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How Do they Pronounce LinkedIn in Peru? [Video + Slides]

Earlier this year I was contacted by a postgraduate school to come and speak about LinkedIn and recruitment to an audience of HR and recruiting professionals (thanks to Twitter by the way). Sounded good I thought, the only little snag is that the University del Pacifico is in Lima, Peru – basically half way around the world. We were emailing back and forth for a while and I said I would do it but never thought it would actually happen… But it did and last month I had the pleasure of spending a few days in the Andean metropolis that is Lima and banging the drum for social media and LinkedIn in particular.

Skills shortage

The reason companies in Peru are increasingly using social media is because there is a serious skills shortage in the country. The economy is booming and businesses are struggling to find the right talent. This means there is a massive opportunity to use social media and especially LinkedIn to reach out to skilled professionals in places like Colombia, Spain, the US and anywhere else they may be.

The biggest shortages seem to be in mining, construction and other infrastructure roles. The country is experiencing a commodities-driven growth, silver and gold are among the big exports. This reminds me of South Africa or Australia a few decades back, definitely the place to be if you want to grow your career or business.

My interview in Gestion (the FT of Peru):

Terminology

One thing I had to get my head around in Peru is that they don’t use the term recruiter as we do in the UK; over here it would typically be someone working for a recruitment agency. Agency recruiters over there call themselves headhunters – to avoid any doubt I suppose! And corporate recruiters, or talent acquisition specialists as some would call them, are known as HR in Peru.

Summary of my presentation on LinkedIn and recruitment

What’s great about Peru?

This was one of my first questions when I arrived and the usual go-to person answered it. The taxi driver said the food in Peru is spectacular; it’s a blend of Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, native Indian cuisine. And from what I tasted, the food was indeed spectacular. I would recommend trying ceviche which is essentially raw white fish in a lime brine. If you like sushi, pickled herring or smoked salmon you’ll love ceviche. And then there’s the drink… I tasted the #1 Peruvian soda which is called Inca Kola, it basically tastes like bubble gum and leaves a nice layer of sugar on your teeth .

Apart from the food I would say the people are all very warm and friendly, which has always been my experience of South America. The country also has lots to offer such as Machu Picchu, the Amazon rainforest, the coastline (including penguins I’m told) etc – sadly I didn’t have enough time to explore these this time around.

I hope to return to Peru sometime soon, many thanks to Karen and everyone at the University that made me feel so welcome!

And finally here’s how to pronounce LinkedIn, Peru style…

Image credits: Myself!

Filed Under: Events, LinkedIn, Slides, Social Media Tagged With: Business School, lima, LinkedIn, peru, slides, univeristy

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

How To Use Slideshare for Your Content Marketing [10 Tips]

slideshare social media

Ever heard of SlideShare? It’s a site that hosts your slide decks from Powerpoint or Keynote. It’s one of those great content marketing platforms most people have never heard of.

Some impressive stats first of all: SlideShare is one of the top 150 sites on the web, they get 60 million visitors per month and have 3 billion slide views a month (that’s 1,140 slides viewed per second). So the traffic is good but it’s also the right type of traffic for most content marketers – it’s highly professional. According to ComScore, SlideShare has five times more traffic from business owners than other popular websites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

I won’t delve further into why it’s a useful tool, instead I’d like to give you ten ways to use it successfully:

1. Use existing content

Chances are that you will have a number of Powerpoint presentations kicking about on your hard drive. What company doesn’t have a sales presentation? An employer branding piece? A few slides about a recent product launch? As long as they don’t contain any confidential information, go ahead and upload these to SlideShare and you immediately have content. You can of course change them before you upload, you might want to change images, update figures or cut out a few slides in the deck.

2. Keep it simple

When I upload a presentation to SlideShare, I’ll typically take out about half the slides. I’ll leave the visually interesting and self-explanatory ones, as the viewer won’t hear me talk about the content. Nobody wants to sit through a 70-slide deck in an auditorium and nobody wants to see even half than that online so keep it simple instead and get your message across in a brief manner. Some of the best presentations I’ve seen are only about 10 slides long and contain very few words.

3. Be sure to add clickable links

I only realised that you can add hyperlinks to a SlideShare deck a few months ago. This means that you can add a link to your website or Twitter on the front page and last page, in case anyone loves your presentation you want to make it easy for them to contact you of course. When I put slides up about LinkedIn for instance, I of course link that to our LinkedIn training workshops in London.

4. Use the right keywords for SEO

SlideShare has an internal search engine where visitors pull searches every day, most of these will be researchers out on a fact-finding mission. On top of that the content also ranks really well in external searche engines like Google and Bing, use this to your advantage. Just like a YouTube video, it’s important to use the right title, description and tags in order for it to be found online. Instead of calling your presentation “Annual Parks Report”, try “London Parks Facts and Figures by Borough and Councils” – the latter one is full of keywords that people will use to searches.

5. Embed here and there

A great feature with SlideShare is the fact that you can embed your presentations on websites, blog posts or anywhere else you can think of. This mean anyone can host your presentation on their blog but with a link back to your SlideShare account. This can work really well when writing a blog post about a topic, you add more weight to your argument with a presentation embedded.

In fact, I write a quick blog post around every most public presentations I give, an example is How To Build Your Personal Brand on Social Media [Slides].

6. Link up to LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers its users very few cool applications but the SlideShare integration is one of them. By adding the SlideShare app on LinkedIn, you can automatically display your most recent presentation on your LinkedIn profile. Or you can set it to whichever presentation you feel represents you the best, you can even show two decks on your profile. Everytime you upload a new presentation to SlideShare, it updates your profile and it sends out a notification to your network’s homefeed indicating there’s new content to have a look at on your profile.

7. SlideShare surprise

My party trick when speaking at a conference is to upload my deck to SlideShare early in the morning. I then schedule a tweet linking to the presentation to go out when I should be up on the podium speaking (using the event hashtag of course). When I do speak I mention something like “right about now a tweet is going out linking to this presentation by the way”. This has generated thousands of views of my presentations from all around the world.

8. Check the stats of your presentations

By having a look at how many views, comments and shares your presentations get you’ll get an idea for what people out there are interested in. And perhaps what they aren’t interested in. Just like with any content marketing strategy, it’s about monitoring what works and try to do more of just that. You’ll get even more interesting stats if you upgrade…

9. Go pro if you want leads

OK if you are really serious about your presentations and feel that they will lead to solid business, you can upgrade your account. This will then give you analytics of who’s viewing your decks and SlideShare will present you with up to 30 leads per month. You can get your own branding on your account and you can do private uploads as well. My rule of thumb is as with all freemium models, only go pro when you’ve mastered the basics.

10. Check out other people’s decks for inspiration

Finally, you’ll probably get into the whole presentation thing now after realising what SlideShare can do for you. This raises the bar and you now want to make even greater decks for yor audience. If you find yourself stuck for what to put on your next slide, fear not. Have a look at similar presentations on SlideShare to get ideas from your peers. Or check out the ‘Most Popular Today‘ section on the site, this is where some of the best presentations in the world are featured. Pick and mix your ideas and transform it into your content.

Any more ideas around SlideShare? Please let me know in the comments!

Related post by Kris Olin: How To Get Crazy Traffic Using SlideShare and LinkedIn

Filed Under: Content Marketing, Marketing, Slides Tagged With: Content Marketing, Marketing, SlideShare