LinkedIn Strategies and Leadership Tips to Master Personal Branding with Richard Bliss
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Description
If you want to have a strong personal brand and strive for continued branding and business success, you must have a willingness to learn new things and adapt to new technology. That’s what makes Richard Bliss’s understanding of modern communication tools like AI and LinkedIn so unique.
Richard is the CEO of BlissPoint Consulting and one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. With decades of knowledge from the world of marketing and sales, he’s a personal branding master who has presented in over 20 countries. His book Digital-First Leadership is full of real-life stories, first-hand research, and countless insightful conversations aimed at helping business leaders master social media and build their online presence.
In this episode of the Branding Room Only podcast, you’ll learn about the challenges of selling the concept of personal branding to executives, how generative AI is changing everything, and why treating LinkedIn like other platforms is a mistake. Richard will teach you how to strategically use LinkedIn for professional growth and brand-building success.
Chapters
00:55 - How Richard defines personal branding, describes himself, reveals how he created his mantra, and names his hype music
7:37 - Why Richard had to adapt to new environments and find commonality with others as a kid
11:49 - How Richard had to reinvent himself for success after getting fired from his Chief Marketing Officer job
22:09 - Challenges of selling personal branding to executives in increasingly diverse workspaces
29:35 - How generative AI is impacting society and whether to embrace or turn away from it
35:24 - How AI can connect the dots, perform a function faster, and even uncover a weakness in your competition
41:02 - How LinkedIn is fundamentally different than all the other social media platforms (and therefore, requires a different approach)
49:48 - The secret to audience engagement and brand building on LinkedIn
56:08 - What you’ll never find Richard doing in his business and the magic he brings to other people
Connect With Richard Bliss
Richard Bliss is the founder of BlissPoint Consulting, a social media consulting company that helps improve executives’ online communications and sales teams’ social selling behaviors. As a LinkedIn Top Voices Influencer, experienced executive communications manager, and social media coach, Richard has helped thousands of people master social media tools and become fluent in social conversations.
Through 1:1 executive coaching and in-depth team training, his systems increase and improve your business, whether you lead a Fortune 500, a startup, or a department within an organization. You’ll develop an authentic voice and engage with others online, and in process, set yourself apart from others in your industry, design a strategic vision with your team, and create a true culture of Social Selling.
BlissPoint Consulting | LinkedIn
Mentioned In LinkedIn Strategies and Leadership Tips to Master Personal Branding with Richard Bliss
Digital-First Leadership by Richard Bliss
“How to Navigate Generational Friction in the Workplace with Chris De Santis”
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Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by PGE Consulting Group LLC.
PGE Consulting Group LLC is dedicated to providing a practical hybrid of professional development training and diversity solutions. From speaking to consulting to programming and more, all services and resources are carefully tailored for each partner. Paula Edgar’s distinct expertise helps engage attendees and create lasting change for her clients.
To learn more about Paula and her services, go to www.paulaedgar.com or contact her at info@paulaedgar.com, and follow Paula Edgar and the PGE Consulting Group LLC on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Paula Edgar: Welcome to The Branding Room Only Podcast where we share career stories, strategies, and lessons learned on how industry leaders and influencers have built their personal brands. Now, let's get started with the show.
Hi, everyone, it's Paula Edgar, host of Branding Room Only where we talk to experts and influencers about how they built their personal brand. Today I'm super excited because we're going to be talking with Richard Bliss, who's the CEO of BlissPoint and author of DigitalFirst Leadership.
He's a master of personal and professional branding, having presented in 22 countries around. He continues to share his knowledge from decades of leadership in marketing and in sales. Richard, welcome to the Branding Room.
Richard Bliss: Paula, thanks for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.
Paula Edgar: Awesome. I'm so excited to get into this. The first question for you is, how do you define a personal brand?
Richard Bliss: It can go all over the place and we hear people talk about it all the time, but often an easy way is, what do people say about you when people ask? I work with executives and sometimes I'll ask them, “Okay, these previous companies, if I went back and asked them to give me one word to describe you, what would it be?”
Oftentimes that's your personal brand, how that comes across, how people perceive you, or how other people tell other people about you and that's oftentimes where that brand comes from. It can involve our clothes, it can involve our work but oftentimes it involves our attitude and our person, our identity, and how people associate that with us, so that's where I go with that.
Paula Edgar: I love that except I was like, “One word. Oh, my God.” Well, let me go ahead and put this to the test. Describe yourself in three words or short phrases.
Richard Bliss: Probably, one is generosity. I am known for—and my team thinks it's a little too much—but being generous, being generous with my knowledge, with my time, and sharing, it's something.
