Summary

This podcast episode focused on personal skills for marketers. The first interview was with Kim Tasso, a prolific author, who discussed the critical importance of soft skills and emotional intelligence in the modern workplace. She argued that these skills are more vital for long-term career success than technical abilities, especially in an age of automation, and she outlined her "four Cs" model (Communication, Creativity, Confidence, and Collaboration) as essential for marketers. The second interview featured Neil Wilkins, owner of Viper Marketing, who explored the concept of personal branding. He emphasised the necessity of authenticity and having a strong digital footprint for career advancement. Wilkins provided practical advice on using LinkedIn as a dynamic branding tool rather than a static CV and introduced his "rule of thirds" for a balanced content strategy.

 

Key Points

Kim Tasso: 

  • She stated that 75% of long-term job success depended on soft skills rather than technical hard skills, a figure originating from a Stanford Research Institute study. 
  • She argued that soft skills, such as empathy and communication, "robot-proofed" a career because they could not be easily automated. 
  • She identified the four most important soft skills for marketers as the "four Cs": Communication, Creativity, Confidence, and Collaboration. 
  • She explained that emotional intelligence (EQ) was a strong predictor of job performance, accounted for 58% of performance across all roles, and, unlike IQ, could be developed. 
  • She advised listeners to improve their soft skills by first assessing their current abilities, then focusing on developing one or two skills at a time through practice and available resources. 
     

Neil Wilkins: 

  • He defined personal branding as the opportunity for individuals to be identified with a particular topic or message, allowing them to "punch above their weight." 
  • He stressed that authenticity was the fundamental building block of a personal brand, as audiences would quickly see through any inauthentic efforts. 
  • He suggested that individuals did not need a "big idea" but could build a powerful brand by simply documenting their authentic journey and story. 
  • He argued that having a personal brand and a digital footprint was no longer optional but essential for being "in the game" for career opportunities. 
  • He recommended a "rule of thirds" for social media content: one-third personal content, one-third "pointing" to others' relevant content, and one-third promotional content. 

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and aprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hi, I'm Kiran Kapur and on this week's Cambridge Marketing podcast, we're getting personal, personal skills. We're on a voyage of discovery first with Kim Tasso on the importance of soft skills and emotional intelligence.

Kim Tasso, Tutor (00:25):
Analytical hard skills can be automated. We can have robots doing a lot of that work and you look at some of the great stuff on online messaging and bots and things. The soft skills side of things, however, kind of robot proofs you for the future.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:40):
Then later on, we move from personal skills to personal branding.

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (00:44):
Take a look back over maybe the last 30 things that you posted and see what kind of balance you have. Ideally, it's one third personal, one third pointing, and one third promoting.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:54):
That's Neil Wilkins from Viper Marketing on the podcast in 20 minutes time.

Announcer (00:58):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:02):
My first guest today is Kim Tasso, a prolific author of marketing books. She's written seven books about business development and communications. Her last two books are Better Business Relationships and Essential Soft Skills for Lawyers. Kim, welcome. You quote that 75% of long-term job success depends on soft skills. So what does that mean?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (01:24):
Well, I was quite surprised at that figure, but it actually comes from 2007, I think, from Stanford Research Institut. And they'd found with their study, as I say, 75% of long-term career success was reliant on soft skills rather than technical hard skills, which is quite surprising really.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:44):
It is, yes. So I suppose we about to start with what exactly is a soft skill?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (01:49):
Okay. There's lots of different definitions of soft skills and it's almost by kind of excluding the technical rational skills that you see. But soft skills covers everything, emotional capability, social competency, all of our human emotions that we convey. It is quite a large range. When I did my piece of research for soft skills with lawyers, we identified over a hundred soft skills and I'm sure that wasn't a fully extensive list.

