestions about how we can do this. First of all, we want to be strategic about how we connect with people. We must follow up. It is my biggest failing in life that I cannot follow up. I've got a great tool, a CRM system that turns it into a follow-up system. I haven't logged into it for 2 and a half weeks. I'm really poor at following up, but if you've got a good lead, you, you know, it's disrespectful not to. We want to offer more than just your product. So when you're connecting with people, it's not, hi, thanks for connecting with me, can I sell you my product? Will you buy my book? Will you buy my course? Because it's not like that. Most people aren't going to buy you, but you can still get so much value. So can you Produce something that you can give away. I did this a number of years ago. I sat down over a long weekend and I wrote a totally frivolous book called How to Use Annual Holidays for Fun and Creative Marketing. So, it's obviously, you know, Christmas decorations are up already, so everybody's tying their marketing to Christmas or to Halloween. And there's Valentine's Day and there's Easter. Those are obvious, okay? There's also Doctor's Day, Nurse's Day, School Librarian's Day. There's also Bubble Wrap Day. There's also Naked Gardening Day. It's in July, which must mean it's like a Northern Hemisphere holiday. But I wrote this ebook. So I found all the holidays, did the research, put them all together. And then the first part of the book is, this is how you would use it. Some are serious. There's obviously October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and November, which is now Movember. There are some serious— things that we need to recognize and acknowledge and deal with, but there's some other fun ones that if you're stuck and you don't know what to write about, you need an excuse to connect or to do something, you can find one of these holidays. So I put this little ebook together, and when somebody connects with me, I say, thank you for connecting. Do you have a Facebook page or a Twitter account you'd like me to follow? Because everybody wants followers on Facebook or Twitter. And they send me the links and I'll follow their pages. And then I say, I have this ebook. If you like it, here it is. Click on the link, you go to my website, and you can download it. I don't even gate it. I don't force them to sign up to my newsletter. I'm giving it away. And people keep coming back and saying, oh no, you could get a lot more leverage out of it. But it's my gift to somebody who's connected with me. So find a way to talk about what you're doing that you can give away, demonstrating some element of your value. That you're not actually taking away from what you wanna sell to the client later. Some will come back and say, thank you, this is what I'm looking for. Others will just say, thanks, I'll read your ebook, and they won't. And then others, months and months down the line, you'll see them reply to the email that has sat in their inbox for like 12, 13 months. I don't get that, but they'll reply to that because it's, you know, your generosity has spurred them, but they weren't in a position yet to work with you. So find a way to be generous. Follow through. And then Dawn talked about— where's Dawn? Positive stalking yesterday. That's the research. Go online. Do, you know, look for people. But you want to elevate it. So let's look at some of the examples. There are different people in different organizations that will hire us based on what it is we're talking about. So Don't argue about whether it's HR or the sales manager or the CEO. We have different experiences. But if I was going to the HR person, I've got a financial services background so I can talk to financial services, so I want some business there. And HR managers often, you know, hire me, HR or training managers. So I go in and I have a look on LinkedIn and I search for terms. Let's see if this works. Okay, financial and HR. I put those into the search bar and I come up with these results. Now this young lady is a team assistant. She's working at Nedbank. She's 2 degrees away. She only has 46 connections. She's not a very good lead. I'm gonna waste my time following through on that. I can, but then I would have to send her a mail and have a conversation, and it probably won't go anywhere. This person is an HR generalist at the Financial Services Board. She's got more than 500 connections. She's experienced, she's skilled in recruitment and selection, performance management, 10 years working experience. She has got a much better place to— for me to have a conversation. She would understand the value of whatever it is I'm bringing to her. That's a much better connection. And she's with the Financial Services Board, which means that if I connect with her, I might be able to now leverage that and start connecting in other directions. This one, this is really good. This is the Institute of Directors of Southern Africa. And this person is— she's a first-level connection of mine. What we're looking at here is a person in a particular level or part of the hierarchy. So rather than just going to the HR people, that you're actually going to the top and trying to connect with those. But if you start to connect with people in the Institute of Directors, again, you start to be able to connect out in different directions. We had an online meeting. PSA runs a monthly online meeting. People, members and non-members attend. We have different people speaking and we invited Sepiwe to talk to us, Sepiwe Moyo, last month. And he is the, or just recently passed president or chairman of the South African Board of People Practitioners. So we said to him, in terms of you working with the HR specialists in that area, what is it that we as speakers should know about what corporates, how corporates wanna work with us? How are we getting it right? What would corporates like to tell us as speakers? And he came up with a couple of things, and one of them was that very often we want to speak to the decision maker. We insist on going to the top of this little hierarchy. And he says as speakers, we need to understand that very often it is a more junior person. So I'm saying here, find different levels of a hierarchy to connect with. Don't just say, I want to work in Nedbank. I connect with this one person. I'm going to sit here and wait for this to develop into something. If you want to work with Nedbank, then you connect with HR and sales and change management and the training department. And you connect in Joburg and Pretoria and Durban. And you connect up and down and sideways. Connect in various places. Build a relationship with various people. Because you're not sure not just what hierarchy, what level in the hierarchy might actually connect with you and hire you, But you don't even know how connected that person is. If that person, the ideal person, is in a bad place at the moment, they're gonna go, oh wow, this is great, but I just, I can't do anything