Also, I had somebody tell me, I had two people independently in one week, in different parts of the country say, "Richard, you're one of the most goal-oriented people I've ever met.” I was like, “Really?” This was two unrelated people in the same week. I was like, “Nice.” Okay, so goal-oriented appears to be that.
Then you use the term as we first got started, to be blissed. I have people who have used that term. It generally means—I didn't know if it was a good word or a bad word when somebody told it to me the first time—but it generally means getting things done and actually finding ways to get things done. Those were not short descriptions, but I'm going to go with those.
Paula Edgar: Oh, listen, I'll take them. A funny thing is that my listeners and viewers know that I pick a word of the year every year. My word of the year this year is joy. Bliss is aligned with that.
Richard Bliss: Absolutely.
Paula Edgar: I'll take it for branding mine.
Richard Bliss: I wanted to have one of my daughters named Joy-Ann because it would be Joy-Ann Bliss.
Paula Edgar: Oh, let's just call her that anyway. That is an awesome name. That would be an awesome name.
Richard Bliss: That would be an awesome name.
Paula Edgar: It's all good, and somebody else can steal that if their last name is Bliss, feel free. Okay, do you have a favorite quote or mantra?
Richard Bliss: I do, and it's something I developed working with leaders, but it applies to everybody, particularly now, because I deal with a lot of senior leaders. The quote I use is, “Your inability to master a modern communication tool calls into question your ability to lead a modern organization.”
If an executive is like, “Well, I'm not really on social,” really? What is that? “I don't know what a hashtag is.” Really? “Oh, I'm not really using AI.” Really? The doubt creeps into the mind of the people you're leading because you don't seem to have cared about the very things that are important to them, particularly communication., that's where that quote comes from.
I created that quote when I was working with a senior leader and he was responsible for $6 billion of annual revenue. We were in a very small room and he said, "Why in the world should I be on social media?" Those words came out of my mouth. I said, “Your inability to master this 21st-century communication tool calls into question your ability to lead this 21st-century organization.” You know how somebody's eyes dilate when, yeah, they're that close, if pupils dilated, I was like, “Oh, I'm going to get fired right now.”
Paula Edgar: Well, first of all, that's definitely going to be one of our clips. But it is so true. When I talk to my clients about growth mindset and their need to want to continue to iterate and that your brand is not a static thing, that has to do in particularly with how we, embrace is a big word, at least, acknowledge and try to understand. Embrace is the next standard. I want y'all to embrace it too, but to that end as someone who is still working on my way over to TikTok slowly, I understand.
But resistance to those things is definitely what you're saying. Wow, that's such a great quote. Okay, well, do you have a hype song? This is the song when they're going to get full Richard Bliss, a blissed experience that's playing in your head. Or, if you're having a terrible day and you need to not be in a terrible day with a song you're playing. It could be the same song or a different song.
Richard Bliss: Well, the hype song that I have listened to for decades, Katrina And The Waves, Walking on Sunshine.
Paula Edgar: Oh, that would have been called [inaudible].
Richard Bliss: It's a high beat, got it going, talking about that relationship. I used to think that. Now that I know. I recently got married five years ago, and at my wedding, I sang Eric Hutchinson's, oh, now I forgot it, oh, I can't remember. Now I'm going to have to go look it up. But that's one that I actually shocked my family and everything because I sang that to my wife at our wedding.
Paula Edgar: I hope you don't think I'm going to let that go, so you can sing?
Richard Bliss: No. Now while it was charming at my wedding, my wife has grown so tired of my singing. I sing all the time, all the time. Can I sing? No. Do I sing? Absolutely. I sing all the time and she hates it.
One, I have five daughters and they grew up knowing that dad doesn't know the words to any of the songs. I'm lyric deaf. It's called lyric deaf. I'm lyric deaf. I'll just make them up. It drives her nuts. No, I can't sing.
Paula Edgar: Wow. Well, first of all, it's a love language, even if it's not wanted. It brings you joy and you want to share it.
Richard Bliss: Yeah, it brings me joy, doesn't bring her joy. But, you know what's interesting is one of my daughters at my wedding reached out to Eric Hutchinson, and he did a video recording to me and sang the song that I sang at my wedding.
He sang it back to me that my daughter reached out to him and said, "My dad is getting married and your song is his theme." It was way cool. I'm just going to tell you, it was way cool. Now I can't remember the song. I'll have to look it up.
Paula Edgar: That is so awesome though. I love that. All right, so tell me this. Where did you grow up? How did that shape your brand?
Richard Bliss: How much time do we have? Okay, we've got time. I went to 14 schools between kindergarten and the sixth grade.
Paula Edgar: Wow.
Richard Bliss: I went to six schools in three different states from September of the sixth grade to April of the sixth grade, six schools in three states. My parents were not in the military. Every few weeks, we were packing up the car, my mother, my brother, and I. I showed up at six different schools as a new kid. Being a new kid in school is tough.
