Lilypath's Dan Nestle on LinkedIn as AI Branding For You!

Welcome back to the Marketing Companion, and boy, have we got a great show for you today. You will definitely want to listen from top to bottom. Before we get started with the Marketing Companion though, I do want to thank our two sponsors. We have Breveo, which I use personally in my company. I know I always say that, but I do love what they do. In fact, all the show notes and everything I send out are sent out from Breveo. And then we also have a sponsor called Semrush. And, you know, I'm all into not just SEO today, but GEO, which is about using all the generative AI search capability. And they have probably one of the most amazing tools, I think, for my business. And that's what we use for my business as well. So try them both out. We'll put both of the links in the show notes for you so you can find those. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get started. I have this amazing guest, Dan. Do you like to be called Dan or Daniel? Because I see you have Daniel down there, but I always call you Dan.

Yeah. That must be the default when I sign in using Google, just goes to Daniels, but it's Dan. Dan is always good. You can call me Danny. I'm trying to revive, trying to revive Danny. I wonder if I'm a Danny anymore. I was a Danny as a kid. I feel like I'm getting to be a Danny again. So whatever you want.

Okay. You know what's so interesting is my mom, my mom named me Sandra and she tried many times to get me to use Sandra and get people to call me. And no matter what I did, it always, they always revert back to Sandy. So, I just gave up. I'm just Sandy from here on out, you know.

You're a Sandy to me.

Well, Dan and I have known each other for a couple of years now. I met him at a retreat called The Rising. It was awesome and I got to know him and I just thought, this guy has got it going on. But Dan, I'm going to have you tell us a little bit about your background because I think it's fascinating what you did in Japan, you know, kind of what you're— and definitely what you're doing now. So give us a little intro, please.

Yeah, little is the operative word. I'll try to keep it as short as possible. Yeah, like, I sort of grew up in Japan professionally anyway. That's where I spent my early professional years. And, you know, kind of started out as many people do as a teacher there. I ended up getting into marketing and communications, I don't know, like a couple of decades ago because I wanted to do business on my own. You know, I didn't want to be part of— it's hard when you're a non-native person in a foreign country, just kind of and you get the bug to do something interesting, and it's— there's not a lot of barriers to starting a new business in Japan for an individual. You know, I just leaned towards what I was good at, which at the time was writing. That kind of a copywriting business led to a kind of, oh, we got these new things called websites, let's see if we could put those together business. And I started— before I knew it, I'm like, oh, I'm doing marketing. Um, and that— yeah, and that— and that—

by accident, really? Is that— was that true?

Totally. I almost just jumped— I kind of fell into it. You know, somebody once. And I didn't realize it until I got hired, you know, a couple years later. I, I had the business for, for 3 or 4 years and my last client just kept buying more of my time and they're like, finally, just, hey, just come on as our marketing and PR manager. I go, that's what—

Company in Japan?

It was a, a global US company, but I was at the Japan office of Robert Half, the, um, the big recruitment firm.

Yeah.

Yeah. So suddenly I'm like, oh, marketing and PR, that's what I am now. Uh, so that launched me on a corporate career. I spent another, I don't know, decade in Japan, almost decade in Japan after that, and then moved to Australia for a year with Robert Half, and then came back to the States about 15 years ago, where I've had like a little meandering journey, I suppose, a couple different things to do and spent some time at a member association, the AICPA, doing member communications around a couple different things. And then I landed at Edelman for a little while and then then a couple of big Japanese companies grabbed me as their US regional, like North America, comms, marketing and comms kind of lead. So I was like up and like running and building comms teams and marketing teams, as it were, for these two massive Japanese companies. And then I went out on my own about it about almost two years ago.

You know, has it been two years?

