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Social Media and Personal Branding at JCI London [Slides & Video]

Malcolm Levene and I gave a taster Personal Branding from the Inside Out seminar for JCI London, at the London Chamber of Commerce. As our workshops are normally full-day and in this instance we only had 90 minutes, we had to focus in on a few bits of content relevant to the audience at JCI.

If you haven’t heard of JCI, it’s is a volunteer network for people in their 20s and 30s. Run by its own members, it is nearly 100 years old and exists in more than 100 countries. Many of those who have ‘graduated’ from JCI have become great leaders, famous alumni are Bill Clinton, John F Kennedy, Kofi Annan and half of the Japanese parliament (Big in Japan in other words).

Both Malcolm and me had a great time and hope to see plenty of JCIers at our Personal Branding workshops in future. Here is a summary of the slides we used for the presentation:

Personal Branding Taster Seminar at JCI London Chamber of Commerce

This is me talking about social media (shot on an iPhone):

Would love to get your feedback, don’t be shy now!

Filed Under: London, Monthly, Personal Branding, Slides, Video Tagged With: Events, SlideShare, Video

LinkedIn and Personal Branding Presentation at the Nordic Career Forum [Slides]

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting ‘Social Media and Your Personal Brand’ to no less than 240 young professionals at the Nordic Career Forum in London.

The whole event was very well organised by the Nordic Chambers of Commerce in London and featured exhibitors from companies like McKinsey, Mercuri Urval, Wimmer Financial and European Leaders. The chambers managed to get a large number of paying attendees which was an achievement in itself I think, it’s not easy to get young professionals to give up a Thursday night in this town.

I was one of four speakers and I think we all covered different approaches to personal branding. My talk was about social media and it’s a topic I could speak about until the cows come home, in this case I only had 15 minutes so had to limit the scope. LinkedIn is in my opinion the most important social network for most young professionals so that was my focus. I picked out 10 points from the LinkedIn trainings I deliver to companies that I think would be relevant to anyone looking to further their career by branding themselves online.

Check out the slides and please let me know what you think!

There’s also a YouTube video of this talk, not the best quality though.

photo by: miguelb

Filed Under: Events, LinkedIn, London, Monthly, Personal Branding, Slides Tagged With: Events, LinkedIn, London, Personal Branding, SlideShare, Video

Making New Friends at the London LinkedIn Meetup

We just hosted another very successful LinkedIn London meetup last night with some 60 people joining us at the Pitcher & Piano in Holborn. This event is all about how to use LinkedIn for career and business success, a topic that seems to be very useful for most professionals.

The format of the night

The format is that we get everyone to introduce themselves, last night we asked only for name and LinkedIn headline (felt like the army, yes). Laurent then talked a bit about the importance of getting the headline and other bits on your profile right as it’s all about first impressions on the professional network. We then had a Q&A session which went on for quite some time actually, we got lots of questions relating to privacy, premium accounts, profile pictures and so forth. The last part of the evening is all about networking and I’m glad to say that the people who came out last nigh were very keen networkers – I could see business cards flying about and promises of connection requests were abound.

All this for the moderate price of free

The meetup in itself is a completely free event, we don’t pay anything for the venue which is the upstairs section of a bar in central London. The acoustics aren’t brilliant and neither are the seating arrangements but it works somehow. We don’t charge anyone for coming out and we certainly don’t get paid by anyone (not even LinkedIn sadly) to host these meetups. You may ask why on earth we do this? I would say personally I'm very passionate about LinkedIn and can talk about how great it is until the cows come home – meetup or no meetup. Then it's also awareness and reputation building for Link Humans, it's inbound marketing at its finest.

What about the people that come out?

A meetup (or any party for that matter) is only as good as the people that come out. In my opinion it’s the people that make all the difference and can really make or break an event. Luckily we tend to get a great bunch of folks from all walks of life. Last night we had a traveling samurai from Japan, we had a laughter coach (who did get me laughing in the end), a magician (great at card tricks) and we had a number of small business owners and consultants. We encourage everyone to connect and hopefully they will be able to help each other sooner or later – you just never know when a juggler comes in handy now do you!

Twitter and Meetup.com in a beautiful combination

The fact that people come to a social (or was it professional) networking event means they are probably well connected online, something I realized yesterday after getting tweet after tweet about the meetup – Twitter is such a great tool for an event build-up. We are now using the hashtag #linkedinlondon – very creative huh! And in case you were wondering, of course we used LinkedIn Events as well to promote the meetup. For details, see How To Promote Your Meetup on LinkedIn.

See you in a couple of months

As we run other meetups (Social Media London is our flagship), we only do the LinkedIn one bi-monthly which is a good frequency for our schedules. So the next one will be in October, hope you will make it out for that!

At the previous LinkedIn London meetup we were interviewed by The Times newspaper by the way, read the full article here.

Filed Under: Events, London, Monthly Tagged With: Events, Meetup