Doing it six times in one school year, and doing it 14 times in six school years causes you to adapt. There are some survival skills that kick in. One, read a room. Two, find commonality with people as quickly as possible. Everybody wants to fit in. I was always the new kid.
I also discovered that there's no such thing as common knowledge. There's local knowledge. Because when I was a kid in Alaska, and then I'm a kid in Minnesota on a pig farm, I'm a one-room cabin in Alaska, outside Fairbanks, Alaska, or I'm in a pig farm in Minnesota, or I'm living in a tiny little farming community near Spokane, Washington, or I'm in Eastern, Western one in Olympia, Washington, wherever that might be, the local knowledge was perceived as common knowledge, but it wasn't because people think way different where you show up.
Paula Edgar: So many questions from that. Number one, I'm giving you my empathy pieces. I have a sixth grader right now and it's terrible when you're in one school. Six different schools, I can't even imagine. But the impetus around the move, was it agriculturally based? What was going on? I heard farm and pigs, what was the reason for the moving?
Richard Bliss: My mother was married five times by the time she was 30. It was new husbands.
Paula Edgar: You know what? I had a feeling you were fascinating, but here we are, in the fascination. Wow.
Richard Bliss: Wow is right. Those were new husbands, new families, new grandparents, and new siblings. When people talk about Christmas traditions, I didn't have a Christmas tradition because every year I had a different family tradition, whether it was a farming community in Minnesota and then religion, each one of those dads was a different religion.
You started to this one, an appreciation for diversity because you get to see how other people think and you get to see an appreciation for how people have in common, but the differences make us so unique and interesting.
When you say, “Where am I from?” I usually say, “I'm from Washington state.” I was born in Washington state. My mother was born there. Where I was born and where I grew up are radically different, but I graduated high school in Olympia, Washington.
Paula Edgar: Wow. It's why I asked the question, “Where did you grow up and how did it shape your brand?” Because asking where you're from, I'm just going to answer the question, Brooklyn. That's it.
Richard Bliss: There you go.
Paula Edgar: Right. But there's so much more. I think you probably have the most robust answer in how it shaped your brand, though, because from that, even just hearing it, resilient, it's like the things you said, being able to read a room and to quickly find commonalities and to appreciate diversity, those are core values that lots of adults and leaders that we know don't necessarily have. It's like putting to the fire on that in terms of having to do so. Wow, that is fascinating. Okay, well, tell me about your career journey.
Richard Bliss: Well, how much time do we have? My career journey, I've been in tech for a long time. As my team likes to say since the late 1900s, which is like, "What?" I was like, "Yeah, since the late 1900s. I'm a lot older than I look."
Paula Edgar: Last century?
Richard Bliss: Last century. I started my career in the last century. I've been at tech for a very long time and over the years moved around. I have remarried a couple of times. Not as many times as my mother. She's on husband number seven.
Paula Edgar: Mom's going to be on the podcast. Just throwing it out there.
Richard Bliss: Oh, yeah, Mom's going. But a couple of things happened. One, I was a software executive at an international software company and traveled the world. I've spoken to over 22 countries, having the opportunity just to be around. Then at the pinnacle of my career as a chief marketing officer, I got fired and they gave my job to my wife.
Paula Edgar: Was she your wife when they gave you your job?
Richard Bliss: I knew what the next question was going to be. Yes, talk about awkward.
Paula Edgar: How was your dinner table during that time?
Richard Bliss: But now it's ex-wife.
Paula Edgar: Okay.
Richard Bliss: Because that was the next question. You didn't want to ask it. I know you didn't want to ask it, but you wanted to know.
Paula Edgar: Wow.
Richard Bliss: I lost my job. Now, think about it, I'm traveling the world. I am the face of my industry. I'm the most well-known person around the world, around my area of expertise. All of a sudden, that's been taken away, it's been given to my wife, and I am now in an awkward situation.
Let's suppose somebody's listening and they're in retail and they lose the job, what do they do? They go get another job in retail. If you're a lawyer and suddenly something happens, then you go practice law somewhere else, you move.
In my case, I didn't have anywhere else to go because I was the biggest vendor in my space, I was the most well-known, all my network and two decades of work had been invested in my brand and now suddenly my brand's been taken away. I was like, “Okay, I have to reinvent myself.” I got a little practice at that, reinventing myself.
Paula Edgar: I mean, yes.
Richard Bliss: Right, and it just kept on going. So, here's what I did. I once started a podcast on a topic that I felt was relevant and it happened to be on crowdfunding and Kickstarter. Are you familiar with crowdfunding and Kickstarter?
Paula Edgar: Yeah.
