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Introduction: [00:00:00] Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns: [00:00:10] And we're going to set sail with another pirate today. Marc welcome back. You're already a pirate and we want to make sure that you come back and share a few tips, tactics and ideas about LinkedIn, and you have some announcements coming up as well. So welcome back.

Marc Halpert: [00:00:26] Thank you so much. It's good to be back again. The funny thing is that when you meet good people and you just reconnect in like moments and it's back to where we were, what? When did we do this. Six months ago? Eight months ago?

Russ Johns: [00:00:39] It's been a minute

Marc Halpert: [00:00:40] Yeah. It's been a minute. Entrepreneurial time.

Russ Johns: [00:00:45] That's what we were talking about just before the show, how quickly and how  time passes and you just you're consumed with all kinds of activities. You can be on phone calls all day long and not really feel like you accomplished a lot. However, building relationships has always been key for you and I know that's something that you are passionate about and LinkedIn has been a huge advantage in building relationships. And I just want to recap on some of the touch points of what's going on with LinkedIn right now and what observations have you had between the last time we visited and today?

Marc Halpert: [00:01:22] First of all, let's go back even before the last time we visited and that is, I had said, I believe on this show. If I didn't, I should have. That you should be marketing your butt off right now. This is the time while things are relatively quiet, they're going to roar. As soon as we get all the vaccinations done, we get herd immunity. Businesses and cities open up. It's going to be outrageous. So now's the time to plant those seeds. And if you haven't planted those seeds, you better have an outstanding LinkedIn profile that you can refer people to, where they can search and find you and then approach you. All right. Gotta have it. So what is LinkedIn doing? First of all, since you and I spoke last time, there's a bit of a new change to the interface. It looks different, graphically different. Big deal.

Russ Johns: [00:02:07] It's always going to evolve.

Marc Halpert: [00:02:10] They're competing with other social media, which is why we have hashtags on LinkedIn and all this other stuff. They're competing with things like clubhouse now, because now the audio and video and all of that stuff, Instagram, all this stuff, fine. Find your niche, find what you're comfortable with, what you need and do it well. If you don't do everything on LinkedIn, which is what we were talking about, because you can't keep up with it. It's changing so quickly. And what makes sense for your business, as a podcaster and a coach is different than my business as a LinkedIn trainer, just the way we work. We work with different industries where we're different types of people. We have different types of geographies. Just find your persona. Once you know why you do what you do, you heard me say this last time, why you do what you do, it'll be easy, but arriving at why is really hard. It took me, I don't know, I won't tell you how many years, a lot of good books like Simon Sinek, start with why, if you're not familiar with that book, you better know it. Simon S I N E K Sinek. If you don't have time to read, or don't like to read, then watch his YouTube Ted talk, which will give you in18 minutes everything you need to know how little you know about yourself. Yeah, that is a wonderful way to realize that you've got lots of explaining to do because people don't just show up on your doorstep and knock knock, knock, let's do business. They have to fall in like with you. And what  you say about yourself enough to make them want to contact you, zoom, phone call, email, and the, what they hear back or see back from you in the contact has to reflect the personality you have put into your LinkedIn profile. The why has to resonate in both times they contact you. Then they are more apt to feel comfortable speaking to you. And while you're speaking to them, they fall in like with you or in love with you enough to offer you a potential piece of business. It's hard. It has a long gestation period. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Russ Johns: [00:04:18] No, I was just gonna say and the reality is that the more alignment you have with the way you like to work and the message and the persona that you have online, the easier is to have that conversation because I've seen so many people that are not necessarily, they put out a marketing piece on their profile, but it's not really who they are. And when you talk to them, it doesn't reflect on anything that they have online. And they're attempting to be someone that they're not.

Marc Halpert: [00:04:48] Well, if someone wrote it for them. Yeah. We hired somebody to do it. What's funny and I probably insulting people who are listening and I apologize. I don't apologize. I'm going to say marketing people, PR people, you have terrible LinkedIn profiles. What's going on?

Russ Johns: [00:05:05] Yeah,  the plumber's sink always leaks, Marc.