about this now. But somebody else in a more junior place who's a bit more proactive, they get your connection request and then they start to work in different directions. I've seen this work. I'll give the example quickly. When I When I started in my professional career, I had a franchise business. I lost it. I lost everything. I wrote a book about it, but one of the, one of the people, the organizations that I'd worked with was Business Partners. They had funded my small business and then I lost it and then I had to pay them back. But I really respected the company, so when I started doing social media training, I thought I want to work with Business Partners because they need to get their message out to more people. They should use social media better. And also then they can, through their coaching programs, they can encourage their clients to use social media as a tool. So I went onto LinkedIn. I searched for business partners and I found about 11 people around the country. I connected with all of them, but not just connect. It was like, hi, I had a business. My business dealt with your company. I respect your company. I'd like to connect with you. Okay, so they know why, but I'm not pitching them anything. So I sent out 11 requests, 9 accept. I respond, thank you very much for connecting, but I'm still not pitching them, I'm just developing a relationship. Then I notice one of the young ladies follows me on Facebook, signs up to my newsletter, follows me on Twitter, like everywhere, positive stalking. She wants to know what's going on. And then the other woman, more senior to her, she was having conversations. So then when I did a public course, when I did something, I would just drop a note, here's what I'm doing, you might be interested in this. No, I can't— which is a sales trainer, but I can't do the whole sales pitch thing, I really suck at that. So it was just kind of making them aware of what I did. So the senior woman comes back to me and she says, we like what you're doing, we need this training, but we don't wanna go to the public course, can you quote us on an in-house? Gig. And it was, I quoted them with travel, it was my biggest to that date, it was my biggest payday ever. They fly me up, they meet me at the airport, and then they pick up people from other parts of the country that had flown in as well for my event. So this is great. And then I'm in the C-suite with everybody, the CEO of business partners and the senior people of everyone. And we're having a great time and I'm sharing all my content. But I did have LinkedIn Live for a little bit. So LinkedIn is up there and all of a sudden they start like muttering amongst themselves and they're looking at a young lady here. They're kind of like looking at the screen and then looking at her. So I look back at the screen and under— no, under her table she is liking and commenting on the stuff that she's seen on the screen and it's live. And they're going, rude, inappropriate. I'm going, brilliant, promote her. You know, she is demonstrating to you how to use this. But the whole point of this was that very intentionally I had a client in mind that I wanted to work with and a good reason for working with that client. And I connected with them and I developed the relationship and then I delivered and I followed up. If you, if you don't do that, you're missing so many opportunities. Let me show you a few more opportunities. When you start to look, you identify a company or a client, go into that company page and explore it a bit more. So here's the Institute of Directors. You can see all 81 employees who are connected there. 4 of my connections are associated somehow with them. So if I needed a personal introduction or a personal recommendation, I could go to these people. Colleen Larson and I have been connected for probably a decade, and we met for the first time in person about a month ago. But— and it was actually through the Institute-associated activity. When you're looking at the company page on the left-hand side, if you scroll down just a little bit, there's a part that says people who have viewed this company have also viewed this other company. And sometimes you see something down a little bit lower down that says these are other companies that are like this company. Spend some time there. Big cup of coffee, in your tracksuit, phone off, go down this rabbit hole because if this is the company you've done work for or the company that knows you, you want to do work with other companies that are like them and you need to understand that. So if I can deliver to the Institute of Directors, then I can deliver to the Ethics Institute or the Institute of Risk Management. I don't know about anybody in this room, I don't know of any speakers in South Africa that really dive into the associations and well enough. There are numbers of associations, and in the States there are, at National Speakers Association, there are speakers whose entire target audience, their niche market, is just associations. So if you're talking about leveraging, acing, you know, doing this exponentially, if you go and speak to an institute or an association, even if you are doing it as a showcase event, you're not being paid, You're standing in front of an audience of people who are senior in their own companies. All of a sudden you're promoting yourself to 20, 30, 50 companies at a time. That is worth it. That is exponential. So I can go and try and make a relationship with this company and with that company and with that, and it's time-consuming and it's soul-destroying. Or I do one showcase event for a company like this, and all of a sudden I'm in front of the right audience. That's exponential. Here are my connections. So you want to kind of dive into that and see, you know, who you know. You could know a lot of people in a company, but you have to decide for yourself what kind of relationship. 2 months ago, I wouldn't have gone to Colleen Larson because while we knew each other, we didn't know each other personally. Now we've met and we've hugged. So, so now, you know, I'm on a much better footing. She remembers me. We caught up. She's heard me speak about some of my projects. So if I asked her for an introduction right now, she can deliver. I wouldn't go to the other people. If you're looking for other companies, especially if you're trying to promote yourselves to the kinds of companies that will pay for professional speakers, the speaker agents, the bureaus say that financial companies, banks, pharmaceutical companies, these are the ones that actually pay for speakers. So we want to look at that. So I go and have a look and I search for Pfizer. It was one of the things that I was just exploring. Pay attention and, and, and to what you're seeing. Too often we get distracted by things. So here is Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, 141 employees, a little bit of information here, but Pfizer there is spelled different from there. Don't, don't get—