Richard Bliss: At the time, nobody was familiar with it. I was the leading, and only at the time, podcast about Kickstarter. Now we're going to get down to one of your questions about this, but I'm going to jump ahead. Do you want to guess what the largest funding category is on Kickstarter? What do people put money into on Kickstarter or crowdfunding more than any other topic by far?
Paula Edgar: Terrible at quizzes. I don't know, tell me.
Richard Bliss: But you're the one asking me all the questions, I'm asking back. Your audience is probably listening and going, "Oh, say fashion, or maybe technology, or something." Board games, board games. Board games have generated more than $2 billion with a B on Kickstarter alone.
Paula Edgar: I would never have guessed that.
Richard Bliss: Nope, so I happened to be well-known in the board game industry. I started a podcast teaching board game designers how to use crowdfunding to raise money, the podcast was called Funding the Dream. It's still out there. It ran for 350 episodes.
Paula Edgar: Wow, we'll definitely link that.
Richard Bliss: I also wrote a book, but it's not the book that you mentioned. I wrote a book, self-published, and self-edited. That's not a good idea. There are spelling errors on the back cover of that book. That is not a good idea.
But I wrote a book, started a podcast, started teaching myself social media, found a way, generated 25,000 followers on two different Twitter accounts, taught myself LinkedIn, learned from people, and here's what happened.
I got a phone call from somebody who said, "Hey, I'm at this massive tech company and they're looking for someone to come in and help write, basically ghostwrite for a senior executive on Forbes. But this individual needs to be able to write, understand technology, works with executives, live in Silicon Valley, is available immediately, and is willing to do it for $800 a month. Are you interested?” That's a really, really specific requirement.
Paula Edgar: This is a narrow part, yeah.
Richard Bliss: “Are you interested in $800 a month?” I said, “Yes.” Now, remember I lost my job.
Paula Edgar: I was going to say, “Have you got the job back yet?”
Richard Bliss: No, and she wasn't happy because she married a vice president that was traveling the world, and the expense accounts for $800 a month, I think that was probably the final straw that led to this.
Paula Edgar: But she had the expense accounts now.
Richard Bliss: Yeah, it didn't work out anyway. She might be listening. We're not going to mention her name. She might. We better hope that not. Anyway, here's what happened. I said yes and stepped in because the individual executive is from New York. He owns a home that faces Alpha Central Park West, up on the west side. His name is on the side of the building at the business school at the University of Notre Dame. It's called the Mendoza College of Business.
Richard Bliss: Oh, I know who it is.
Paula Edgar: His name is Tom Mendoza. I got to go and work directly with Tom and help work with him as he wanted to put his stories out on Forbes and then I taught him social media, then the salespeople wanted to learn it, and then the CEO wanted to learn it. All of a sudden, I got hired as an employee. I was making more than $800 a month at that point.
All of a sudden, that step, that risk I took of reinventing myself, even though I didn't know where it was going, my instinct said, “It's going to go somewhere good.” When that $800 offer came up, the money wasn't the opportunity. The opportunity was a door open to a world that I normally would have never had access to. This is more than a decade ago.
From that, a series of events happened that allowed me five, six years ago to go out on my own, start a business, work with these same executives, with sales teams, with these companies, helping them understand how to make these transitions, how to become successful, how to build your brand, how to use LinkedIn, how to become of influential in a digital world. Because I had done that path and now I was just going to show people how I'd done it. That's a very, very long answer to how I got here with this career.
Paula Edgar: I'm so happy you said the whole answer because number one, folks, what I pulled from that is that you have to constantly reiterate in terms of your brand, but that was a full brand, a whole.
Richard Bliss: A whole reset.
Paula Edgar: People ask the question all the time, like, "If I've had a ding to my brand, what should I do, Paula?" I'm like, "This is not a ding. This is like, “Bye brand. Come on into this next room. That brand is no longer yours."
I immediately felt like a wrench in my chest. That hurt. It felt scary to me. So, for you to talk about it, obviously, from the other side, I'm sure that that was challenging for you to even think of yourself differently than how you had thought of yourself for such a long time, building up this influence and being the man of our town in this space and then having to figure it out again. I'm in awe.
Richard Bliss: Well, I appreciate that. Then in the middle of this, I got the shocking news that she wanted to divorce. It came out of the blue. Not only was I trying to reinvent myself, but suddenly now I was in the middle of a relationship breakup. There's all kinds of identity and brand things going on here. There's a personal identity. There's professional identity. Am I worthy?
Paula Edgar: Spiritual, value, all the identities lined up. Wow.
Richard Bliss: It was across the board. There you go. Without going into any terrible details, that gives you an idea of what I went through. I find myself today, could I even anticipate that I would have been here? No. Because I couldn't have anticipated what I went through to get here.
