Humanizing Social: Creating a People to People Brand | Marcel Molenaar, LinkedIn | OnBrand '16

thank you very much with a wonderful introduction yeah so as I said great to be here after being stuck in this banner for like six to eight weeks I've seen myself grow all over the over the place and and so today I'm here to share with you a little bit about let's say underlying factors that we see in the world of branding and b2b branding and so again we're in this wonderful place where actually the very first brands of the world were being traded so it's it's a excellent choice my binder to be here and so and I want to start with actually with this word when people when people ask me to share with them a little bit about LinkedIn I mean it can go all sorts of ways and so usually there's no end to it so I take it I can take quite some time which I know is a little bit of a challenge as we're pressed for time so I pull up this word and its success and what I really like about this word is that it sums up actually what we are trying to do on a day to day basis for our audience is to make them more successful and so by show of hands so who here has a LinkedIn profile so for those in the front everyone raises their hands and who has been there this week on LinkedIn all of the hands go up great so and in fact this is this is a little attest a testament to that is that and I won't ask you individually why you go to but usually you go there to be more successful and it's also really a nice way of describing to my children actually what I do all day because like many of you we all have now titles that didn't exist I think I'm at five or ten years ago and so when they ask me what I do all day at LinkedIn I say I try to make people more successful and this is actually what I'm doing right now what I'm trying to do right now and there's another thing that's interesting about it and that is that success is something that we all strive for and it's all within all of us and to be successful you can actually not do it by yourself you need a network you need other people to be successful and so this is also a very important tenant of the word success and so you know without doing without all of the product pitch and all the great stuff you can do on our platform this is actually what we're all about - trying to make make you more successful now switching gears a little bit and I was able to be up here and look at look at the audience a little bit but I'm still gonna do it anyway it's you know if you look at the diversity of people and I tend to let's say look back a little I asked myself so who remembers this game actively playing this game by raise of hands by actively playing you're all liars you're all liars you all know the game so don't worry it was it was able stay in the field but actually so this is the game of pong and it was released by Atari in any one or the year 80s it's in 1972 1972 this was like the biggest thing in gaming now switch a little bit to FIFA 17 my 9 year old son plays FIFA 17 I mean I can't even hold the controller right so in 1972 this this game came out and it was the biggest thing and I think two years after when it really spread to other parts of the world and it wasn't a connected world like now I was actually playing this game so those people that raised their hand that actually actively played this game back then I want to welcome you all because you are all digital immigrants you are not digital natives you know of a world when this still existed and nothing was connected and there was no the world out there and so by being here another congratulations because actually you were able to shift gears over time and stay let's say relevant in in this in this current connected world and so I urge you for that and obviously for myself being here you know it's it's it's quite remarkable and I think many of you have similar experiences I'm working for a company that you know was nowhere near when I graduated from school so it's a completely different it's a completely different time now on another note and I won't ask the raise of hands but this is actually what in the eighties the desk look like and and I want to take you through actually what the desk is has evolved to every single piece of equipment that has been on our desk at least at my desk from the 80s onwards has gone into the computer and actually this is a little bit old now because actually it has gone into the smartphone and so now even your brand has gone into the smartphone your brand has become digital and so you see all of those little icons all over the place and now finally they're all in one place so it's a remarkable world enter the Millennial age group because in my opinion this is truly transforming the world in a very fast pace and this is really what we are why you constantly hear about this is that this is a profound impact on how you work with your brand and how you maintain relevancy by 20 20 50 percent of the Millennials 50 percent of the workforce will be Millennials and in that year there will there there's entering people in the workforce that have never known a world without a connected smartphone so it's it's if you think of those if you think of those numbers that's truly mind changing and the reason why a lot of brands and a lot of companies have a little bit of a struggle in the in the current connected world it's because the brand is no longer a property which just solely belongs to you as Scott Cook said it's no longer what we say it is it's what consumers and people's tell each other what it is and this is very scary this is very scary because other people start to give meaning to your brand and start to give value to your brand and it can go on the upside and it can go on the on the downside I've heard you know people say I've gone from hash tag to bash stack right overnight it takes an army of one these days to make that happen so that that's one of that's one of the the first challenging things that we see happening now secondly what you then see is that there's old versus new thinking because this millennial generation they have no respect for the status quo and this can be very frustrating because you know as we expect people to work from their desk this is generation that wants to work mobile I see many Mobile's out here it's not about managing time it's empowering results right actually it's behavior over skills it's fail often and fast instead of fear of