 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Thursday. We're on the downward slide to the weekend. Thank you for joining me today. Here's what today is according to LinkedIn Creator Managers. It is get to know your customer day, which is why I wanted to join you here on LinkedIn Live to get to know you a little bit better. Now, pardon me, many of you have been so gracious and provided me with an insider look at your lives and your careers over the past year. Boy, did I ever learn a lot about the hospitality industry, our meetings and events professionals, our supply partners, all of you have had such an incredible journey over the past two years. But I want to continue that journey today. I want to give you some of the things that I've been learning over the last little while that might help you with your continuing journey into 2022 here. Now, whether you're watching from LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube, I'd love for you to just drop me a little high in the comments so that I can see that you're watching. But more importantly, I want you to also drop your questions and your insights, because I want to get a sense of how you guys are feeling here launching into the new year. We've had a tough couple of years. If you're in the meetings and events industry, this is no surprise. Something that was only supposed to last for three months, we're now heading into our second year anniversary of shifting and changing, cancelling programs, rebooking programs, finding new ways to deliver knowledge to our various client audiences. And the trends are that we're going to return to in-person meetings soon. And there's a lot of talk of what that's going to look like for now, all of our virtual meetings and our hybrid meetings. I had a conversation earlier today, and I want to encourage you to still keep an open mind about all the different formats that might be available to you. There's still lots of pros and cons to hosting an in-person meeting, as there are in hosting a virtual meeting or looking at the hybrid model. So I wanted to share that with you, and that's not coming from me. That's coming from someone, another professional in our industry, who is looking also at 2022 and all the different formats that might be available to us. But we're also talking about our own personal brands and our LinkedIn presence today. And I wanted to share with you a few things that have obviously come up as of late that might encourage you as you explore your own LinkedIn or your own personal branding journey. So the first thing I want to look at is newsletters. Now, newsletters kind of hit the main stage for LinkedIn audiences back in October. And I just launched my newsletter on LinkedIn as recent as just a couple of weeks ago. In fact, today I launched my second edition of my newsletter. So if you have opportunity to hop on over to my newsletter, you can find it under my activity or maybe you can't wait a minute. I just posted it. So maybe it's just not showing up every hour. Oh, there's the video. That is literally the video that I'm doing right now. That's very meta. I am watching. That's very meta. Anyways, here is edition number two of my newsletter. So I encourage you to go check it out. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit the subscribe button and you will receive my LinkedIn newsletter once every two weeks. What I'm trying to do differently with my newsletter is give you small actionable things that you can use in your day, your week or your career. So small, tiny things about under LinkedIn or about my blog, different resources that maybe you can use to add to your 2022. I do want to mention I have a LinkedIn challenge happening right now. So for those of you who are looking to level up your LinkedIn game in 2022, I have some LinkedIn formats that maybe you haven't tried before. So check out the challenge over at liankhulderwood.com forward slash challenge. And we'll see if we can get you infusing a few different media formats into your LinkedIn presence here in 2022. I also have an upcoming webinar all about ways to level up your LinkedIn game fast. These are the low hanging fruit pieces that are going to deliver some ROI when you're looking for leads and opportunities on LinkedIn. So find your preferred class time over at liankhulderwood.com forward slash master class. And we'll make sure that you get into the right class. But here's so here's what I really want to talk about with newsletters. How do you get started? So if you are on your home feed and you have access to newsletters and if you're in LinkedIn creator mode, you should have access. It's as simple as clicking on right article and it will actually already pop up as being a newsletter. Now, I have my newsletter already created. You will find an option that says create newsletter and you can fill in the details. The newsletter itself requires you to give your newsletter a title as well as a newsletter description so people know what they're receiving each week or by week from you. Also asked you to create a little newsletter image. So that's kind of cool. You get to create your own newsletter logo and that's all it takes. Like I said, mine is a bi-weekly newsletter. You may choose to do a weekly or a monthly newsletter. But whatever it is you try to do, this is a great way to connect with people on LinkedIn, off of LinkedIn. So what happens with the newsletter is it gets emailed to the people who subscribe. So if I subscribe to your newsletter, your newsletter is now going to show up in my inbox, my email inbox. And email is still one of the best ways of connecting with our clients. People are still using email. It hasn't gone away. So this is a great way to connect with your LinkedIn connections outside of the LinkedIn platform. It's super powerful. It gives eyes onto your profile, onto your content in a different way. So I encourage you to check out newsletters, especially, of course, if you have Creator Mode and see if it works for you. If you do create a newsletter, make sure to invite me to subscribe to your newsletter so I can take a look at what you're creating and give you some feedback if you're looking for it. So here's the other thing I wanted to do on LinkedIn today. Because I've had the opportunity, obviously, to connect with a number of you and look at your LinkedIn profiles. Now, because I'm on LinkedIn several times