That's what we have to think about is that when we're faced with a challenge, a setback, we have to rethink this is an opportunity. Now, I need to set aside my emotions, or hang on, process my emotions, go through them, mature, deal with them, and then figure out, “Okay, I can't just lay here and wallow. What's the next step? What do I need to do?” Sometimes it's the tiniest step. Sometimes it's an $800-a-month job simply because you believe that it'll take you somewhere that you never anticipated.
Paula Edgar: Taking a chance. You know, as a fellow business owner, my own business, all the time I tell people the easiest decision that I ever made was to bet myself. Because I, for the most part, can control my output, my response, et cetera.
While I can't control the market, I can control some things, and having a boss did not allow that. So, wow. That was fascinating. All right. You talked about doing this globally, 22 countries, particularly in the sales space, how has being in all those different places with all these different types of people helped to think about how you approach selling the personal brand aspect to executives? How do you say that this is important for you to have, and then get them on board to start doing it?
Richard Bliss: One is, going back to those survival skills, finding and recognizing where they're at. Where I am, but where are they? Is there a comfort level? What's holding them back? What are they struggling with?
Recognizing and understanding that. One of the biggest challenges that goes on today with executives and the teams that support them is oftentimes the disconnect between, for example, a young woman getting a new job as a social media manager of a large company.
I'm picking young women because oftentimes it is young women who step into that role. This young woman now is being asked to create a piece of social media content for a 50-plus-year-old white male.
Paula Edgar:. Okay, got it.
Richard Bliss: Now this young woman has no experience or ability to speak in the voice of him and he doesn't have the ability to understand how to ask questions to get the answers he needs. For example, this young woman has no idea why he doesn't know what a hashtag is.
She's like, "He doesn't what?" This means if she doesn't know why he doesn't know what a hashtag is, he doesn't know how to ask what it is so that he can get an answer.
I'm using two very stark demographics to draw from this experience. I recently spoke at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego and the room was full of 300 people who are learning and wanting to be at their social media jobs.
Well, they're predominantly young women and oftentimes now young women of color. Yet I know the executives they're supporting, I know those guys and most of the time they're guys and most of the time we know they're white.
That disconnect becomes incredibly important for a young millennial to understand how to talk to an older, boomers have made their way out of the market, mostly, so how do I talk to this Gen Xer leader and the Gen Xer leaders? How do I talk to a Gen Z person?
In my role, I help these two groups. Now we can get away from the stereotypes because now I'm working with women executives, I'm working with leaders of all kinds of backgrounds and they're getting younger and younger and they are more and more diverse.
This means that you need to be aware of cultural differences. I'm in tech. There are a lot of tech leaders who are coming out of India. Indian culture, when it comes to self-promotion and how you present yourself is radically different than White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
These two are going to have very different styles of self-promotion, of self-identity. You've gotta be aware of that. I've had the opportunity of living in foreign countries. I speak fluent Spanish. I have lived in Asia. I speak a limited amount of Chinese Mandarin.
This has allowed me to think differently, not just from a generational standpoint, but also from a cultural standpoint. But Paula, I have blind spots and my team is made up of young women who have helped me say, "Look, Richard, you've got a blind spot here.”
And they're candid enough with me that I've needed to listen and make sure, because I'm aware I have blind spots, I just don't know what they are. This comes from that understanding that there's stuff I don't know. I don't know common knowledge.
This is a key thing for executives to become comfortable understanding how to step into an environment they don't know, how to teach a different generation of social natives, and how to communicate with executives to help them understand what they don't know. Those two groups, oftentimes, there's all kinds of diversity. I've covered a lot there with that conversation.
Paula Edgar: Oh, it's fascinating and totally in line with what I've talked about on the podcast and what I do. For example, two weeks ago, my podcast—well, I guess depending on when this comes out, but previously in my podcast—I had an author and speaker named Chris De Santis who's written a book about the generations of the workplace. It's called Why I Find You Irritating.
We talked about a lot of that. In the work that I do, professional development, and the lens of DEI, I talk about cultural fluency all the time. People want to be culturally competent. I’m like, “That's a standard you can never meet.”
Because to your point, local knowledge is not common knowledge. Sometimes when we are living in our biases and our privileges, we think our knowledge should dominate the other knowledge.
Understanding that you want to try to be fluent and to hear other people's experiences and needs, et cetera, I talked to the leaders about inclusive leadership and inclusive communication and those types of things.
This is all very much in line. Most important in all that is that when you do it and even if you do it and make a mistake, you are regarded in your brand much better than if you are resistant and decide “This is who I am and this is how it's going to be.”
That is to your point at the beginning, that's a non-starter. People won't trust you because the world is changing and swirling around. You're standing still. I love that.
Richard Bliss: I used a little comment when I got out, I was doing a presentation shortly before our interview here. I was asked about emojis in social media and LinkedIn, emojis. I knew where the question was coming from.