failure so try a lot of try a lot of stuff it's open communication instead of top-down and so there's many of these tenants that we see changing currently in the workforce and in the world of marketing and what applies here to employees basically also implies applies to the consumers the consumers out there you could read consumers here so this is an important factor now thirdly this is one of my favorite quotes and I'm pretty sure some of you have seen it it's a culture has become the most defining underlying part of success and culture eats strategy for breakfast culture eats strategy for breakfast and the funny thing is that we are all part of a culture and we are all contributing actively to a culture whether it's a good one or a bad one either in the office or in our personal lives the more culture you have in an organization the less corporate BS you need you don't need a lot of rules if you have a strong culture and maybe you recognize this and to give you a little example of this for you guys on the right hand side is Brian Chesky of Airbnb in 2013 this is how they started and in a way I will get to that's a very humanized Brent it's because actually what can get more personal than sleeping at someone out someone's place that's not yours right and he wrote an article a blog a piece that said don't mm-hmm up the culture I know this is being filmed right and never know where it's going so and that was a very interesting thought because into into 12 when they finish their Series C funding and they had Peter to come over one of their investors and then when they were in Berlin in a conference room and they shared a lot of data data points and a lot of progress on to because obviously you know people give you money and you want to show progress and you want to show points and then halfway through the meeting actually Brian Chesky asked Peter Thiel so what is the single most important piece of advice you actually want to give us as today in 212 was that and he said don't mm-hmm up the culture and what he meant by that is that as you will grow and as you will get more stakeholders and as you will serve more people the stronger you remain in your culture and the more you can have these cultural tenants the stronger your company will be because ultimately if you grow and if you become a large company and maybe in our careers one day of the other we have been there it's almost inevitable that what I would call you get your fair share of idiots on board right those are people that are along for the right those are people that want to take instead of gift and I can guarantee you as long as you can keep them out the door the more successful your company will be so the culture is a very important thing now of course it's not just saying you have a culture and that's that you really have to bring those tenants to life that's an that's a very important thing because actually what a recent study of us found is that 66% of the people looking for companies looking for their next play they look for culture they really want to have purpose over profit they really look I mean this starts very much into the the former slides are showed they really want to work for a company and for a cause they truly believe in because in the end of the day and maybe this is an open door but it's not about making the most money and people now start to realize that that's the error we are in and so the better you can surface and show your culture as a brand and as an employer the stronger your organization will be and so these are some of the cultural tenants that that we live by at LinkedIn and that let's say our surfaced all over our 33 offices and among our 11,000 employees and so these are the this is actually what we look for in a cultural fit when people join and also how we stay true to our vision a mission which I'll get to so for instance transformation isn't a very important one so the single most piece of constant factor that we have out there is change and the funny thing is when you confront people with that a lot of time when when people join they say I love change all right I'm all for change I want it I want to change things I want to be in a dynamic environment right well try and seat people let's say a half year after they work somewhere trying seat they're somewhere else in the office only that little thing we don't like change right and it's all these little things so transformation is a very important one and of course collaboration collaborate as I just said you can never be successful on your own you need other people and so the how we operationalize that culture and those values is through this vision it's creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce now why is that so important why is that the people you know love this about the LinkedIn brand and and and and this is why they want to want to work for us it's because it has meaning and it has purpose and it's the single vision around talent in the world is is very democratically distributed all over the world there's talent in each and every one of us but the opportunity to do something with the talent is not at all distributed democratically it still depends very much on where you were born in what circumstances you're on board what country you were born under what regime etc etc and so by platforms of scale we hope ultimately to bring those two much closer together and this is this is a this is a vision this is a purpose actually that drives a lot of the stuff we do on our platform so by show of hands so who here has a one-sentence vision in their company that you know every employee knows and they're and then they live by so I see I see about 25 hands 20 hands and I think this is this is this is the true challenge because often you know this vision and this purpose or the mission it's it's usually saved for the annual report and then it goes in the drawer right and we've seen in the financial industry what can happen you know if the moral compass you know goes astray and people don't live by you know a certain culture or certain mission and values no longer and so this is also why it's very important because we ask um Zoomers now expect companies you know to not only have that strong culture but have a meaningful culture because consumers they look for value but citizens they live in meaning and we are all now citizens and especially in the social environment that we are so this is why that's very