Marc Halpert: [00:05:08] Accomplished children never wear shoes, you name it. It's all the same. So if somebody wrote your LinkedIn profile for you and you didn't write it for yourself, you hurt yourself because they're not getting the same thing on the telephone or in the zoom call that you're saying on LinkedIn. So there's that connect. You get that and the buzzer it's out. What's going on here. People shut down on you. So if at the end of a great phone call, You don't get an offer to do business because they went back to your LinkedIn profile to review it. And they say, that's not the person I spoke to. What the hell is going on here?

Russ Johns: [00:05:41] I want to even go back past that, Marc because there are still people I talk to on a regular basis that say, yeah, I'm not really an online person. Cause that's not where my audience is. What are they living in? Come on. It's going back to 1995 when they say I don't need a website. What's a website for, none of my clients are on the website. None of my clients are on

Marc Halpert: [00:06:00] It's so last century, grow up, would you? Were 20 to 21 years into a new century. Where were you for the past? I'm not a technology person. I had a nurse tell me that. You know what, I'm not excited about you doing your medical work with me if you're not a technology person. So it's stunning what people say. And how your perceptions of what they say without them really realizing what they've said. And you have such a hole to dig yourself out of to get out of the hole. You gotta be best all the time. People say to me, I'm not good in front of a camera. I don't like talking to people I can't see.

Russ Johns: [00:06:40] Yeah, it's hard. Darren. I want to point out Darren's comment here. So timely. Spent an hour responding to my LinkedIn contacts regarding episode on American Detective with Joe Kenda. Darren is here in Arizona and he's a pirate and we've had him on the show and we've talked about some things. In fact, I think I'm scheduled to be on their show as well. And the reality is we all have skills. We all have ability. Howard Kaufman, another amazing individual here in Arizona. It's a great topic and guest. Thanks, Marc and Russ. Thank you. These things are all going to... we're living in the most amazing time in the history of mankind in terms of technology and the ability to connect and the ability to operate just like we are we're in different time zones, we're in different parts of the world and we still have the opportunity to have this conversation, share some value and distribute some ideas that people may be thinking about, but they don't know how to articulate it, or they don't know where to go with it and they don't know what to do with it.

Marc Halpert: [00:07:41] We do in their own environment, in their own culture. And that's, what's fascinating with this. There's a woman in New Zealand who's a LinkedIn coach like me and I met her through LinkedIn. We found a time where we mutually get phone call and we zoomed it because it was easy. And it was like she was next door. And she's explaining to me the New Zealand or mentality of how you connect with people, which is different than the Australian, which is different than the British. And you make these assumptions that well, they're wrong, that's wrong and crazy American like me, yammering my mouth off in my sort of New York Metro area kind of way. And we connected at such a high level because we each had something to offer each other. Yeah. Yeah. It's easy.

Russ Johns: [00:08:26] It's a beautiful thing. It's amazing. I have friends all over the world as a result of technology. So you don't have to master everything. You just have to master something that works for you.

Marc Halpert: [00:08:36] And you have to know who you can lean on to help you when you need the help and those people that you help freely helped you back. If you ask them and you nurture them. And I nurtured this woman in New Zealand and I nurture all my people. I got 3,300 connections on LinkedIn. They all see me multiple times a day. I get comments from people that say, wow, cool stuff. Never thought about it that way. Really helps me in something I'm working in right now. As we were talking about before we started talking a nine year period with two guys I'm working with right now, they've been reading. The one guy has been reading me for that long. We met a long time ago, but now, he needed me. He pushed the button. Okay. Terrible ROI, but it wasn't just marketing him. I was marketing everybody and it just works.

Russ Johns: [00:09:26] Yeah, it's amazing. And I'm always surprised about who shows up and when and how they catch up with the... cause I've been doing this, your probably episode 362 now and just cause I don't keep track of it. I just show up every day and the reality is that there's so many interesting conversations going on and all of these different nuances of what people are doing that it's really intriguing to me and I'm always curious about. Okay. What's going on in the rest of the world? My, my little zone of consciousness isn't necessarily what's going on in the world. It's just happens to be what happens in my world. And so I love the opportunity to catch up with people like yourself, Marc and see what's going on. What is it? I want to ask you a question. What is it that LinkedIn has done recently that you're really enjoying making connections with, or utilizing in a different new, and different way?