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:23):
Over a hundred soft skills. So can you give me a couple of examples?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (02:27):
Yeah. If we take something like communication, you've got soft skills such as empathy, which is part of emotional intelligence, being able to see other people's perspective. You've got a soft skill around listening actively. You've got a soft skill around asking insightful questions. You've got soft skills around encouraging people to continue speaking, creating a personal presence, influencing people, persuading people, storytelling. It goes on just in the area of communication. The range of soft skills is quite extensive.

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:08):
So I know you're very passionate about soft skills and I know you think that soft skills are really important for marketers, but also future marketers, the next generation of marketers.

Kim Tasso, Tutor (03:18):
Yeah. I've written for many years around the two branches, if you like, of marketing and the skills there. There's obviously the rational technical analytical skills that every good marketer needs to have, but then there's also the emotional psychological skillset. And marketing, I say, is one of my passions because it combines both the science and the rational side as well as that kind of people and psychological side. When I interview people for marketing roles, if they have their marketing or digital marketing qualifications and some track record, you kind of take that technical ability for granted. So in interviews, you're really assessing their fit and their soft skills. And there was a report by part of Deloitte that said most employers are likely to select people for their adaptability, culture, fit, and growth potential rather than their technical skills, which they believe they can develop. And people like employers like Google and Amazon and Microsoft have reported that for them when they're interviewing people, something like learnability, someone's curiosity and a thirst for knowledge is probably the thing they're looking for because it really indicates career potential.

(04:45):
And also with soft skills, I suppose, increasingly with marketing technology and automation and artificial intelligence and machine learning and some of the fantastic software systems you see emerging all the time. Those sorts of analytical hard skills can be automated. We can have robots doing a lot of that work and you look at some of the great stuff on online messaging and bots and things. The soft skills side of things, however, kind of robot proofs you for the future because those aren't so easy to automate.

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:22):
You do a great video demonstrating that, don't you? You have a toy robot and a soft ... Is it a worry monster?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (05:29):
Yeah. I use worry monsters in counselling with kids. You kind of put your worry on a piece of paper and put it in its mouth. But I use the worry monster to show the soft skills because worry is an emotion. You don't get machines that worry if you like. And the fact that machines, although there's great advances in facial recognition in motion, machines do not feel emotions. Machines cannot feel empathy with the other person. So that's why I use the worry monster, people worrying about their jobs being automated and the robot saying for me, that's the battle there between hard skills and soft skills.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:07):
And so what do you think are the important soft skills for marketers specifically?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (06:11):
Well, I think the Chartered Institute of Marketing was very farsighted when it published its professional marketing competences some time ago.You have that kind of beautiful ring diagram with the core competencies and the technical competencies. And then the final outside ring are what I think really covers the key soft skills to marketers. Things like creativity and being inspirational and asking challenging questions, looking at challenging the status quo. I think if I was to pick a few for marketers, I would offer my four Cs model. So moving from the four Ps to the four Cs model, I definitely put communication top of the list, nonverbal communication, questioning, listening, influence, persuasion, storytelling. There was a piece of research a couple of years ago that said that people were 34 times more likely to agree to a request if it was made face to face. So goodness knows what's happening in COVID at the moment where we can't be in person.

(07:19):
And as marketers, we are often being educators ourselves. We have to explain to people the value and the benefits of marketing to our businesses and those around us. So we have to make sure that we can see things from other person's point of view, explain things simply incorporate the benefits and really those communication skills are core. So communication is number one. The second area I pick is creativity. And I think in marketing because of all the technology and the amazing analytics, we've kind of lost a little bit of touch with our creativity skills. But if you look at a load of data, you need some creativity to gain the insight from it. You need to be confident to ask a really kind of insightful original question. You need creativity to challenge assumptions to always ask why. And of course, for the best campaigns, you need to have a big, bold, all encompassing idea.