Phished.

Yeah, don't get phished. Don't get caught out. This is a page that was created accidentally. Don't waste your time on that. Have a bit of savvy. There are so many leads. There is so much potential in this country for the work that we could be doing and beyond the borders. Don't waste your time on something that looks a little bit suspicious. Move on. Find the right company. That reminded me that when people— when you look at your own profile, you can also see at the bottom left-hand side other people who've looked at your profile. So that's, that's a good sign. People are looking at me and Richard. But you wanna see who you are in connection, in whose company you are in. So for a number of years when I was involved in Toastmasters, if I looked at this, it would be other Toastmasters. Now I'm not seeing other Toastmasters listed here. Great organization, but I, I'm not gonna get business through Toastmasters. So— Who are you in? It's Richard, Darlene, who's an entrepreneur in Durban. Suzette was an intern of ours. But this is important. Sherry Briggs, who is the director, she does the technical work for the Global Speakers Federation. If people are looking at me and Sherry, I'm keeping the right kind of company internationally. If you wanna be exponential, folks, if you wanna take your career to new places, When you become a member of PSASA, you want to try and get into a leadership position. Because when you're in a leadership position, you start to think differently, you start to see globally, you start to connect at a different level. And that can elevate your business. That can open your mind up to opportunities you hadn't thought of. It can give you the courage to explore opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise. It also allows you to speak— see other speakers and to realize that South African speakers are actually really good. Okay, we really rate up there amongst the top. So we don't need to be at all shy of the work and the standard that we deliver. Promotion aside. Okay, associations. If you want to get involved in associations, one of the things that you can do at Team Exponentially is we've got a mastermind group. And our mastermind group, we kind of work out some of the work that we wanna kinda share, we create a Google Doc and then we go into various places and, and we're, we're developing a list of different associations. So whenever we come across one or we find a website that this association is also a member of or affiliated to those associations, we just grab that information, update the Google Doc, and anybody in our Mastermind who wants to follow up on those leads goes and does so in their own time. So you can share resources as well if you're trying to act exponentially. But plenty, plenty of different associations. Alright, so that was kind of connecting on LinkedIn. The last bit of acting exponentially that I want to refer to is when you create your content. Now, there are various ways of doing it. This is just one model. I'm not saying this is the way to do it. It's just something that I've kind of played around with. Another way to do it is kind of what Ross was referring to earlier. That you've got content and you can monetize it and you can present it in different ways. So Richard, for example, can do a keynote, he can do a 1-day event, he can do a half-day seminar, he can do a 3-day event, he can— he's got books, he's got DVDs, and he's got a 52-week microlearning program all on the same content. If you've developed your content and material, find different ways of expressing it and sharing that content. So somebody will, somebody will see Richard present live, get all the information, and then buy the book and the DVD of what he's just presented and be happy with it and go back to the office and share it or leave it on their desk to keep reminding themselves of what they've learned. So, you know, you just wanna kinda spin out the work you've already done and get more value out of it. But this is another way, because I've been doing social media, this is a model that I've used. Oh, not that one. That one. Say you come up with an article, a thought, a concept that you want to share and you want to develop it. You sit down and you write yourself a really good solid article, a blog post. So let's say about 2,000 words. And we're not going to get into the little technicalities, but a blog post, say 750 words is long. Minimum is 350, but, you know, that's kind of like the length of content to really dive into something. 