important so how we bring that to life is last week at Ellen's connect we launched our new company page and our new career page and there's many ways you come in which you can bring that to life so I would encourage you to look up some of these companies this is one example uber where they actually show you know the biggest question of people is what does it really like to work there and this is actually how you can show that so let's say away from just the job specifics now it ties very very nicely into personal branding because as we all sit here personal branding is very very much part of our of our lives and we we are all still learning it but the generation behind us is not even learning it it's just a normal state of doing I mean if you look at how you know these young people present themselves on social media whether it's Instagram or Facebook or you know fine you know it's all it's all some form of personal branding and when people ask me what what personal branding is I usually say so what it is what is it that I find of you when I google your name so what does it say about you what do I find around your person similar by the way to companies and another thing obviously is that you all know this phrase right it's not what you know it's no that's wrong it's who knows you let's become much more important it's not so much who you know it's who knows you and what you stand for and so we have a we have a tremendous array of tools on our platform to to to stand out and to present yourself and not only from an employee perspective but also from a professional level and the representation you are for your company ever anyone seen this one on our platform paper she some nuts yeah anyone wondering if you can get a fool a lot of people they email me and said how do I get this fool well a little secret you can't so this is a little bit of gamification of course the reason why this is is this is really very much also a part of our current culture nothing is ever done nothing is ever perfect so actually your brand your personal brand your employer brand your company brand it takes constant taking care of so it's something that you constantly have to work on and so this is also very much in a new generation a thing that we see with a lot of people is that they say well it's better done than perfect so why go for the last 5% if you can do 95 percent great so this is what that ties into so when you have that when you have that strong culture and and you bring that to life and you have and and and you enable your people to work with a professional brand then something that is usually overlooked when it comes to marketing and social media is that basically you are overlooked because employee engagement is really a factor that hardly comes into play when companies start to engage with the world at large so they usually look over their employees for stakeholders instead of empowering their current employees to help them with that in fact in a recent study witnessed we did internally only 5% of the social media content of the company is shared by the employees in their own networks 95% is the terror clown right or is the cats maybe in a trump video I mean there's a lot of other stuff out there so this is a very important factor when it comes to to to brand your story and your and your message over social media is to look for that you already have a lot of brand ambassadors in your company so who loves who here loves the company they work for yes right right I I still see people sitting there like not me right so this is a very famous quote of simon Sinek so it's really important you know if you didn't raise your hand you're in the wrong profession or you're at the wrong maybe a right profession but in the wrong company and maybe you want to look for something else but this is really important because we as myself for LinkedIn and you for your organizations you are the true brand ambassadors and everything you say you do etc etc so it's very important to keep that in mind you know when when you know instead of just looking at the outside you also look at the inside so what it goes to show is that it's great it's a great way to empower your people to become social professionals and to help them and to have programs in place to make them become better at being a social professional I never understand this whole discussion of companies when it says yeah you know I blocked a couple of channels in my organization because people are on social media and they should do that in their own time right so I never understand why people would take that away let's say of their employees and the professionals they work with as it has such a tremendous impact on what they do and in fact their stats showing that if you don't do that but you do the opposite and you and you incentivize them you're almost 60 percent more likely to attract great because you have an open culture and you able them to share your culture and your able them to share the great things you do as a company and on all sorts of other metrics it has had a tremendous effect and so we've seen many companies devise special strategies to employee engagement you know it's part of their onboarding when they when they join the company you know you have profile photo sessions you work in small workshop where you set your professional brand it's all these different ways you can you can utilize our platform and and and really you know make make the people that work for your brand ambassadors so from culture and and the branding and the personal branding there's also another underlying factor which we all recognize is that we're currently in the human era and the human era is the era actually if you go back in you know starting somewhere in 1900 you know you had the the era of manufacturing so yet these huge companies like Boeing and forth and they were like huge manufacturers and then became then came the age of distribution so Walmart is a very good example who became very good in distribution on a global scale and then we got the Information Age started about in the 80s into the 90s information age the Internet age and then since about 2000 we switch to the to the human era and human era is basically an era where a company acts and speaks much more like a human that they used to so what makes a human a human error company is basically the question and I have some examples later on so it's companies that actually you know speak as