It's been almost two years. And, you know, there's only the, I mean, there's, there's two reasons for that. The first, of course, is, you know, the company, right after the, after the pandemic was over and, you know, the business sort of came back, came down to earth, you know, the company had to reduce staff. So I was, I was one of those people I knew. I was, I was the executive in charge of communications. So I knew what was coming. I knew when it was coming. So it was no surprise to me and I was ready for it. But it also coincided with something we're probably going to talk a lot about today, which is the advent of AI. Yeah. And as an early adopter, from whatever it was, November '22, when ChatGPT launched, I was in it to win it. By the time I was, I, I was at the end of my time at my company, I was already like doing things that I knew the company would never do or would not allow me to do. So you gotta go where you're gonna be happy. And, you know, started my own thing. Um, who knows what that journey was gonna look like? And who knew that that would end up where, you know, being a communications slash AI consultant and trying to build a consultancy around that, around training and, and educating people around AI, but also creating solutions for mostly executive communications was where I, where I kind of leaned. Who knew that that was going to lead to creating products and building and just experimenting so much, you know? And that's where, that's where I am now with— so eventually that that led me to build what became Lillypath. And so super proud to have co-founded that with two wonderful people, Todd Grossman and Aaron Lanuti. And, you know, we're, we're really in the thick of the startup right now. It's fantastic. We're having a great time.

Well, and I have to tell everybody who's listening, truth in advertising, I have used Lillypath and it helped me out tremendously. We have a whole— Dan and I have a whole story around that. But Dan, you really built Lillypath around the idea that AI systems are interpreting your professional career before a human ever engages. So when did you personally realize that this was happening and what was the moment it shifted for you into something that's interesting? And maybe before we start that, do you want to give a little background on what LilyPath is so that people know the context before you kind of jump into the question?

Right. So LilyPath is a new company that is focused on something we're calling authority intelligence, and we'll get to what that the depths of that maybe in a little while. But essentially, you need to know how you're being interpreted by AI these days, because otherwise, you know, you don't know how you stand in terms of authority and you don't know how to take control of your own narrative and your own authority and become the professional, the expert that you either A) deserve to be or have earned to be or want to be. Right. So you need to know where you stand. And Lillypath was, was started really to kind of get a, get a grip on that. And we're starting with LinkedIn. So currently we're focused on helping people to understand how LinkedIn and all the changes that have happened there over the last year, but how LinkedIn's AI or their AI systems more accurately that kind of sit under the hood, how they're actually interpreting you and how that leads to your performance on the platform and how you engage on the platform. And it affects everything, you know, and it's the fact that it's not an algorithm that you can game, right? It's— there's the LinkedIn algorithm that people talk about, about like, oh, I need to do this many likes and this many— I should post carousels or whatever it is. Like, it has very little to do with that. It's your profile. It's what— who you are. What is the core? How do you define yourself? And then what are the signals that AI picks up on from that to determine your relevance, to determine whether you— whether you have standing to be in a conversation, and to determine who you should be exposed to and who should be exposed to you. And it's even deeper than that. So the AI that sits under LinkedIn, you know, that started— I mean, I heard about it first time maybe last September, I would say last August, September. You know, I think I have to give credit where credit is due. I think it was because of a report I read from Chris Penn, who did this extensive report on— and he's very, you know, if you want to know about technical things about AI, you just subscribe to Chris's work.

But Did you say Chris Penn?

Yeah, Chris Penn.

Yeah, Chris Penn.

Trust Insights.

Chris Penn is, yeah, he's amazing. If you haven't come in contact with him, you should. He's part of, I know, the Marketing Institute. He's part of a couple of groups I'm in, but.

That's right.

He's been doing, believe it or not, he's been doing AI or something like AI since 2001.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah. I mean, he knows, like he knows it. He has the authority. He has expertise. He's not just one of these who says, I'm an AI expert. No, he really, he really knows his stuff.

Yeah. He wrote the book on analytics way in the day.

Yeah. Back in the day.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's right.