I said, "Look, I tried using emojis. I love chocolate ice cream.” So, I used that pile of chocolate ice cream with the big googly eyes and the big smile, then my team pointed out that wasn't chocolate ice cream.
Now, whenever I say that, technically that's a joke, but you know what makes it funny? There are people in the audience who think it might be true. Because I'm not of that generation. Is that true? I mean, it could be. He might not have known that was.
Anyway, being in tuned and being able to, first of all, recognize, I don't think I know the answer to that one. For a lot of executives, they struggle with that because they don't know how to ask the question.
As I pointed out, the younger generation doesn't know why the question is being asked. What's a hashtag? What do you mean by that? How do you explain to somebody what a hashtag is who has no concept other than if they're old enough to say, “Remember when you had the little round, there was a button there that had a little pound sign?
Paula Edgar: It's a pound sign. Obviously, my daughter was like, “I'm not sure what you're talking about.” We actually had a similar conversation. I was like, “You know, forget you.” Speaking of getting into new technology, etc, with the rise of digital tools, what do you think are the key elements that executives and folks should focus on today to enhance their personal brands online?
Richard Bliss: Okay. We've had a great conversation here in the last 30 minutes about adaptability, rebranding, and teaching yourself. We know the answer to this one right now because the people listening to this podcast are being exposed to something that no, and we're not talking about generation, all of us.
Anybody who's listening to your podcast, no matter their age, their background, culture, or race, it does not matter. We are all being exposed to something that is so radically transformational, that it has never happened before to human beings on this planet, and that is, generative AI is changing everything.
Now, we've heard this before. The internet changed everything. Well, I remember when they said that. Google changed everything. Whatever, TikTok changed everything.
Paula Edgar: Yes.
Richard Bliss: No.
Paula Edgar: This is it.
Richard Bliss: This is it. Everything is being changed and is being changed so fast that in the past, we had time as a society to create social contracts that allowed us to deal with it.
Let's talk about the digital divide when it comes to access to the internet. You and I both know that there was a gap that got bigger and bigger as those who had access to high-speed bandwidth and those who didn't.
Oftentimes it was economics, it was geography. As that gap got wider, those who had got better. But we had a social contract to say, “Okay, let's put in place things to make it possible for bandwidth, laptops, iPads, whatever. Let's adjust to that.”
Well, that happened over a series of years. Generative AI, the way we recognize and understand it, has been out for 18 months. 18 months. In those 18 months, it is possible that right now you or I could be a fake avatar.
This could be a deep fake interview that you actually could be talking to my avatar and not to me. That is possible right now. 18 months ago, that wasn't even conceived of. That was in a sci-fi movie that Steven Spielberg put together.
I mean, it was like, here we are 18 months later, which means that each of us has to ask ourselves the question, and you've already said it, “Am I going to resist it? Or am I going to lean into it?”
That means even overcoming the fear. There are several fears here. There's one of, “I don't know, I don't want to look stupid, so I'm not going to do it at all, and I'm going to resist it.” There is, "Oh, my gosh, if I do it, they're going to know everything about me and steal all my money out of my bank account."
It's like, "Oh, no, they're going to learn who I am and now they're going to make fake phone calls to my kids and strangers are going to pick them up." We’ve heard it. Well, that's all happened in a matter of months or days. We have not had time as a society to create a social contract of how we're going to deal with this. So my answer to your question is that right now we all need to lean in.
We all need to learn and share and be comfortable. My mother is going to be 80 next year. Well, obviously she's got some activity that she goes on with her life, but she's also studied computer science in the '60s and has been at the forefront.
I started hearing her talk about this resistance to AI, “Oh, it's terrible, blah, blah, blah.” Then I realized, okay, hopefully, she's not listening to this, but she lives in an all-white over 60 retirement community. They're all sitting around talking about how rapists are crossing the Mexican border and how AI is going to come in and steal all their money.
Paula Edgar: She's in Florida?
Richard Bliss: Arizona. Two guesses. It was one or the other.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, that resistance is there.
Richard Bliss: But here's what I said to her. I said, “Look, you are the smartest person I've ever met in your generation when it came to technology. Since I was a kid, you have been leading the way. I urge you right now to become the smartest person in your collective generation that you hang out with about understanding what AI is.”
This was by text because I was fed up with the whole phone calls of, "Oh, it's going to steal..." You know what her response was? "Teach me."
Paula Edgar: Okay. And?
Richard Bliss: I'm going to wave the flag of victory and march off the field of battle. That was a win. My point here is that my mother was willing to, even at the age of 80, lean in and say, “Okay, all right, I'll not listen to them. I'll listen to somebody who I respect, her son.”
