JD Gershbein

CEO of Owlish Communications

JD Gershbein is considered one of the world’s top thought leaders on LinkedIn, and a pioneer in the design and delivery of LinkedIn education. He is also a globally acclaimed social business psychologist, keynote speaker, a frequent broadcast media expert on LinkedIn for business, and a contributing writer for The Huffington Post and Forbes.

Article

My LinkedIn Profile Strategy To Drive Thought Leadership

LinkedIn is the de facto social networking site for business and an essential component of any digital marketing strategy. As the site has evolved, it has become a vehicle through which professionals can tell their stories and accomplish any number of professional objectives, including the development of a thought leadership platform.

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on JD’s success

Using a LinkedIn profile strategy to drive thought leadership

Result if you follow the steps in JD’s session

A LinkedIn profile that communicates your expertise and advances you toward your desired outcome as well as objective insights and guidance strengthening your personal brand as you embark on the thought leader’s journey

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I mean, how do you generate leads? How do you get people to know you? How do you get them to like you? And most importantly, how do you get people to trust you just on the basis of how you represent on an internet page?

Well, there’s an art and most definitely a science to that. So clearly the how to and the what to do is around this building of a personal brand, which is a very nebulous concept.

So personal brand will drive our outcomes on the site. I believe that our success on LinkedIn, however we define it is directly proportional to the impact and reach of the LinkedIn profile that we put out there for consumption.

So these days, as you mentioned before, with Google, with LinkedIn, being the first point of access on business professionals, all roads now lead to and from that profile page.

So in my thought leadership model, obviously the first piece, the most important piece, is to really set up that LinkedIn profile for the decisions that you want, because business today is decision oriented around the type of information we glean from people.

And the more content you put out there that supports your value proposition, the better off you’ll be in the decision making.

So generating leads, anybody can generate leads. I mean, we can all produce targeted lists. LinkedIn can certainly help us in producing scores of people who might be able to buy our products and services. But it’s the equity we put into conversation and into building relationships that’s going to drive our outcomes.

So I think the how to is really predicated on how you manage conversations, how good are you at keeping those plates spinning. Some conversations really come to the fore, others lose momentum, others stop dropping crash. So keeping plates spinning has really become the challenge of business people today, especially in b2b.

And when you have content that supports what you do, you’re publishing, you’re producing audio video content that really supports your value and keeps the dialogue going. This is truly how we nurture leads and how we isolate the people who really want to go forth with us and buy from us.

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