But, you know, he, he, his, his report just, just got me thinking, you know, about my, my own profile at the time. Wasn't that long ago. I was already building out executive positioning and executive positioning architecture. And that's something that, you know, I was really digging into how, you know, trying to pull together. The various threads of a person's life, essentially their professional life, and use all of that to create, you know, where to create a positioning statement and, and a content strategy and all these other things. And, you know, LinkedIn, a person's presence on LinkedIn as an executive is a core part of that. So I wanted to know everything I could. So I was always, I was trying to stay on topic. When Chris's report came out, I was like, now this is different. So I looked at Chris's stuff. I then dug into the research. I found the research papers that were all like the details about how with 360 Brew is the name of one of the, of one of AI engines that sits under LinkedIn, but how 360 Brew works. And there's all this math in there that I'm not really too, too familiar with, but we have the tools around us to help, help interpret that. So I started to kind of work this through and eventually I just came out with, well, if I'm going to recommend people to use LinkedIn as part of their executive positioning, then I got to get that right. So I dogfooded a little bit, you know, I, I did my own, I used myself as the, as the test case. Sure enough, like I start to do things that are to optimize my profile and I noticed that my, my engagement was rising just a little bit, but I was getting more profile views and I was getting more profile views from the right kind of people for change. And, you know, I just, I just started noticing things, but I wasn't super aggressive about it. So then I just sort of blew that out a little bit into a deeper report.. And that deeper report with my previous— or actually, I still have the company going called Inquisitive Communications, but it's part of this whole thing. And somebody saw it and said, can you do one of these for me? Sure. And I started to do these reports. And back in those days, it was pretty harsh. And when I say those days, it's only like, what, 6, 8 months ago? But it was like I was giving— the report was designed to be really harsh. Like, your LinkedIn profile grade is like an F, and you're really screwing it up. And it was really really in your face. But some people saw that, and my friend Todd saw it. He said, we have to do something. And within 5 days of him seeing it, we started LilyPath together. And then Erin, who is just like, I don't know, which is a shooting star that we caught in our— luckily caught in our hands. She just came with a vision and a I would say, a body of work and incredible depth of technical knowledge that then took what I built, like my creation, and blew it up into what is— we know is going to be a tremendous success. We know it's going to be a big success.

I have to say, I do too.

So LinkedIn, LinkedIn is just the start of it. So we do these reports that give you, that give you in-depth advice and optimization, not just hints. We actually give you, uh, how to rewrite, like rewrites. We give you rewrites for your headlines, for your About section, for your Educate— for not your, your, um, your Experience.

Experience.

Yes, cut and paste. You can just use it. We, we do recommend that you make it your own a little bit, but it works. That is going to soon— you know, LinkedIn is sort of a single source of truth for your positioning. And next we're going to weave in and knit in, and this is, you know, still a little bit in development, but we can't stop at LinkedIn. How are you seen on the LLMs? Like, how are you, what's your authority on ChatGPT? You know, these are the questions that we're going to answer with diagnostics and dashboards and reports.

It's really interesting, I think, Dan, because what you're doing is you're using AI to help you with an AI assessment. Assessment, right? So what LilyPath does is it goes through your headline, your experience, your profile, and evaluates that against the criteria that AI is using. So you're actually using AI to help you meet the standards of AI, and then it delivers you a human report that anybody can take, leverage, and use to increase your— really, your personal branding. This is like personal marketing essentially for you, right?

Essentially. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I should mention that, of course, it's using AI to evaluate AI, but it took me months to build the rubric and test it and validate it and make sure that it is solid. It took me months to build this rubric.

I remember because I was trying to get a little bit of time with you, remember? And you're like, oh my God, I'm vibe coding. I'm trying to figure this out. Do you remember that? I still remember that one day I got you on the phone for like 2 minutes and you were like, I'm vibe coding. I'm doing it all. Like last night I did from like 8 till 10. You were, you were hyper. You were hyper in what you were doing.

I was doing 14, 16, 18 hours a day and just not even, but like the, the other part of it though is like, there's no way that it could have been done without 20 years of understanding what good executive positioning is. Right. And, and maybe that's, that's something that, that people should take away. It's you, you shouldn't just jump to Claude or to Codex or whatever and start co— if you wanna do a fitness app, go for it. But if you wanna do something that actually has value and, and is, and is defensible and valid. There has to be more to it than just a wish.

So yeah, I completely agree. If you don't mind, I'll just jump in right there. So this is one of the trends that I'm seeing right now for marketers is that now everybody can code, but what you code is most important. And that means you need domain knowledge. So we're starting to see the shift in what companies are looking for from Indeed or from LinkedIn shifting from, hey, can you code it? Can you sell it to are, can you fall in love with the problem and do you have the expertise to frame the problem? So I interviewed, I also write for Forbes. I interviewed Michael. He is a cardiologist from the Netherlands. He won third place at Anthropic's hackathon. Hackathon. Wow. He was one of the only non-coders in the hackathon. I can't remember how many people were there. 100+ thousand. He won third place. And so I got to interview him. And we were chatting and he's like, "Look, I didn't know how to code. In fact, every engineer has told me I don't know how to code, but I understood the problem and I fell in love with the problem and that's what got me over the line." And then I have another couple of friends, Dan, who have spent their entire careers, 25 years in film producing, directing, and writing scripts. And so they've recently created another product that I love called Storytown.ai.