To your audience, you don't have to become an expert. You don't have to use it, but generative AI, more than anything, figure out ChatGPT, go out and play around with Midjourney. Just play.
That's why, to come back to my message, in my career, when I had to reinvent myself, I went and played. I went on Kickstarter, crowdfunding, and talked about board games. It has nothing to do with my career. I played. Find ways to play in a safe environment and just play. For example, Paula, what's your favorite author?
Paula Edgar: Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison is my favorite author.
Richard Bliss: Okay. What does Toni write? What kind of genre?
Paula Edgar: A lot of fiction based on the African-American experience. Beloved is one of my favorite books that she wrote that's been turned into a movie. A lot about the African-American experience.
Richard Bliss: Okay, so here's what you're going to do. Here's what your audience is going to do using this as an example. You're going to go out to ChatGPT. You're going to say a prompt that says, “I'd like you to write me the opening chapter of a book in the style of,” and who was the author?
Paula Edgar: Toni Morrison.
Richard Bliss: Here are the two main characters, a 30-year-old single mom living in Iowa, and genre, is there like mystery or is it just life?
Paula Edgar: It's just life. It's just life.
Richard Bliss: Okay. Who has this moral dilemma, and subtly because of an aging parent in Virginia has to quit her job and find a way to move her and her daughter to Virginia. I want on the way for her to encounter an individual who transforms her life in this experience that she never would have anticipated. Could you write me the opening chapter in the style of Toni around these two topics? Here are the characters, go.
Now, it's going to spit this out. It's going to identify it, give it the dilemma, show it, introduce this character, do all of this, you're going to read this and you're going to be like, “Okay, now, here's what I want to happen. I want this individual to suddenly be not real and that it's actually her imagination because she was driving late at night and she stopped at a rest stop and maybe it was the gentleman who came up to her. Now she's realizing that she has a spiritual guide who's been talking to her. Then she finds out later that it's actually her great-grandfather who lived in this.”
Now we're going to go down and it's going to keep writing this for you. You're telling the story and now, okay, Paula, are you sucked in at this moment?
Paula Edgar: I mean, first of all, you had me [inaudible] and I have to tell you, it's probably my lawyer-ness that I'm like, "What is theirs?" I'm literally like, “But it's her voice,” and I get it because that's where pretty much all of the talk around AI and owning and copyright and all of those things are happening right now.
So my readers who are primarily lawyers or lawyer adjacent are literally probably like, “Girl, this is what we've been talking about.”
Richard Bliss: This is what we've been talking about.
Paula Edgar: The way I described AI is a faster brain. We have it, but we got to work together the stuff out. They take all of our brains, and then go, “Let's do this faster.”
Richard Bliss: Connect dots. Part of my brand is I have the ability—some people think it's just crazy—to connect dots, but it's because I see something that's happening in Fairbanks, Alaska, I see something that's happening in Minneapolis, I see something that's happening in Spokane. All of a sudden I recognize, “Wait, there's some things that people aren't seeing that maybe they think is unique.”
Or I see a bunch of board gamers who don't know how to raise money and all of a sudden there's this crowdfunding thing and I connect the dots. What AI does more than anything that we've ever been able to do is take all of the dots and then we're like, or for example, “Tell us something that's not there.”
“Here's a website of my competitor. Please analyze the website of my competitor and tell me what's not there and how I would build a marketing campaign to exploit the lack of content they have there so that I can differentiate my brand to take advantage of that.”
Paula Edgar: Ooh, what a prompt. Y'all, you better write that down. That is a prompt, wow.
Richard Bliss: Don't write me something, tell me what's not there. Well, whenever we had somebody tell us what's not in the law, not just tell me what's in the law, but what's not in the law, here AI can jump in and say, “Well, here's your case, this isn't there, this isn't there, and this isn't there. You could take advantage of it by this, this, and this.” You're like, “Whoa,” connecting the dots.
Paula Edgar: I think that that is why folks are hesitant. It's like back in the day when we watched Terminator and whatever that movie was with that one guy who ended up being a robot that's not the Terminator, then, all of those things, it was like forecasting that people would be able to read our eyes and do all those things.
What I have read about and explained to people is that we have had access to and have been benefiting from AI for a long time. We just haven't had direct consumer access to AI.
Now, yes, now all the things are happening. Now you can take a song and they're going to be like, “Write me this rap like I'm Snoop Dogg,” and it will. I do think there's a lot of conversation that's going to continue to happen about how those folks will be able to benefit from people tapping into their talent or their lens of their talent.
And also people being able to curate and create in a different and better way because they have access to all of these things. I'm excited to see where it's going to go. But, and, comma, what I really want to talk to you about is what's coming up next.
