by Caroline Leach | Jul 8, 2023 | Careers, Marketing & Analytics, Social Media
What happens when you post daily on LinkedIn? ✍️
A week ago, I decided to find out. I began a reprise of an experiment I did in 2017. At the time, I posted every weekday for a month, collected and analyzed data, and shared my findings in this article.
Back then, I was testing a hypothesis about how many posts are needed in a month to reach a certain percentage of my network.
Now, I’m doing a slightly different experiment. I’m posting daily, including weekends, during the month of July.
My hope is that this data will be valuable to you, too, as you think about your own content creation strategy.
I’ll share interim updates in July, and a full report in an article in August.
In this experiment, I want to answer these questions about content creation:
📊 What content is most engaging, or valuable, for serving my network?
📊 How can I increase the quality of my network through content creation?
📊 How will content creation enhance my personal brand?
It was a bit daunting to start this experiment during the 4th of July week. It feels like this week has evolved into what the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is like. Everyone seems to be on vacation. This is great for quality of life, and not so great for interest in business content.
But I pressed on. Thanks in part to encouragement from various people.
And I’m happy I did. Here are some numbers for the past 7 days:
📈 Post impressions are up 862%
📈 Profile views are up 147%
📈 Search appearances are up 11%
Qualitatively, I’ve noticed other changes.
They all have to do with the ratio of salespeople (who I DON’T want to meet) to professionals (who I DO want to meet).
As a coach, consultant, and speaker, I hear from a LOT of salespeople who want to “fill my business pipeline and increase my revenue through done-for-me marketing.” No thank you. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
What is changing in these first 7 days?
Profile views, connection requests, and DMs are all evolving. I’m seeing and hearing from much more interesting corporate professionals and business owners. These are exactly the people I’d like to get to know better and serve through my content.
My daughter thinks these changes are because the salespeople are on vacation this week, too. But time will tell as July unfolds. 😊
What questions do YOU want to see answered in this experiment?
by Caroline Leach | Jul 7, 2023 | Careers, Corporate Communications, Leadership, Social Media
Don’t apply for stuff. 🚫
Students and colleagues give me a puzzled look when I share that advice.
How are you supposed to get jobs and grow careers without applying?
Applying for stuff:
🔴 Rarely leads to anything good
🔴 Often involves being ghosted or rejected
🔴 Gives a false sense of taking action that will lead to desired outcomes
What works instead?
✅ Getting to know people and being of service
✅ Building a network of colleagues who encourage and help each other
✅ Creating a reputation – a personal brand – for delivering value
A few examples …
In a career change, I applied for multiple jobs in corporate communications in my organization. Initially, I got rejections. Then I met people on the team through professional associations. They helped me get interviews. But I was often the number-two candidate, without an offer. Finally, I interviewed for a job and hit it off with the hiring manager. The role wasn’t right, but we kept in touch. Two months later, he reached out. A senior writer had resigned. Was I interested in the job? Um, yes! More interviews ensued. They wanted to make me an offer, but I hadn’t applied for the job. So I quickly did.
In leaping from the corporate to entrepreneurial world, I wanted to teach as a focus area. My start was serendipitous. A colleague from a volunteer board was a department director at a local college. He asked if I was interested in designing and teaching a new class in digital marketing. Um, yes! It was a blast. Later, I wanted to move to a larger university. I reached out to people in my network to chat about opportunities. While the conversations were friendly, they didn’t lead anywhere. One referral seemed hostile and uninterested in connecting, so I decided not to push it. A few months later, I got an email introduction. It was someone at the university who knew me from my alumni volunteer work and corporate social media work. A department head asked her for adjunct professor recommendations in digital and social media. My contact recommended me. After several conversations and guest speaking, I was invited to start teaching. Oh, and I had to apply after that.
More recently, I applied for an intriguing part-time contract role. It was complimentary to my current portfolio of clients and focus on coaching, consulting, speaking, and teaching. I thought I met or exceeded the key criteria. I excitedly applied online. Two days later, the rejection email arrived. I reflected on what went wrong. Because I thought my experience was a strong match with the requirements, I didn’t reach out to people for advice. This is a mistake I will not repeat.
So, stop applying for stuff. Instead, nurture your network. Help people. Let them know how they can help you. Do great work and tell people about it in the spirit of serving others.
How have you landed new opportunities?
by Caroline Leach | Jul 31, 2022 | Leadership
Not every thought that flits through our heads needs to be expressed. We don’t always need to be right. We don’t always need to point out others’ errors. Why? We can instead assess what purpose it would serve to mention someone else’s error.
Recently I was corresponding with someone and asking why an action had been delayed. It turned out to be a discrepancy, seemingly between an instruction that had been given to me and how I had carried out that instruction. When I went back to confirm the details, I saw I had followed the instructions exactly as provided.
My inclination was to respond that I had, in fact, taken the right steps. And then I paused for a moment and realized it would serve no purpose. I didn’t need to go on record stating that I had done what was asked. Instead, I thanked the person, considered the matter closed, and moved in. This preserved the relationship, which was more important than saying I was right.
What is better left unsaid today?
by Caroline Leach | Aug 14, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Marketing & Analytics
To my surprise and delight, “communication” topped the list of key skills for data scientists in a CEB Market Insights blog post I read this week.
The post covered the top 10 skills for data scientists and 2 strategies for hiring them. Yet “communication” felt like a lone outlier among a list of highly quantitative skills, like managing structured data, mathematics, data mining and statistical modeling.
But indeed, the Business Broadway study the post cited showed that “communications” recurred the most frequently across a variety of data science roles.
When Thomas Davenport and D.J. Patil named “Data Scientist” the sexiest job of the 21st century in Harvard Business Review, they cited an enduring need “for data scientists to communicate in language that all their stakeholders understand – and to demonstrate the special skills involved in storytelling with data, whether verbally, visually, or – ideally – both.”
As a communicator who pivoted into marketing analytics, it’s heartening to to see data showing there’s a role and need for effective communication and storytelling skills.
And having led communications, the field is dramatically improved by data that demonstrates what works and what doesn’t, and helps predict how various audiences might respond to different communications strategies.
Beyond enabling data-driven decisions, clear communications about data can literally be a matter of life or death. Two fascinating examples crossed my path this morning in an article by Dr. Jenny Grant Rankin called Over-the-Counter Data: the heroics of well-displayed information.
The first example was an early use of data visualization in the summer of 1854. In London, 500 people died of mysterious causes in a 10-day period. A Dr. John Snow made his data user-friendly. He took a neighborhood map and noted the exact locations where people had died.
This pointed toward a local water pump that was the culprit in the spread of cholera. With this clearly displayed data, Dr. Snow was able to convince authorities to remove the pump’s handle in order to stop the outbreak.
Another example took a much more ominous turn. The night before the Space Shuttle Challenger launched in January 1986, NASA engineers and their supervisors looked at charts and data on the rocket’s O-ring function. This is what keeps hot gasses contained. Based on what they saw, the launch was cleared for takeoff.
But the available data was not displayed clearly. It showed failed launches, but not successful launches. And this led decision makers to overlook a critical piece of information – the O-rings worked properly only when the temperature was above 66 degrees. The day of the Challenger launch was 30 degrees below that. It was “so cold it does not even fit on the graph.” It’s still heart wrenching to recall the tragedy that occurred that day.
While thankfully the work of data scientists is rarely a life or death matter, these examples underscore the need for clarity in communicating data. For what cannot be understood cannot be implemented.
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