Yes.

None of them, none of them have coded. None of them have coded. And they vibe coded a solution kind of like you did, but they, they embedded 25 years of emotioneering and how to create the right character, how to create the script into the— and that's what I'm seeing too as the next big thing for marketeers to look at is what is your domain skill? What's your domain knowledge? And you said, just like you, you said My domain knowledge is executive positioning, executive communications, and that's what you vibe-coded here with Live Like Beth, right?

Well, you know, it's, you said fall in love with the problem. I mean, love is a hard word for invisibility. You know, like I, I'm more, it's more like I felt a kinship with people who are, you know, of a certain part point in their career and age who are just like seeing all this stuff go by and say, why am I, you know, why am I, I'm not getting the traction. I know more than these people. So you kind of feel a little bit like, yeah, what can I do to be visible? And, you know, I was joking with our friend Richard, with Richard Bliss a while back and say we should create an unofficial association for the defense against invisibility.

Yeah.

Something like this. I don't know. Like it's been on my mind for a while. So I think that, you know, LinkedIn is one that is a first natural step. To fixing that problem for people.

Yeah. And, and I think that this is really interesting. A lot of great moments here for marketeers. And I think for everybody, because everybody needs to think about their own personal brand, how you get across your domain expertise and what you're going to focus on. Right. So you got— you guys did something that I love because you didn't just launch a product. You defined a new category, this category of Authority Intelligence, and I love that. It's a bold move. I've made my career on creating new categories. So, you know, walk us through the thinking about Authority Intelligence.

Yeah, so, and I, I have to give Aaron the biggest, you know, kind of nod on this one because even though it's created the platform, you know, Aaron brought this brilliant idea and/or was able to encapsulate it in a way that makes a lot of sense. You know, when, as I said earlier, the way that you sort of measure your visibility used to be real easy, right? Used to be like, oh, I'm on LinkedIn and I have this number of engagements, so I'm doing pretty well. But now with, with the LLMs and with the adver— especially with search kind of decreasing and there's so many stories out there or so many tidbits of information or facts or factoids out there about you. Do you know what they are? Do you know where they are? Do you know how to measure them? And do you know how much, what the volume of conversation is about you? And are you, and more, more importantly, is that conversation the right conversation? And there are now ways to measure all of this. LilyPath is one of those things where we measure it on LinkedIn. There's a measurement involved. But when you look at the whole executive or the whole, you know, solopreneur, you know, the whole coach, the whole Sandy Carter, how are you being interpreted across all these different platforms? So that the answer to that is, well, authority intelligence, the intelligence, the diagnostics, the, the understanding, the metrics to see what your authority is. And I think here's a great illustration. Okay. When I was, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago, whoever, I forget. But let's say, let's say internet early days, there was a lot of books written about reputation management. Now that we have this cool thing called the internet, reputation management has gotten, is now hitting a new frontier and you got to really defend. And the best way to defend right now, back then, back in the day, is go to Google and search for yourself.

Yeah, right.

Search for yourself. See, you still could do that. You still should do that today, by the way. But go to Google and search. So you can go to Google, search, see what's coming up. Fine. All right. Now take that to the age of AI. I was doing a lot of executive positioning work, right? And I recently ran a report, an executive positioning report. Now I have a prompt that I use all the time on Gemini Deep Research. It's one of the many inputs that I use for some of the stuff I do. So doing this report on Gemini Deep Research on an individual, and let's just call him John Smith because it was, it was a common name. I mean, the name was not super unique. So John Smith, uh, gets— I get this great report about John Smith. John Smith is a, is a high, high-level elite financial type, and he's an if-you-know-you-know type of a guy, almost invisible online, right?

Wow.