Marc Halpert: [00:10:24] That's a really good question. I'm using it a lot. I'm posting a lot. I'm posting on different topics that are not LinkedIn topics. Now  LinkedIn didn't change that they don't care what you post on. All right. Within limits, not everything professional. Let's keep it honest and decent. Alright. No politics, no, nothing offensive to anybody. But I've decided that I would just post whatever I thought was interesting to the most people that I would benefit. And so I'm posting things like LinkedIn things. And I'm posting things like today, I'm going to post a bit later that I just saw on zoom that you can now add closed captions, right on zoom. Now doesn't seem like a lot, but people are telling me, we can read your blog posts every day. And you were saying, can't believe you have 360 episodes. I have 1700 blog posts out there. I can't believe I've written that much stuff. That there's that much stuff to write about over the last many years. So I'm looking at different ways to different, to sort out different technologies, video, audio, podcast, all this stuff, because I have to be varied to different audiences and the larger my audience gets, the more varied their tastes are. So I have to hit on those types of things. So what I really am excited about is that I have something like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. And I encourage anybody listening. Please don't ask me to connect cause I only connect to people I meet and get to know through business. All right. But that's not to alienate you if you want to see what I have to say, and you can tell I've got passion. I've got a lot of opinions. If you want to see what I've got to say, follow me. And the more followers I have, the more diverse the conversation global conversation gets. And so follow me, you'll get all my material that I post every single day. So that's something that's always been there that I've learned to ace more recently, since I've last spoken to you, I'm not a fan of LinkedIn stories. This is like to me, noise, LinkedIn stories are...

Russ Johns: [00:12:37] I still don't have stories.

Marc Halpert: [00:12:40] I don't either and I don't care. I don't have LinkedIn live. All right. Let's go back to stories. Stories are quick little videos that you put out there for all of 24 hours. I want my material to be enduring. More than 24 hours.

Russ Johns: [00:12:52] I want to leave a legacy. I don't want to leave...

Marc Halpert: [00:12:56] You can't relate to this. A snowflake in a snow storm. All right. Boom. It's gone. It's disappeared and they make it disappear. I don't have LinkedIn live. I don't really care. One of the things about LinkedIn live is you can't talk about LinkedIn on LinkedIn live, which I think is really bizarre. So I know some of my fellow LinkedIn gurus who are using LinkedIn live for other purposes, but you know what, that's not my single focus. Okay. We'll keep going there. I'm not on clubhouse. I haven't gotten bitten by that bug yet. I've don't understand what all the chatter is all about. I would like meaningful conversation rather than just anybody who happens to drop by. So those are the types of things I'm trying to be. More selective and qualitative than quantitative. So the blog, I asked people to guest blog, have I asked you to guest blog yet?

Russ Johns: [00:13:43] I don't recall. You may have.

Marc Halpert: [00:13:45] I would love you to guest blog on my blog and tell me what you've learned in 360 podcasts that you've done. Reflect back. So authors out there published. We have witnesses, I guess there are witnesses out there. So I'd love that. So Fridays are my blog guest post.

Russ Johns: [00:14:04] Hiett Ives says, thanks for the great how to. And then Darren says my first book became successful based solely from my LinkedIn efforts with all the proceeds going to nonprofit Crimestoppers.

Marc Halpert: [00:14:17] That's fantastic.

Russ Johns: [00:14:18] It is and he's an amazing individual that you two should connect, so I'll have to introduce you.

Marc Halpert: [00:14:23] So we'll chat away. That's great. There are so many things that I try to bring, like you. New people's opinions. I love when they reflect back on things they do. When somebody has been in business 25 years, what have you learned? I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. Why don't you think about it and tell me so you can tell my blog.

Russ Johns: [00:14:39] Because there's a lot of difference between learning something new every day for 25 years of doing the same thing over and over for 25 years.