(08:22):
And again, curiosity goes alongside that creativity. So for me, the second one would be creativity. Thirdly, I'd put confidence. I speak and train lots of young marketers. They need to be confident to speak up and to stand out. They need to be confident in their personal branding and the contribution that marketing can make to a business. The best ideas in the world won't make the light of day if the marketers are not confident in talking to senior people about why they should go ahead and what returns they might deliver. So you have to really believe in yourself, think about not just what you say, but how you say it and overcome your inner critic and your imposter syndrome stuff, but not be over a confident or aggressive in your approach. So I think confidence is my third critical soft skill for marketers. And the final one I would put as my foresee would be collaboration because no man or woman is an island and the solutions in today's very complex and ever changing and interconnected world need multiple inputs and perspectives.

(09:47):
So you really need to be good at establishing strong relationships with people in your own marketing team and in other functional areas such as finance and compliance and technology to create teams that might be very different in their backgrounds and perspectives, but can come together and pool their expertise and insights from different perspectives into an integrated solution. I think the COVID pandemic has shown how feendishly difficult it is to really collaborate with people even in the same team remotely yet across teams and even across businesses and client relationships and so on. So collaboration would be high there. And I suppose my final comment on skills would be about picking up the phone. We're so in the digital space right now and particularly when it comes to developing relationships, picking up the phone for a two-way conversation, that's the sort of skill that I think people have kind of neglected a bit and that really needs to come to the fore.

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:57):
Okay. I just wanted to make certain I was clear on the four Cs. So we've got communication, creativity, confidence and collaboration and you used an interesting phrase under confidence. You said the phrase imposter syndrome. What does that mean?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (11:12):
I think imposter syndrome is just a thing that we suffer from sometimes. And it was interesting that Michelle Obama commented on this and said that we've got the skills, technical skills and soft skills. We have the ability, we have the experience, but sometimes we have that little voice inside us saying, "You're not good enough," or, "You can't do this. " And it's very common that we sometimes don't recognise our strengths and our abilities. And if we suffer and let that imposter syndrome take over, we don't do our best in communicating what our businesses need to do in marketing. So I think be aware of your inner critic, the voice that says you're not good enough, because again, you usually are and you need to override that inner critic. And that's why I say confidence is so important.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:05):
It's interesting, isn't it? That little critic is, it's never an inner cheerleader, is it? It's always sitting there going, "You're rubbish. Why does anyone want to talk to you? " I think we all know that little critic. And so you talk a lot about emotional intelligence and you've used that phrase a couple of times. So what exactly is emotional intelligence and why is that important for marketers?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (12:24):
Okay. Well, most people understand about IQ, that's intellectual capability, which is back to those hard, cognitive, intellectual problem solving skills. And emotional intelligence kind of lumps together a whole range of, if you like, soft skills. In fact, there's a piece of research that said when you test emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important soft skills, emotional intelligence actually covers them. So emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, you can develop and you can measure it with psychometric tools. It also is a good predictor for performance. Something like 58% of performance in all job functions and roles is accounted for by your emotional intelligence. And there's an indication that something like 90% of the highest performers are also high in EQ. Now, when we say what is emotion intelligence, I usually say there are four aspects, two to deal with you personally and two to deal with how you deal with other people.

(13:40):
So the first part is self-awareness, knowing yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. The second part is about self-control. When you realise how you're feeling, how do you manage it or do you just let yourself outburst the emotion with no filter and then awareness of how other people are feeling and that's the empathy idea. And the fourth one, the fourth part of emotional intelligence is actually relationship management, how you respond to other people. So we actually have a psychological construct for measuring people's ability to manage relationships, which I'm sure you can realise for marketing is vitally, vitally important.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:19):
Sorry, tell me more about the psychological construct for relationships.