a consumer would speak they are not afraid to admit their faults they're not afraid to switch back if they made an error I remember Reed Hastings of Netflix getting up on a press conference when he changed the subscription model he lost about thousand subscribers to his DVD service he got up on stage and he said sorry I screwed up we'll change it and double the amount came back when when Tim Cook did the same thing with Apple music and the artist he said sorry we got it wrong we'll change it back this is a very very important part of being a human error company it's also the ability to let people have a glimpse of what's behind the curtain so through openness and the funny thing is being a social company being a social organization is not something you can sprinkle on after the fact because if you do that you know we're all smart enough to see what is a campaign and what is truly driven by purpose and culture right I mean and my children aged 14 and 9 when they when they when they when they're on YouTube all day and they see that also they can they can exactly spot what is a campaign is trying to sell something to them or what is really true meaning so it becomes even more and more important in the coming years so now what I'm trying to say is so successful social media is about people and it's not about technology is about the exchange of engagement and ideas between people that's a very important thing so I have an example anyone know what this is anyone have kids Yeah right you have kids anyone with kids yeah anyone know what this figurine is what's it called a Ninjago actually to be more specific it's a it's a J set X Jane set X Ninjago it comes it's part of a kit you actually think it's hard to buy separate you have to buy it in a kit okay so Lego actually this is a great example of being a human error because what happened here little David from England bought that kit from all and saved up money and I can relate because I see my children saving money and he bought that kit and he lost this little figurine and his dad said well maybe you should write a short email to leggo explaining that you lost it and so we did and he brought the email he said I'm very sorry you know I was at Sainsbury and I lost it and you know my dad said I should send it so the representative of leggo that received that email said well actually I spoke to my boss and I'm not allowed to give you a new one as you admitted that you lost it sorry but I spoke to sensei rule which is one of the other figurines in the box right and since a rue is a very powerful and wise men and since I wish that no army of mine can go without to jzx and so in fact here you will fight in two weeks time you'll find an envelope with J Z X in it together with a couple of other figurines to make your army complete again and now you can conquer the world and this I want you to remind you of this like speaking and acting as a human and we see all of these examples all over anyone everyone knows the company cool-blue right have you ever seen that they that they send handwritten cards if something really goes wrong it's that simple right I know of restaurants that have vouchers in the back pocket that they say to the employees if it really goes wrong we'll let it up to your decision you just give the voucher and they don't have to pay for the meal and it's all of these little things where you empower individuals and organizations to do right when no one's looking and you see what happens and not only online never ever seen this one so in this restaurant you can order a bandit plate so if you have children if you have children you recognize this you go to a restaurant they have all these beautiful stuff on the menu but your kids they don't know what to choose or they don't see anything to choose and so what the restaurant says is just order the bandit plate it's zero zero euros and you can just steal food from your parents now it's a very small gesture but it can have such a tremendous impact of being a human error company of understanding as I just said why citizens live in meaning set of value and so I never understand this whole discussion about you know can I get the water for free at a restaurant do I have to pay for the restroom it's always ridiculous things that we've grown up with that we we kind of find normal which is not normal at all and not normal to the people now you know entering the workforce and people that that are now coming of age so and there's many I I advise you to have a look for these examples and every time you see one of those I collect them a little bit in in a little folder I say yeah this is you this is a human error company so and to let you lean on little secret and I have to after go sorry to let you in on a little secret so not that I'm inviting you but I I'm I'm having people sometimes call me on my cell because they lost their password okay and they're surprised that I can fix it for them even to so I mean because you know customer service of course is not a department it's an attitude that's very important so it's your brand human now I'm not sure if you can take notes but this presentations will be shared afterwards but I mean is it hard to read or each a real person do you still send those emails which say don't reply please don't reply click on a link but don't reply I don't know why you know can you can you can you say sorry so and this is one of one of the other famous quotes that I really like is that we are now in the age of counting the impressed and not the impressions for those of you that have been in all I marketing a little longer you know how we used to count let's say the impressions and the clicks it's not about that it's the impressed the impressed can make a tremendous difference for your brand as you saw in the foregoing Lego example so on a closing thought understand Lee very famous Minister is that that's another advice if if you are surrounded by people you know that are constantly adhering to the status quo and you have no diversity there and eventually you'll be surrounded by people that have nothing to say so that's also a very important thing to keep in mind now summing it all up this is actually what we show and a lot of people that come into our company is we say you know to sum up everything we do in our culture and everything we do as a brand is we dream big we get shit done and we know how to have fun and I thank you very much for your time you