Marc Halpert: [00:14:46] Yeah. Yeah. I just had 17 years on LinkedIn, so I wrote a piece what I've learned in 17 years on LinkedIn and you know what I had to dig deep. It was really interesting when I realized that I had learned that I'd never really articulated. So promise Russ, next thing you hear from me will be how to get on my blog and I'd love it if you would be the least thing I can do to thank you for having me out now twice.

Russ Johns: [00:15:11] Always. Writing, speaking about writing. You're wrapping up a book right now, Marc. I want to make sure that we don't forget, and we don't get off on a tangent without saying something about your book okay.  Share the details.

Marc Halpert: [00:15:26] Two and a half years ago, I wrote whoops, this book, LinkedIn Marketing Techniques for Law and Professional Practices. So it was published by the American Bar Association, which was great to be a non lawyer writing to the American Bar Association, which I was thrilled that they approached beyond that. And I was very honored and I wrote a book and it did okay. And two and a half years later, I approached them. I said, God, I have a second edition. So much has changed on LinkedIn in two and a half years. And they said, sure do it. And what else are you going to add? So I'm in the final editing phases right now. We've just agreed on a cover and the back cover. And it's such a process, but anyway, I've added more material and it's all the new and updated all the old material that LinkedIn is today. With a lot more, not how to, because any idiot can be an idiot guide and write an idiot's guide. This is not what to do, but why to do it from an overall brand marketing perspective.

Russ Johns: [00:16:21] So behind why you're doing it,

Marc Halpert: [00:16:24] Always the why.  I do the book always a lot, because if you don't understand why you're doing it, you'll never do what you're doing well, and that's, and then the other thing is that anybody recommends you or endorses you on LinkedIn has to say for you, that guy Marc. He says why he does what he does. Let me tell you how well he does the, why he does what he does. All right. So we're getting out of the what and who that's the elementary we're using really articulate ways of expressing ourselves. We're being introspective, which is a tremendous viewpoint into what makes somebody invaluable as a connection or not, if they're just flat, then you want to get away from it as soon as possible. Think of the last time. I remember when we used to all get together at networking events,  long time ago, and you would get roped into a conversation. There's some really dull, horrible creatures standing there pontificating about what he does and how successful he is and you couldn't get out fast enough. You want to find people who talk about why they can help you. And why they have found their manner of speaking. Anyway. So back to the book I've added two new guests, chapter writers. You already had a woman who wrote Carol Greenwald. Thank you, Carol. I know you're not watching this, you've been amazing to me, introduced me to the ABA. She wrote a piece on on legal ethics, what you can say and not say as a lawyer on LinkedIn, gotta have it. Because lawyers don't understand that very well. So that chapter got rewritten because the ethics rules have been rewritten, but I added two new chapters by two new chapter writers. One woman calls me one day. This is years ago. She's hi, Marc. This is Sandra I'm in the Toronto library and I'm reading your book. I love it. It's fantastic. I said, okay, Carol. Okay. Sandra let's connect. Let's figure out how we can do some work together. So I've been on our blog. I've been on our podcast. She's blogged with me, all this stuff. We just really connected. She wrote a chapter on using LinkedIn in your social media policy if you're in a firm and how to use it for your marketing strategy. And it was a great tactic. That's her area of expertise as a consultant. And then I asked a friend of mine who I have, I've known for many years who's a recruiter to lawyers and professional practitioners. What do you look for in a LinkedIn profile? Because a lot of lawyers are in flux, right? Firms are small or it's getting smaller or whatever. They're all working from home. They don't like it. And they're just thinking about what's next for me. Then we added two chapters. As an appendix one chapter on ikigai. I think we talked about this last time. Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy of why I am, who I am and what are the influences that makes me who I am. And it's brilliant. And it's like everything else Japanese that I love. It's so simple as to be unbelievably cool, but we say it so well.

Russ Johns: [00:19:18] And it's so telling, as well.