The report comes out and it is 80% wrong. Like 80% things that it said that he did, he had nothing to do with. The completely wrong John Smith, right? Um, I did another one for another similar profile of a person, and not only did it get part of his career wrong, it said that he was involved in a certain religious activity that, that A, he's not a member of that religion, and B, the activity, uh, could be considered controversial by a lot of folks, and that that was one of his passions. And we're like, okay, this is on, right? Point is that these guys, incredibly successful. I don't know how much, you know, how they're certainly financially successful, you know, giants. Google's getting them wrong. Gemini's getting them wrong. In other words, they have no control over their narrative. So what they need to do is get control of your narrative. They need to be, you know, need to have the right pieces in place so that when somebody looks for them, they're not going to get Oh, he's a member of some crazy, you know, sect that I don't wanna have. Mm-hmm. They'll get the real deal. So you need to have control over this. And authority intelligence is a measure of that. Like how much control do you have?

Mm-hmm.

So we wanna stop that kind of nonsense for people.

That's great. And I'll have to tell you, our next podcast guest will be talking about that for brands. You're talking about it for people with what's happening with agentic commerce today where you don't have a chance to tell your story. It's just showing up in the LLMs. So stay tuned for that, that category too. So you've told me many, many times that LinkedIn is now the number one cited domain for professional queries across all 6 AI platforms. But most people still think about LinkedIn as a networking tool or a resume host. In fact, I was talking to someone today and she's like, yeah, I use LinkedIn to network, right? So what do marketers and business leaders need to rethink about what LinkedIn actually is today?

Yeah. And, and that research, that recent research from Profound and LinkedIn, I think they did a joint, a joint study. And from SEMrush, like, like your sponsor, like separately. And at the same time, they both came out and had slightly different numbers, but the, the, the verdict is in for a person. For an individual, LinkedIn is the, is basically the single source of truth now.

Right.

So if you think about that, you know, marketers, communicators, anybody out there who, who has any inkling of being known for anything, who wants to actually protect their reputation or, or establish reputation, the clear sign is get your LinkedIn right. Like, get it right. Make it thorough because it's beyond networking. Yeah, you use it for networking. You should use it for networking. And if you want to get a job, absolutely use LinkedIn to get a job, but you're not going to get that job and you're not going to network with the right people unless they're introduced to you. You're not going to even be exposed to their content if your profile is terrible and if your profile is weak. That's the new thing, like newish thing in LinkedIn. Like they're the AI systems and the gen— they call generative recommenders are now making these judgment calls about, okay, this is what Dan is about. So I think we're going to have to show him this stuff. You know, the jobs that I might want, if I have my profile wrong and I'm looking for a job, the jobs I might want are not going to appear to me. They're never going to reach me and recruiters aren't going to reach me.

Interesting thing that Lily Pats found for me, and this is obviously the LinkedIn algorithm has changed. So I use a combination of Lily Pats and then Richard Bliss. If you don't know Richard, you need to know him too. He's on your board.

That's right.

He is like the LinkedIn god. Thank you, Richard.

Thank you, Richard.

And, you know, one of the things, it seems so obvious now, but my skills, I had artificial intelligence in my skill set, but I had like 100 skills. Yeah. And so it was like way down at the bottom. And so I had to reshuffle to make sure that AI showed up at the top of the list because that's part of my brand and part of what I want to come through is the skill set I've had in AI since 2013. That's right. So, you know, the cool thing is that the report itself, you write a little description about yourself, like what you want to stand for as your brand. And you have to take some time to think about that. And then it optimizes to that domain expertise that you want to be known for. It optimizes for that. And it's so important because then it shows your profile and your post. So now instead of looking at the post, it's looking at your profile. It's showing your posts to people that match that profile.

That's right.

It was, right? It's really, I think it's really interesting. And then you did this for Kenny too, right? What do you think? Yeah, Kenny Laura. I was a keynote speaker at South by Southwest and Dan so graciously did a demo for me, like a little demo video that I could show everybody. And so we had to find a victim, I mean a person to try it out on. So we used it for Kenny Laura, who was just on my show. And We were— I was shocked that he was, what, 37 out of 100?

Pretty low. Yeah, very low score.

Yeah. What do you think were the top— what were the top things that you recommended for Kenny? Do you remember?

