How to Be Engaging and Courageous on LinkedIn with Kevin Turner [Podcast]

Podcast #217 – Learn from Kevin Turner on How to be Engaging and Courageous on LinkedIn to Revise your Personal Brand

Description:

Our guest speaker, Kevin D. Turner, is an organizational and personal branding phenom. After honing his skills at SONY, Stone VC, American Teachers, Thomas Nelson, and the AHA, he opened his own branding firm, TNT Brand Strategist, with his wife Dana S Turner.

He is proof to “Pivot you have to Prove it” pulling off 5 in his career. From Fortune 50 Sales and Marketing to VC, to Public and Private Turnarounds, leading a Non-Profit 50 into 140 countries, and finally proving it to himself by turning a side gig into a 10-year successful business.

Kevin is also a staunch supporter of job seekers and understands what it takes to compete in a tight labor market and jump into new industries. He is regularly present on LinkedIn, providing personal branding and LinkedIn tips to help job seekers better market themselves. Sitting on the other side of the table, he’s had to source and hire over 200 people in 5 countries and has great insights into what employers are looking for from their candidates. Known for his “Networking Always Beats Not Working” approach and how it, even digitally, is your quickest way to end your job search.

This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community. Make sure and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition.

Now on to the podcast…

Show Them, Don’t Just Tell Them

You can use your work experience to help you pivot, but you have to prove that work experience first.

You can tell them you can do this one thing, but they will want to see it in action.

There are a lot of ways you can show them by effectively bringing your work experience out into the public eye, especially through social media. That’s one method that’s going to help you make that transition.

This may even bring them to you as opposed to you having to go to them.

Focus on LinkedIn

Focus on LinkedIn because it is a professional platform and seems to get the most attention from recruiters.

On LinkedIn, you can start engaging, start contributing, and start sharing. This builds a social currency of “knowledge leadership.”

Everyone has things that they know better than anyone else. Or maybe they know it in a different or exciting way.

By sharing these things, they are building concepts and exposure. And that becomes part of your reputation — your brand.

Your brand is what everybody says when you’re not in the room.

Don’t leave it up to the people in the room.

You need to refine it, deliver it, make sure they understand it so that when you’re not there, they’re talking about it.

That’s what many people forget to do. And one of the huge opportunities on LinkedIn is you fully control that and it doesn’t cost you anything to do it.

Write on LinkedIn

Write some good articles. What’s nice about articles on LinkedIn is they are indexed by the search engines. So people see them outside of LinkedIn.

If someone is looking for somebody and they’ve got all their keywords put together in a city, those kinds of things are going to come up. They’ll see you as the knowledge leader in there.

They’ll also see your profile level and that you created articles. They will read the articles. And again, it’s your opportunity to establish your knowledge in that area.

So the articles have great value.

The biggest exposure piece right now is creating content on LinkedIn.

Emulate the Good Ones

When you see something you like, what is it you like?

Is it how they use their voice?

Is it how they use the presentation materials?

What is it?

And the next question is, ‘can you do that?’

Look at the stuff that you like that works.

What caught your eye?

Was it the use of icons? Is it the use of white space? Or was it the use of lists?

Then that’s something that you can learn from and emulate.

Don’t Remove Items, Just Minimize Them

Control what you want the people to focus on in your LinkedIn profile.

You can keep what you’ve done in the past listed, however, just don’t make it the main focus if you are looking to pivot to another industry.

You want to highlight the experience of work for which you’re looking and let the older, irrelevant experience fall to the side.

Ultimately, you need to be courageous and engaging on LinkedIn to be successful.

It can be done!

You can reach Kevin on LinkedIn.

How to Find More About the Podcast and Subscribe

Make sure to check out the Career Pivot Community.

You can contact us here.

Marc invites you to connect with him on LinkedIn.com/in/mrmiller. Just include in the connection request that you listen to this podcast.

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