Marc Halpert: [00:19:18] It's so helpful for people who are stuck, who don't know... I talk, a lot of people are stuck and I thrust in front of them the ikigai, Venn diagrams is four circles and they all intersect and where everything intersects is your ikigai. It's your raison d'etre. It's your why you do what you do. It's the Simon Sinek thing, but it's so brilliant. It allows you to assess what are your influences and where are you in your influences? So you can be better to influence others. It's just brilliant. And then I wrote another chapter based upon artificial intelligence. I'm sorry on intelligence being emotionally intelligent about what you say on LinkedIn and when you say it, so you can get involved in a really bad argument on LinkedIn, that's not emotionally very intelligent. How you protect yourself is not emotionally intelligent. You always have to be emotionally intelligent as a mature adult, as a professional. So all these come together and the book ended up being 50% more material, which I was thrilled with. And it's even stronger because all the old stuff is time tested and the new stuff will be time tested. With the passage of more time and if there's a third edition, so be it. And we'll talk about that two and a half, four years, but it just got to the point where people were reaching out to me saying I'm not a lawyer. I used to be a lawyer. I hate being a lawyer. I'm a lapsed lawyer as they call themselves. And I'm a real estate investor, or I'm a financial planner with a law degree. How do I do this? I kept thinking, hearing all this stuff saying, you know what, I can't just write this book for the ABA just for lawyers because it's going to be too small an audience. And they loved it. They thought it was a great idea. So then I also wrote a piece of it for multiple owners like me, cause I have three businesses and anybody has multiple businesses know how challenging it is to fit your entire multiple preneurial life into LinkedIn in a limited number of characters in each section. So I give a lot of tips on that because I did it myself. So the book comes out two months from today, right? About  April 26th. Very excited about it. It'll be on the ABA website at least for a couple of months until they finally release it over to Amazon. But once it is there, it will be freely open to buy. It's also going to be available in Kindle. So if you're not a paper book reader and you're a Kindle person and you sit on an airplane or a train or a bus or an automobile.

Russ Johns: [00:21:36] So are you going to release an audio book with this?

Marc Halpert: [00:21:38] Not in their ballywick, shall we say. I've talked to them about it. I would love to do the audio book, but you know what's interesting. You can convert Kindle to read to you in your ear. It's really basic and really mechanical, but, and that's how, but I'll tell you one thing while we're on that topic I'm having adobe read back to me my book and I'm catching a lot of stuff I never caught before. And I've been editing this book several months.

Russ Johns: [00:22:12] Interesting. So you've been editing it with audio feedback?

Marc Halpert: [00:22:15] I listened to my own words and make in my head, I stopped and I make the changes that need to be made to make it clearer or a here duplication that is not necessary. Like I'm a big thing about never use the same word twice in a sentence. I just thought I know beaten to me in fifth grade. I don't know. But anyway, I try to make that change. I want to be the best writer I can be. And that's also available by the way, guys, on word it's called read aloud and everything I send out, or hopefully everything I send out, I let word read back to me before send it out. And it's always better when I hear something that I don't like and I change it. So a couple of tips there for you.

Russ Johns: [00:22:56] Couple of great tips. So Donna Dunn says, I like the idea of your second book. It's a great idea. It keep it fresh. Technology is always moving. Technology is always evolving, so we have to evolve with it.

Hiett says, what's the Japanese program again?

Marc Halpert: [00:23:13] Ikigai...IGAI. Google it or look on my blog posts. What I've done in my old blog post is unashamed is I've written my perception of ikigai from a LinkedIn lens.

Russ Johns: [00:23:29] Oh, that's perfect. That's perfect. Angie says, ooh, I made it good morning. Good morning, everyone. She's an avid supporter of the #PirateBroadcast

Marc Halpert: [00:23:38] She's got 2 flags for the pirates, so she's a double flagger.

Russ Johns: [00:23:41] Yes. Donna says, okay, thanks for the tips. Yeah. I want to come back to this. Cause I do transcription on all these shows and sometimes how we speak isn't necessarily how we write either in reverse. So it's really fascinating and there's a lot of tools out there that are really getting very effective at transcription writing and audio words, and back and forth.