I can't remember, but, but I will— I can probably, you know, I won't— I probably won't be wrong when I say it was very likely that his headline wasn't exactly like weighted properly. He wasn't saying what he does. It was, it was maybe a little bit about what he did, and maybe there was there's a little bit of, of this sounds great, let me put it in there. So you have a packed headline, but it doesn't tell the story. The second thing would be the about section. And his about section was biographical, but not achievement-oriented and not success-oriented. It didn't, it didn't, and it didn't match with what the headline was telling AI that Kenny's all about. And then very little in the work, in the work experience section. Like this is where a lot of people fall flat is that you know, go through life. And for many of us, it's almost life. I might have been on LinkedIn for what, 20— since 2000. So my adult life is practically all on LinkedIn. And you just keep adding, right? Like you get a new job, you add it in. Eventually you're just like, I'll just put the job title. But now LinkedIn reads the whole thing and you want to make sure that at least your most recent 3 or 4 jobs and positions are fleshed out and all aligned and connected to the message that you want to present.

Right?

You don't want to do this in an unethical way where it's lying, you know, because you should never do that. But there has to be a thread somewhere. Like, why did you go from this job to this job? And how did it eventually lead to where you are now? That story has to be understood by the AI, just like it would by a recruiter. So that's, I think, what we found with Kenny is that he has a lot on there, but a lot of it's just lacking information.

Blows your mind.

That's what a lot of professionals are like.

Yeah. This guy, I mean, Kenny, he was the chief marketing officer for the Golden State Warriors. He helped market Stephen Curry. Like, if you know basketball, like, Stephen Curry is the guy. He worked at Apple. He's worked in Japan. I mean, he's done global jobs. He helps Sound, the number one innovative sound company in the world, figure out how to make restaurants have a great experience with sound. I mean, this guy has done a lot, but when you looked at the assessment from Lillypath, you're like, wow, I really need to change this up.

And you couldn't—

I would say you wouldn't know.

Yeah.

Oh, you wouldn't know. And, and this is where I think it's really important, because Lillypath is really about helping real people who are amazing stay visible and relevant in this new AI world, right? So if you're thinking about where does the human come back in, you know, after machines have done all their sorting and scoring, yeah, what do you believe still gives person that irreplaceable edge or brand for, for someone who's out there?

Yeah, well, the AI is only good as the material you give it, right? And, um, when you're talking about— when you talk about LinkedIn profiles, for example, I mean, if a person has like nothing to show for their career, I'm sorry, though, you'll get— you, you'll have a nicer profile, but ultimately the humanity of what you've done, that the great things that you've done, and may not be visible that has to come from you. It's got to come from somewhere. In a pure process way, you know, I would never suggest that somebody blindly takes something AI gives you and just cuts and pastes and done with it. Right? Always check, you know, always check. You know, what often happens, especially people like you, Sandy, like people who are, have a voice and who have a career and who have a, or known for a few things, you get a report In our case, you get a report and it's like, okay, it's— the language is good. I mean, it's, it's gonna emulate for the most part what your last LinkedIn profile language and tone was, but you know, something missing or it's like there's a little bit I need to do, do it, you know, get in there at the beginning and at the end, the person needs to be heavily involved, like no matter what. And that goes for any AI process, you know, AI will only go as far or do as well as the instruction and then the management and the supervisory capacity that you give it, and then you kind of let it do its work. You know, you be the good manager, be a little hands-off, let the worker run, but then come back at the end and say, let's see how good a job you did here, and, um, you know, make the iterations, make the changes. So we don't have a per— nope, nothing's perfect. But when you do get the outputs, highly recommend that you make it your own. So the human has to come back in, and, you know, it's very useful to know, like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that that was an important thing in my life. You know what? One of the other things that we recommend and we highly recommend is people add as much context to the intake process, right? So, you know, you, you upload your LinkedIn profile, but we want you, we want you to upload bios and like, you know, if you're looking for a job, your resume for sure. And, um, all recent puff pieces that have been written about you in Forbes, whatever there is, throw it in there.

Doesn't do puff pieces.

Forbes does not do puff pieces. Let the record show.

At least I don't.