Kim Tasso, Tutor (14:24):
Yeah. You can do an assessment for your emotional intelligence, a bit like you can do an assessment for your personality and those psychological assessments will give you a measure of how good your emotional intelligence is in those four areas. I can actually go to a group of people and run an emotional intelligence test and work out who has the strongest emotional intelligence for something like relationship management. And that's a tool I can use when I'm picking, for example, who would be the best sales representatives, who would be the best account managers, because I know those people have the soft skills that make them particularly adept at recognising and adapting to the emotions of people around them and that is relationship management.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:18):
Gosh. So Kim, I'm sure our marketers listening to this will now be convinced that they do need to work on their soft skills. Do you have some sort of top tips for how you could improve soft skills?

Kim Tasso, Tutor (15:31):
Yeah. I suppose the first thing is do an assessment or an audit of how your soft skills are at present and there are lots of online assessments that you can do and no doubt your employer will do appraisals or maybe 360 degree feedback to give you a feel for where you're strong and perhaps where you need to develop. There's an incredible array of online resources, particularly now after COVID, online training and digital classes on communication skills, on questioning skills, on selling skills, on listening skills. So there's loads there that's free. You can also observe people working around you and just kind of reflect on how you are doing. But I do say take things steady because there are so many soft skills, you can't develop them all at once. So pick one or two that you think are important for you and your role. Don't try and eat the elephant and do everything and have a structured approach.

(16:39):
Soft skills are about behaviour. So it's not just about the knowledge. You need to think about that new soft skill and practise it in a safe environment so that it becomes part of your regular behaviour. I say to people, you never kind of stop developing your soft skills, you never stop learning. So you have to kind of commit to constantly reviewing what skills you have and where you can improve.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:07):
Kim, that was absolutely great. That was Kim Tasso, prolific author, and her latest books are Better Business Relationships and Essential Soft Skills for Lawyers. And I do thoroughly recommend her videos with props where she explains how soft skills and emotional intelligence works. Kim Tasso, thank you very much for coming on.

Kim Tasso, Tutor (17:25):
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Announcer (17:27):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:35):
My next guest is Neil Wilkins, owner of Viper Marketing, and he's going to talk to us about personal branding. Neil, I know this is something you're an expert on, so can we start with what is the difference between personal branding and normal branding?

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (17:49):
Yeah, it's a very interesting question because I think when people think of branding, they think of the big brands, the Microsoft, the Starbucks, the Apples of this world. And obviously there's a huge heritage in terms of the value of having a good brand that people can identify with when they sort of think of a need for a particular product or service. But in lots of ways over the last sort of decade, I guess you could say, we've seen a real proliferation of individuals and smaller organisations, I guess you could say punching above their weight and creating what you might term a personal brand, which is where they can stand up for either particular message or a particular initiative or something that they passionately believe in and then really be identified with that topic. So I think obviously with the huge growth of social media, we've seen this opportunity to make a global footprint, if you like, on a particular message and then create this kind of reputation if you like, around a particular topic.

(18:57):
So there really is an opportunity for everybody to be big and bold and kind of create something that they'll be remembered for.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:05):
You used a word there about create around a particular topic. So does that mean I have to be quite specific about the brand?

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (19:13):
I think when it comes to a personal brand, I mean there is an opportunity obviously to be all things to all people. So in other words, just start talking about yourself or start to make it all about me, me, me. I think the most clear personal brands are where an individual has identified with a topic or with a theme or with something that they might be particularly good at, but that actually adds some real value to their audience, their listeners, their fans, their followers, however you want to term it. And I think when that narrows down to one thing, it becomes really clear and that person can almost sort of own that topic. I mean, in a business sense, we call it thought leadership. I don't think necessarily we have to be talking about thought leadership in this sense, but I think having some real clarity over the value that you're bringing and almost kind of identifying really your kind of reason for living, your reason for being at the centre of all of this and saying, "Look, here's the biggest thing I can offer to the world.

(20:19):
Let me now share that. Let me have that as part of this kind of personal offering, if you like, and see if we can kind of create a message, a theme, or a brand around that.

Kiran Kapur, Host (20:30):
" Does a personal brand have to be authentic? I mean, does it have to be me or me plus or me trying to put something onto the world? How does personal branding work?