Marc Halpert: [00:24:09] Yeah, I'm using VEED.io right now in transcribing my video blog posts with closed captions underneath, and they have another way to transcribe as well. It's pretty good. I find probably because I'm from the Northeast, I clip my words really bad, fast, and it can't keep up. The words come out a little weird in the transcription, but whatever, it's fine. It works okay for me. It's just to keep it fresh, keep it interesting. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Russ Johns: [00:24:40] Darren says, I'm really looking forward to Marc's new book as I too juggle three variations of myself, my true crime TV shows, books and podcast efforts. That's exactly what we're talking about here is. I have a tendency to use words  the wrong place at the wrong time and I ramble a little bit here and there, and it's just my personality and I'm okay with that. Wrinkles in these smile lines. Yeah, I've earned them.

Marc Halpert: [00:25:06] Exactly. We're doing that now, it's even harder because you can't take back anything you say like a moment ago when fluffered and I'm very honest about when I screw up. When I couldn't come up with artificial intelligence. I came up with artificial intelligence instead of  emotional intelligence. See, I did it again, or emotional intelligence. That's just the way it is, laugh at myself all the time. And this is, I'm not a politician who's reading off of the teleprompters. It's okay. This is me. So I let it go. I can't beat myself up for it anymore.

Russ Johns: [00:25:37] Not at all. Marc, I really appreciate the fact that we can actually come together. Talk about these subjects and maybe if somebody out there hears this, finds value in it. They'll subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, subscribe to the YouTube channel. You'll get notified, hit the bell when we go live and you'll get involved in the community, get connected and also reach out to Marc. How do you like to be connected with people, because I know you're very particular. You have to meet individuals. So how does someone connect with you or how can someone like myself introduce you to individuals?

Marc Halpert: [00:26:15] All right. If you'd like to follow me, go to my LinkedIn page Marc W Helpert and you can just click follow it's that simple, everything I put up will appear on your page and it's every morning at 8:00 AM there's another blog post. So that's, I guarantee you'll hear from me every weekday morning with something hopefully that is valuable to you. I put a lot of material out there. You'll see me comment a lot. You'll see an intelligent, hopefully intelligent conversation around various topics. If you would like to receive my blog separately from LinkedIn, you can go to my website, connect2collaborate.com and look for the tab that goes to what's called I call it LinkedIn nuggets, these little nuggets every day. If you want to engage with me and you want to ask me to connect, tell me how I can help you and how you can help me. It's a 50/50. I'll give you 51%/49. Okay. It's not always equal every day, but nonetheless, tell me....just don't send me like to connect with you or heard you on the #PirateBroadcast I'd like to connect with you. It doesn't give me anything to go on. Yeah, you can tell. I take this very seriously. Okay. If you want to buy my book, if you want to read my book in the library and call me from the library and say, hey Marc, this is a really great library, I'd be happy with that. That's the stuff we content providers thrive on. We know we hit a nerve.

Russ Johns: [00:27:34] Look forward to the episode, the guests post on what I learned with 360 podcast episodes.

Marc Halpert: [00:27:43] I do too, I think that'll be fun.

Russ Johns: [00:27:45] Yeah. So thanks Marc. It's been a pleasure to catch up with you and connect and share a few nuggets of knowledge with the pirate committee and as always value add, influence information and all of these things that we're doing right now is a legacy for everyone. So what's one thought that you'd like to leave with the world.

Marc Halpert: [00:28:09] Take care of yourself. Be healthy mentally, physically be careful. Be healthy.

Russ Johns: [00:28:18] Awesome.

Marc Halpert: [00:28:18] That wasn't particularly philosophical, but nonetheless, it's very high on everybody's minds.

Russ Johns: [00:28:22] It's a beautiful thought and it's appropriate for the time. So as we know everyone, thank you so much for being here. And like I said again, leave a review comment, subscribe, connect, all of the things that social allow us to do and make sure that you remember that#kindnessiscool, #smilesarefree and you #enjoytheday.

Marc Halpert: [00:28:45] Great. Thanks. See you.

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