You don't? No, you know what I mean. Like, just really nice, like, profiles or features. And, and, you know, throw it all in and you'll see, you'll be surprised at what surfaces to be the, the things that you didn't think were important that are, that are very human and authentically you. Gets right, gets put to the top. And, you know, it's, it's a very eye-opening experience sometimes.

Yeah. Um, I will say, when I got back my Lilypath report, I actually went through it and I added different story elements like that, you know, the AI wouldn't probably know about me or maybe didn't tell in my voice. And mine, at least right now, my, my engagement is up, which is awesome. And I was telling, I was telling Dan, you know, I'm not gonna advocate for your tool unless I see the real results, right? Which for me is engagement, just like you talked about earlier. And the right kind of engagement. Like I was looking today at some of the people who were commenting, but more important, DMing me, and what kind of companies they're coming from. They're coming from the types of companies that I'm really interested in right now. So if I'm listening in right now on this podcast, what do you think are the signs that professional authority is being misread by AI, and what damage does that actually cost the person and that personal brand and missed opportunities? And how fast does it go? I know that's a lot of questions.

Oh, but this has been my raison d'être for a long time. So I already talked about the Google debacle, right, where you're being surfaced in ways that are not related to you. That's a huge, huge risk, not just reputational, but from a client standpoint, anybody. Because if, if deep research is finding things that are not correct, you better believe that that's surfacing in other places too. Right. And, you know, you have to use your common sense when you when you look at that, but still that's a huge risk. So that's like one of the big signs is Google's not getting you right. Major sign. I'd say, you know, when you're not control of your own narrative, you'll start to see things like, like inquiries are, you'll, inquiries are, are slowing down or they're, or they're coming from the wrong places.

Mm-hmm.

You know, for a long time I keep getting inquiries from these, from franchise opportunities. Why are franchise opportunities reaching out to me? What is it about my profile?

Yeah.

So like, That's kind of thing that maybe you're visible in the wrong places. You start to see that, like, the usual things, like, oh, recruiters aren't responding to me, I'm not getting any inbound, I'm not getting any, or inbound is low, or, hey, I've been talking about this thing for 10 years, I'm clearly an expert, I've made a career on it, but yet here comes this person who nobody's ever heard of, why are they kicking the hell out of me on LinkedIn? Like, why is this person all of a sudden get all, like, They're now an authority.

How'd that happen?

I don't mean to be petty, but it's a sign. If you've been working so hard at something and somebody comes in and not to downplay their hard work either, but somebody comes in out of nowhere and it's like, oh, well, that's the new expert. Well, that's a sign that you, your visibility isn't where it needs to be. You know, it should. If you're the domain expert, then AI should know that you're the domain expert, the credibility and the authority. And there's a, there's a whole school of, of of thought about this. There's a lot of methodologies to raise your personal brand. And you know that Mark Schaefer, our dear, dear friend and original introducer connector, you know, he's written one of the best books about that called Known. And it's a program, you know, you take time to build your authority. We don't have as much time anymore. So, you know, at least get the basics right. And then, then when you build that authority, you'll be building on solid ground because Otherwise it's all gonna fall down.

Yeah, I agree. I have to tell you, the funny thing was I have a friend who used to work with me at IBM. She's gone into a jelly making business. She's doing very, very well. I have another friend who's been writing cookbooks, doing very well, ex-tech person. I have another friend who's ex-tech who's designing clothes now, and I was engaging on their post a lot. And so it was fascinating to me because I started getting people going, Do you wanna be on my cooking podcast? I'm like, do you know, do you know me? Like, no, I'm not the right cooking podcast person. And I got someone about fashion, which I was very— I was very, I was like, oh, thank you. Thank you. But, but I was asking her, I'm like, why did you, uh, invite me to this fashion show? Like, I love fashion, but I'm not a fashion expert. She said, oh, I saw that you responded, you know, X times to this person. So you, it is true. Like sometimes. Sometimes you try to do some of the best things and the right things and you get known for other things. So it has caused me to pause and think about, you know, how do I want to showcase my skills, especially on LinkedIn where people are using it for business. And let's, you know, the brand, you know, if you're a marketeer, you pay a lot of attention to your company's brand. It's so important, super valuable, you know, people have on their balance sheets the value of the Coca-Cola brand or Patagonia. The same thing should be true for you. So if I'm, let's say, a senior marketing leader or an executive and I'm hearing this and I want to take a concrete action this week to improve how AI reads me and, you know, and understands me, what would you recommend that they do?