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (20:41):
Yeah, no, that's a really good question because I think anybody who listens to any of the things that I share would know that I'm very much about authenticity. I think what we'll see in this sense is that if you try and push the boundaries too far, if you try and be something that you're not, if you try and almost fool the audience into thinking that you're bigger than you are or that you're sort of more important than you think you are, they'll see through it very, very quickly. And of course the ownership of the brand and how you're perceived is actually in the audience's mind. It's not actually in what you're saying, it's what they're hearing. And I think that's a fundamental sort of skill to those who really sort of made this thing work for them is that they really understand the audience so they know that the audience is going to be not looking to trip them up and not looking for them to fail, but actually being quite sort of openly critical over the things, but critical in a positive way to help them grow.

(21:42):
So I think if you try to fool your audience, if you're not authentic, it gets spotted and shared very, very quickly and that is the surefire way of this thing not working. So I think the fundamental building block of this is you have to have at the core something that's really honest and true because you will be found out if you don't.

Kiran Kapur, Host (22:05):
I think there's always a slight worry in that. And we've talked with some other contributors about the little critic that sits on your shoulder that never sends anything nice to yourself. So could you be sitting there thinking, "But what if I got to personally brand or why would anybody want to listen to me or, but what happens if my authentic self just isn't very likeable?"

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (22:25):
Yeah, it is interesting and I think a lot of people almost don't get started on this journey because they think, "Well, I have to have something really significant to share." In other words, if I'm not the next big thing, nobody's going to care. There are a lot of commentators on this subject and one I really advocate and listen to a lot and I know a lot of people listening to this will know of him is Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V is his social media handle and he talks a lot about this thing of documenting. So when you're creating your personal brand, you're actually documenting your world and your life. So you don't necessarily have to have this next big thing, this next kind of trending topic to be talking about. You can actually just document your authenticity. So maybe you're setting up a new business or maybe you've got this sort of side hustle that you're trying to sort of evolve into a business and documenting the journey of that can be very, very powerful because it has that authenticity to it.

(23:30):
It has that kind of feel of being real and I think again, this is something which can bring huge value is that when people can identify with your personal brand, by storytelling and documenting your journey and it is warts and all, this is not about putting a perfect gloss on something. This is very much about the real life experience. So if you don't come up with something and you think, "No, I need to have a personal presence in social or on my website. I want to create a bit of a noise around something." You don't have to be looking for perfection. You don't have to be thinking that if I don't have a key unique theme, nobody's going to listen. People are fundamentally interested in your story. Now you might think, "Well, I haven't really got a story to tell, but you got up this morning, you did some stuff this morning, you talked to people, you went somewhere, you experienced something." And what somebody like Gary V, and there are others who would share this same sort of sentiment if you like, what they will say is share that, share how you felt about that moment, about that experience because that in itself can help people to identify with you and that is one way of kind of building this authentic reputation, which really is at the core of personal branding.

Kiran Kapur, Host (24:49):
And is personal branding something that's really important for careers? I think a lot of people are currently, current situation, very worried about careers and employment and perhaps finding a next role. So is having a personal brand going to help you with that?

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (25:03):
I think there's an argument that says if you don't have any kind of personal brand, you're not even in the game. And I think a lot of employers, as we know, will be using social media, particularly the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook to critique whether or not you have, I guess you could say, enough presence in your market or in your sector or in your discipline. And so without any kind of digital footprint, as I call it, because of course a lot of this is going to manifest in a digital space I think without any kind of footprint, without any kind of clear style, if you like, and without any clear tone of voice, I don't think you're even in the game. I mean, a CV is a small part of that kind of selection process and a lot of people will be secure in great positions and will be getting onto the radar of significant decision makers without even a CV changing hands.