a day and this is kind of what I do, I always look at people's LinkedIn profiles and I do a quick little, you know, a quick little view of it in my head. And I'm looking for great examples. And I've stumbled the last week, I've stumbled on two examples of really good LinkedIn headlines. So I wanted to show these to you because I just thought they were really good examples of LinkedIn headlines. So we're going to go back to LinkedIn. And one of my friends, Ryan Young, he just recently recreated both his banner and his LinkedIn headline. So I want to show him because he's actually done a couple things on his profile. So the first thing he did, the first thing I want to actually pardon me, mention about Ryan is Ryan wears a couple of different hats, right? He is the director of sales over at the Ottawa Marriott. But he's also a big part of the Illuminate Project podcast. So we were talking about, OK, how do we create a brand that is Ryan Young that speaks to both of these roles? And I think he did a really good job capturing this in his banner and in his headline. So let me show you what he's done here. So firstly, in his banner, typically the advice I give to people about their banners is to create clarity and avoid confusion, especially if you're wearing two different hats. So either your banner speaks to one audience at a time or your banner speaks to all of your audiences at once. But I love what Ryan's done and let me show you why. So he's created he's speaking to both individual audiences in his banner. But when he uses these words up here, ready to create an experience here and ready to collaborate on this here with a clear divide, but yet a clear synergy using the words ready to in both. He's been able to do it. And and so that's what I love about his banners. He's really been able to capture both audiences in his banner. And I don't know about you, but I am not confused because there's that clear delineation between the two audiences. Very clear on what he's doing. But here's the other thing that Ryan has done really well with this kind of revamp is making sure that it's tying to his headline. So he's got the Ottawa Marriott here. Great picture, Ryan, by the way, and I'll tell you why I love this picture in a minute. And he's got the Ottawa Marriott here. So he's made a clear match between those two. And here's the other piece, the Conversation Starter on the Illuminate Project Podcast. It's a clear match with this piece here. So that's what I love about his banner. I do want to go back to this photo for a second. The reason I really like this photo he's chosen is it evokes an emotion. I want to have dinner in this space. It's it's created a desire in me to visit this space, which is kind of what we want to do with our visual imagery. So a fantastic job with the picture choice. Again, creating that clear divide between the two sections. So let's jump down to Ryan's headline for just a second. So he's again dressing both audiences right there in his headline, which is brilliant. And he's using really compelling words like Conversation Starter. I love that word. I mean, who doesn't want to be a Conversation Starter? It's just it's it indicates that he's a thought leader without using those trendy words, thought leader. He's also using words like Creative Thinker, which he is. It's just I'm really impressed with how he has wordsmithed his headline. He's included all of his audiences. It clearly positions him as a thought leader and it positions him as someone that you want to collaborate with. So well done, Ryan. Love what you've done here. Let me show you another example. This is from a recent friend of mine. We've only become LinkedIn friends recently, but Cindy's headline really struck me. And ironically, she's even changed it up since I first saw it. So it was super great before. And I think I copy and pasted her headline and I need to go and find it. But here's so for starters, this is what Cindy does. She does candles for she she does candle making classes for groups, right? What a fun activity. And if you're in. Pardon me, if you're doing a team building activity, maybe consider doing some candle making just super fine, right? This is what her headline reads, certified candle, holic light up the world with me. And then she talks about being a virtual event, a fiction auto, etc. But what I loved was the certified candle, holic and light up the world with me. It's just so, so cute. I'm going to get rid of that pop up. Just so cute. You know, it is a bit of a play on words there. Just I'm really I'm a big fan of this headline and I was a big fan of it before she even changed it and this is even better. Now, I wasn't really going to speak to her banner, but I do want to to showcase her banner here because again, it's such a clear match with what her headline reads because it does show candles, but it also shows candle making as as best as you can. And then it has, of course, that she's a team building expert and it's certified candles. So it doesn't take long for you to recognize what it is that she does when you land on her profile. So anyways, well done, Cindy. So glad that we connected on LinkedIn. And I look forward to learning more about you in the future. I want to kind of wrap up this LinkedIn Live today with my promise to talk to you a little bit about community. One of again, another big goal of mine this year is to create different kinds of community with different kinds of individuals. I've always liked community, but it's very easy as a solopreneur, someone who works from home to kind of get stuck in a rut and just kind of stay insular. I'm also an introvert. So it would be super easy for me to ignore community. I can do it like that because of my physical location, because of my natural tendency to be an introvert. But I do I see the value in community and the energy it brings me. So I want to talk to you about four ways that you can find community and perhaps you'll you'll find some community yourself over the next couple of weeks. So the first way to find community, pardon me, the first way to find community is through those chapter memberships and those associations that you belong to. So if you're in meetings and events, maybe this looks like the MPI community that you belong to or the PCMA site is another great example. I, Leah, another great example, most of these associations have local chapters. And