Lillypaffs.com, get your report. That's the first thing I'd recommend.

I would say that too. Yes.

Yeah. And, and, you know, there's— of course I'm going to say that. But look, if you are serious about building your authority and just and really making sure that you are visible in the right way, go through your— go through what's there first. Do an audit and see what's being said about you and see how your LinkedIn profile first, but maybe some of the writing you've done, maybe your Substack if you have a Substack, maybe your blog, if you, if you have a blog, see what the message is. Look for the threads, look for the, the kind of unifying pieces and look at your profile to see if— read the headlines and be honest with yourself and say, hey, I want to be known as an AI expert. Does my headline say this? Is there specificity in that that's going to separate me from other people? Like, ask these hard questions of yourself. And that's maybe the first thing you can do. And if you can even fix some of those things, it will I think it'll dramatically improve your, you know, it'll help mitigate risk for sure, but it'll also start to improve your visibility, so to speak. But, you know, you can always go to a professional.

I think that's really important. And one of the hardest things when I'm— because I have a lot of mentees, I'll ask them, what do you want to be known for? That question that you just talked about, what do you want to be known for? Part of the input for LilyPad And I think that's a hard question. I don't think that's, you know, if you don't know the answer off the top of your head, I think that's okay. Spend time thinking about it. Just like a brand, right? Like Patagonia is known for one thing, Walmart's known for another. You don't have to be like everybody else. Yeah. But you do wanna know what you want to be known for. Yeah. And Dan, I heard from a reliable source that you're gonna give people who listen to this podcast discount on getting their LilyPath. Is that true?

Why, thank you, Sandy Carter. Yes, it is.

Okay, good.

Yes, it is. So if anybody wants to, wants to go run their profile and, and get a LilyPath report, we have an Authority Builder report. We have something, somebody, something that's a little more tuned for people who are sort of thinking about career transition. Then we have a slightly different report that's for folks who need a job now, like all the folks out there out there who have suffered or have been laid off, a track that is for the urgent job seeker. And then college students, we have another track for college students. And they're all different in their own way. But, you know, you go to lilypath.com and you choose your track. When you decide to purchase on the checkout, use code COMPANION20 in honor of the Marketing Companion. Companion 2-0 for a 20% discount on any report.

Awesome. That's great. Thank you so much. And I will put that in the show notes too, if you missed it, but it's Companion 20. We'll also put it in all the documentation as well. Dan, first of all, congratulations.

Thank you very much.

You are now an entrepreneur. You're co-founder of a startup, Vybe Tutor. I mean, you're—

I mean, I have a fancy title. I mean, I'm a chief product officer.

Chief product officer.

When was I a product guy?

Are. Can you believe that? Yeah, that's so cool. I'm so— I'm, I'm just so excited for you and the team. And, um, I got to meet the rest of his co-founders. I don't know, that was a couple of days ago. Super impressive, amazing people. And you have people like Richard on your board, Richard Bliss, again, another powerhouse in LinkedIn. So, um, congratulations. And to everybody listening in, thanks for listening today. Hopefully you got something today about marketing your brand instead of marketing just your company's brand. But I think all these principles can apply. And again, I do want to thank, uh, Brevo, because for me Brevo is such a powerful tool. We'll get all this out in Brevo. That's how you'll get information about this. And then also SEMrush. I mean, SEMrush for me is amazing SEO and GEO and does great reports like Dan talked about earlier. So thank you, Dan. Uh, thank you so much. If people people want to get in touch with you, how would you recommend that they do that?

Well, of course you can find me on LinkedIn, right? Just look for Dan Nessl on LinkedIn. I'm an open book. You can Google me. It will be correct. I can almost guarantee you. But you can find me there. You can go to my podcast, which is The Trending Communicator. Sandy was a guest not too long ago. And yeah, go to lilypath.com. You'll find me there too. So I'm out. I'm out there.

Awesome. Thank you. And thanks for everybody who listened in today. Today. Give us feedback. Let us know what else you want to hear about. Thank you so much. Talk soon. Thanks, Dan.