(26:01):
So I think this is something that can be almost the precursor to opening up new opportunities. And so I feel quite sort of passionately that people who can create this are really getting those first sort of steps ahead of the competition. And it was quite interesting because as I sort of described this, I just think of some advice I gave my daughters when they were actually in their early teens. I said, "Look, I know that you're not kind of looking for jobs now, but you're doing things that can start to build a profile. And you don't have to be out there doing everything every day and sort of sharing everything that you do. " But what I was encouraging them to do at the time was when they were doing their work experience and little internships and just getting a little bit of experience around the kind of roles that they wanted in their early teens, just exploring and experimenting.

(26:52):
They were logging it and journaling it and now their CVs are kind of almost going before them and opening up opportunities that wouldn't have been there. I've kind of seen that from a very sort of evolutionary process if you like. So I think it's really, really important.

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:08):
So one of the areas I know you talk about a lot is how to use LinkedIn. I'd like to sort of explore that a bit further because I think a lot of us are worried about our LinkedIn profiles and you are very clear that a LinkedIn profile is a lot more than a CV. But I think most of us, I'm definitely guilty of this, just shove up a CV on LinkedIn and assume job is done.

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (27:31):
I think the way that LinkedIn over recent months, and it really is recent months, probably the last sort of 12 months or so, has evolved in itself and what it offers to us all is that it's really reflecting exactly what you've just said there, which is a need for us to hopefully if you could say a showcase really of who we are and what we do. So this isn't, as you say, just the CV. I mean, we need that base detail. So it is, where was I in 2012? What was I doing in 2017? What kind of value was I bringing to the world in that particular job? And of course, all of those things are there as are the things like the recommendations and testimonials. So all of that kind of traditional core stuff that you would see from a professional sense and certainly LinkedIn has grown over the years on that basis.

(28:23):
But I think for me, the real difference now that is being really fostered by some of the features that come through LinkedIn and I would always put, from a professional sense, I would always put LinkedIn right at the heart of this personal branding exercise if you like, is this idea of sort of showcasing the day to day. So there's a nice new feature in LinkedIn now, which is within your profile. The opportunity to showcase two or three things, those might be links to maybe your podcast or your Twitter feed, or maybe if you've just created a new personal website, it gives you the opportunity to kind of highlight those over and above the core kind of CV and sort of job description details that we would be expecting. So this to me allows us to differentiate and one of the ways that we differentiate on LinkedIn is to be relatively active.

(29:17):
I think if you expect LinkedIn to deliver your personal brand for you and once you've actually created your profile, you sit there and you wait and the tumbleweed rolls past and you think, "It's not working." Nobody's approaching me, nobody's viewing. Well, that is because you're not being active. So one of the things that LinkedIn is very keen to do, and of course this shares everything that we're talking about within building a personal brand is the active engagement and really using something like LinkedIn to help with the storytelling. Now, I'm not saying you have to be on there twenty four seven even necessarily every day, this is all about blending LinkedIn and other social networks are available, but blend Bringing that into your day-to-day activity such that you go on there for developing your profile, you go on there to see whether there's business development opportunities.

(30:10):
You go on there to listen to what are the hot topics that are trending and what people are discussing. You go on there to look at the groups where people are talking about themes that you can listen to and learn from. So it's a real two-way flow of information now and I think it's a huge opportunity for people looking to develop a personal brand because it's as much about the listening as it is about the sharing. So you use LinkedIn now to engage and have conversations. So huge opportunity if you're looking to make those first few steps to creating this brand profile.

Kiran Kapur, Host (30:45):
So I was looking at your LinkedIn profile this morning and I noticed that you've got a lot of visual elements on there. So there's photos, you use a WordCloud in fact and you've got links to a number of things that are in different types of media. I presume that's something you would recommend.