2,000 words is somebody has to sit down for a good hour or so and read your content. But say you've got 2,000 words and you break it up. The first is you make 3 blog posts on your own website, okay, with good content, keywords, do all the good SEO stuff. Then you get a summary post and you post it to LinkedIn with references back to your own website. So you've written the content, you've got 3 posts on your website, then you write another summary and 'Cause you can't have anything duplicated here. You write another summary and say, and I go into this in more detail on my website, topic 1, topic 2, topic 3, hyperlinks back to your website. So you're now talking between LinkedIn and your website. Extract tweets. So look at your content, extract some tweets out of that, things that you can send off but with hyperlinks back to your own content. And there's a lovely little app called Click to Tweet, a little plugin that you can put onto your website. And then you can extract your quote, you put it in there. So if I'm reading your article and I like it, I click to tweet and it takes your content, posts it to my Twitter account with a link back to your website. It's all there so you can— you help the people, your fans, the people who like your content, you help them to share your content for you. You want that exposure. But all we're doing is just spinning out this one concept. We're just making it broader and broader. Make it visual. Find images that you can create that will be on Facebook, on Twitter, on your website, on LinkedIn. Canva is the best tool to use. That's Canva, it's canvas without the S. Canva, they have templates, well-designed templates that you can use. You can play around. It's very simple. If I'm starting a blog post, I open Canva before I open my Word document. Because I want that visual. I want to create my own unique visual and then I kind of use that as the stimulus for what I'm writing. But once you've got those images, then you can send them off to Pinterest. You can use them in your social media and everything else. And in terms of the consistent branding, find a theme to go through things. So, on my new website for charlekemp.co.za, it's all about futurism and it's all branded steampunk. So there's a particular color scheme. I've got like an actual color swatch in my folder that I can keep referring back to that because I don't want anything jarring in there. I don't want some bright gaudy colors that doesn't make sense to that branding. But if you go to LinkedIn Coach, then it's all blue and glass and shiny and formal. So you want to get your branding right across that. Then the next thing is create some audio. Create a podcast, do a YouTube video. YouTube, I know, is also visual, but, but find different ways of doing it. You could, for example, create back on LinkedIn a SlideShare presentation. So a PowerPoint presentation, you save it to SlideShare, you can take that same presentation down and make it automated like a little movie, put a bit of music to it, or put a voiceover on it, and then pop that up onto YouTube. You're not even videoing yourself in that case, you're just sharing your content. But these tools are there. We have the tools right now in front of us even with our smartphones. You don't need anything extra. The editing is all free. When Richard edits videos for me, they're great. When I edit videos, it's just, it's simple. I want to get it out. It's got the name in front. I don't try and do anything fancy because then I would spend 3 hours. I'd be disappointed. So I've lowered my standards and said, this is good enough to get it out so that I can get the content out and move on to the next thing. So don't get caught up on it.

Yes.

And then you've got the whole thing. So you've taken one concept, one idea, and you've shared it in all these different ways. You've acted exponentially with your content. You don't have to come up every day and think, oh, there needs to be a newsletter. There needs to be a blog post. And you've got to think of something new. Because once you spin this out, that could take 2 weeks' worth of social media commentary. And then obviously once you put it out you pay attention to who's following and liking or commenting and engage with them and see what you can do with that.

Okay.

Alright. That is all I wanted to share with you. We want to be intentional as we approach LinkedIn or any of our marketing, any of our online presence. We, we want to kind of get that branding right when we share things in different ways. We cannot be shy. We have to be bold in the offering that we are giving to people. And when we act, we don't want to waste time. So we want to, we want to ace it. We want to act and we want to connect exponentially, get that higher-level connection so we can get more business out of that. But folks, if you do want that email course, just drop me an email and I'll send it to you. And I'm quite happy to chat to you on Zoom or Skype afterwards if you want to just have a little consultation after that. Thank you.

Thank you.