so these are your people. These are the people that you can connect with on a monthly basis and share best practices, learn from one another, find common alignment and ground maybe for collaboration. And so it's so powerful. And I was a member of a local chapter for many years. That is until I moved to a smaller city that doesn't have a local chapter. So now I find myself four hours from a local chapter, which it's not feasible. It wasn't even feasible before COVID, definitely not feasible now. So now I'm looking at other ways to build community. And and I'm going to share the example that I'm working with right now. It's something that MPI has done. Is we've created these communities not based on your physical location and that local chapter membership, but based on other personality traits and career traits of the individuals. So MPI is created. What they're calling is communities where you all have something in common. I believe there's a diversity community. I believe there is a meeting planner community. The community I belong to is for independent and small business owners. So all of us, regardless of what it is that we're providing as a service or a product, we're all small business owners. So there's no one that works for Marriott or Hilton inside of this community. All of the individuals inside the community are entrepreneurial. Again, small business, which means very, very few employees. Some of us have zero employees and it's just one person. And what I love about this community is we're able to talk about things that impact us and impact us alone. In fact, next month we're doing a session on business planning and looking at some of the financials of being a small business owner. So super important for small business owners, maybe not so important for those that work for umbrella organizations that have their own finance department. So anyway, maybe MPI or those other associations, they've created these small communities within the larger community where you can find a home. So I encourage you to go to MPI.org if you're an MPI member and take a look at the communities there and see if you can't find some alignment in those types of communities. Now, the third type of community I wanted to talk to you about is finding people who share a similar job title to you. Now, that in our industry is easy enough to do because we all hang out in these MPI communities. But I want to take my particular job for as an example. And because what I do is I do a lot of training and speaking around LinkedIn and personal branding. So the other kind of community I'm trying to create is around other LinkedIn trainers and personal branding trainers. And so that's what I've done. And we're starting to look at ways that we can collaborate. And one would say that we are, in a sense, all in competition with one another. But this is such a great and powerful group of women. We all come from different industry backgrounds. So we're able to learn from one another about LinkedIn and personal branding as it pertains to our industry. And I'm getting so many incredible insights. I feel like I'm learning a lot. I also feel like I'm imparting a lot and sharing my industry knowledge as well. So super fun community, because we have that in common, right? Like we can all sit around and talk about LinkedIn and personal branding all day long, like the little geeks that we are. But such a fun group of actually, and in this case, it's all women, but there's obviously gentlemen, trainers out there as well, who are welcome to join us. So that's the third kind of community that I'm exploring a little bit further and seeing how we can collaborate, share best practices, share our knowledge base, et cetera. The final one that I want to encourage you to try is the community that happens organically when you participate in social audio. So I'm going to repeat that. The community that happens organically when you participate in social audio. Well, what is social audio? So in a word, social audio is Clubhouse. So Clubhouse is the social audio app where you join conversations and you can become a part of a two-way or a five-way or a 10-way dialogue about a certain topic. Twitter Spaces is also social audio. LinkedIn Audio also social audio and brand new. These are places where you can come and have a conversation and you or you can even just be a passive listener of the conversation. And I've done both and created community in both capacities. But the power of social audio is you're able to find your people very quickly because you are talking to one another, virtual strangers. You're talking to strangers to start with. And then you start to see some alignment with these strangers. And then these strangers start to become friends. And then those friends start to become collaborators and business partners and all of those great things that come along with networking. So if you're looking for a community and the three that I mentioned have been exhausted, I encourage you to try your hand at social audio. Find a room that speaks to you and just start by listening. Listening to the conversation. Listening to the people contributing to the conversation. You're going to start to find some alignment with some community members within that social audio app. So those are my four ways for finding some community here in 2022. So as a quick recap, I encourage you to try out LinkedIn Newsletters. Make sure you let me know when you've created a newsletter so I can check it out. I also want you to take a quick look at your banner and your headline and use the examples of Ryan and Cindy from earlier to see if you're creating a compelling story with your banner and your LinkedIn headline. And finally, I encourage you to build and enrich your communities this season, looking at your association, local member, local chapter meetings, your association, smaller communities, as well as social audio and other niche communities in your network. Thank you for joining me for today. Get to know your customer day. I hope you enjoyed today's broadcast. And I do look forward to seeing you on my next LinkedIn live. Have a great day, everyone. Best of luck for the weekend. And oh, hi, Heather. I see you, Heather. My good friend, Heather, was watching today. Another person I'm collaborating with, by the way. Have a great week, everyone. So glad to see you. Hope you found value. Take care. Bye for now.