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (31:07):
I think it's really important to have different types of media in there. I mean, there are an increasing number of features available in there. And I think if you just rely on the written word, I mean you could argue, well, that's very kind of old school and sort of yesterday. I mean, we still need the written word, but I would always say that the old adage, a picture paints a thousand words, is that with the speed of processing, the speed of with which people are going to actually be looking at your profile, scanning through your timeline, scanning through the documents that you've shared, it is about trying to hook them in to a consistent theme. And of course we can use images and we can use video clips to do that. And I think the fact that LinkedIn now offers you the opportunity to put in links, to put in images, to have little video clips, to supplement the words that you write.

(31:59):
I think it's make the most of all of those features. You don't have to have nowadays a standalone website. If you're publishing a lot of content to build your personal brand, it probably is nice to have that as a hub. So I have one number of people obviously do have those, but you can actually do all of that for free in something like LinkedIn. They're so fully featured now that you can actually consider it almost like your own website within LinkedIn. So it is vitally important to think of all those different media styles because again, you don't know quite who's going to arrive and it might be somebody who loves consuming images or they might love consuming video clips. So making sure that you've almost sort of hooked them in on their terms rather than yours is vitally important.

Kiran Kapur, Host (32:46):
And you have a rule, a rule of thirds for LinkedIn.

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (32:49):
I do have a rule of thirds. This is something I've been evangelising for years and years and years. And I would always encourage everybody looking to build, well, a brand both professionally and personally to use a correct, I guess you could say, balance of the type of things that you're going to be talking about as you build your brand presence and obviously increase this engagement that we've been talking about. So the rule of thirds itself talks about personal point and promote. Okay. It's basically breaking down your style of content into sort of three categories, personal point and promote. So with personal, that is getting to know you. So one third of the content should be not overt selling of anything like that, not signposting to anybody else, but just getting to know you. And this is really obviously an important part of this whole documenting the journey.

(33:48):
So there'll be lots of things that you can share in terms of a consistent way of helping your audience to understand who you are, your values, the things that really excite you, the things that you know you bring to the world. It's not selling, but it's kind of helping them to make the decision as to whether or not to connect, follow, like, or engage with you. So that's one third of the content that you share. One third of the content also is what we call point and this is signposting to content that is relevant to the audience that helps to build the story around you. So this is third party content. So it's things that maybe have stopped you in your tracks, a good article. You might have watched a great video, you might have learned something and you want to share that onwards. So if you feel that it adds value to either the theme or the brand that you're creating, but it's not created by you, you can then what we might turn say retweet it or repost it.

(34:46):
And that's a really, really important part of your overall balance of content because this is the third of your content that makes you unpredictable. The worst thing you can be in any kind of digital marketing, digital communication is predictable. As soon as you're predictable, people switch off. So the beauty of that middle third is that people don't quite know what's coming next. So it's about adding value in a kind of a surprising way or not necessarily a shocking way, but it just piques their attention and their interests and it's like, oh, wasn't quite expecting that, but that's interesting. Or, oh, that's amusing or that's engaging or that's educational and really helpful. So it's about fueling the content by using other people's content. So again, it's very much part of building this community. And then the final third is promote and this is where you can overtly sell the product or service or message that you have.

(35:44):
Now a lot of people say, "Well, if you're using social media, you shouldn't really be selling in social media." And the reason they're getting it wrong is because they're not doing the previous two thirds. So it's really important to take a look back over maybe the last 30 things that you posted and see what kind of balance you have. Ideally it's one third personal, one third pointing and one third promoting.

Kiran Kapur, Host (36:05):
Neil Wilkins, that was a very helpful overview of personal branding and particularly some great tips there on how to use LinkedIn. If you would like to get more information from Neil, you can go to his podcast, which is at anchor.fm/neilkins and I'm off to update what I now see as a very sad looking LinkedIn profile. Neil, thank you very much for your time.

Neil Wilkins, Tutor (36:28):
You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure.

Announcer (36:30):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.

Kiran Kapur, Host (36:39):
That's your lot for today. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast so that you're alerted to it every Friday when the next episode is released. And talking for the next episode, next week we are looking at networking old versus new.