I'm going to take this because this tool that we both love has just started using AI pretty adeptly, and that is LinkedIn. Y'all, when I first was introduced to Richard, it was in a webinar where he was talking about using LinkedIn, and I was like, “I'll just sit through this. I know everything about LinkedIn already.”
Then three seconds in, I was like, “Wait, he's teaching me.” Like I said to him, I said that I knew that I needed to make sure that this conversation and you talking about this tool because I say, LinkedIn is the most powerful personal branding tool that we have at our fingertips. Hard stop. And most people don't know how to leverage it.
You are a fancy-dandy LinkedIn influencer top voice. So tell me, what do the people need to know about LinkedIn?
Richard Bliss: I completely forgot that's what we were going to talk about. We got so excited talking about other things.
Paula Edgar: I told you, this is what we do. Trust me, I don't feel bad about the conversation, we're good.
Richard Bliss: I'm going to agree with your statement because your listeners, every single one of your listeners, guaranteed 100%, have a LinkedIn account. Guaranteed. That is not true for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Twitter. Not all of them have those.
Every single one of us has a LinkedIn account because it has become the platform of trust. When I look at your profile, which I'm looking at right now, I trust that's you. I see you. I recognize you. I see your content. All of these things tell me that I can trust that you've got the certification badge.
The way we used LinkedIn originally was to find a job or to connect. Rolodex. Electronic Rolodex. Although the younger generation, I keep having to spell it for them. This idea that we're going to connect with each other, that's what LinkedIn is.
Why should I be on LinkedIn? I already had that quote because if you can't master this tool, why in the world are you leading this organization? Here are some things that I dropped some truth bombs on you that shocked you that I can share with your audience.
Paula Edgar: Please.
Richard Bliss: LinkedIn is fundamentally different than all of the other social media platforms. We call it the upside-down world, I do, of social media, if we're a Stranger Things fan. Everything you do on the other social media platforms will sabotage your efforts to be successful on LinkedIn.
Anything that you do to be viral on the other platforms will kill you—and not in a good way—on LinkedIn. So here we go. LinkedIn's goal, the reason is because the other platforms make money off of advertising. We are the product, advertisers are the customer. We create content, we cause other people to see it, which drives revenue, we all understand that.
That's not how it works on LinkedIn. LinkedIn only has 20% of the revenue coming from advertising. The other 80% comes from subscribers. People paying for LinkedIn Premium, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Recruiter.
Some of my clients spend more than a million dollars a year on LinkedIn Sales Navigator alone, not for advertising, but for the tools that give access to the platform to do better and better things.
This means the algorithm is radically different in its outcome. What LinkedIn's trying to do is establish communication and conversations between its members, not your content to go viral, not to entertain, not to distract. Or as I say, not to hold you underwater until you stop struggling, Facebook.
What you got here is they do it in an incredibly counterintuitive way. When you put out a piece of content on LinkedIn, now you have 16,000 followers. LinkedIn does not show your content to 16,000 people. You know this, your audience is going to be a little surprised, it shows it to less than 10%.
I go with the 10% because it's easier. So 1600 people on average are going to see your content. But, but if you included a link in your post, LinkedIn cuts that audience in half. Bam.
If it's a link to a YouTube video, 80% reduction in your audience. Because LinkedIn wants you to have a conversation, not be a source to drive people somewhere else. Have a conversation. They only allow you to have one conversation a day.
Paula Edgar: It's wild. Everybody, hold please. Go. Hey, now I’ll let you go.
Richard Bliss: If you post more often than once a day, LinkedIn hides the subsequent post from nearly 95% to 98% of your audience. Now, a couple of days ago, you posted, I think, two things on the same day. You probably saw a radical difference in the numbers.
Why? Because LinkedIn's like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're testing that first conversation. You can't have two conversations at the same time.” So you get the one conversation and now you'll let it run for about 24 hours.
If it's running really well, let it run for 48 hours before you make another post because if you post again, LinkedIn's like, “All right, stop that conversation. Let's start a new one.”
You're like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, well, that one was really good.” They're like, “No, you get about one conversation.” Now this is radically different than Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, more is better. Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk that many people know, he's like, “A hundred pieces of content a day.” No, LinkedIn's like, “That is not our business model. One piece of content a day.”
Now, one post. Okay, there's some more bad news. The link cuts your audience in half. A multiple post a day cuts your audience by 99%. So in addition, if you hit the repost button, LinkedIn shares that repost with 1% of your audience. That would be for you 160 people. If you saw a post from me and hit repost, 160 people of your 16,000 would see it.
Paula Edgar: Why, LinkedIn? Why?
Richard Bliss: Why? Because we're like, “Wait, wait, I want everybody to see it.”
Paula Edgar: Exactly, they deserve to see my content.
Richard Bliss: Right. Now let's suppose that was true. So let's suppose you made a post and everybody went and reshared it and it went to everybody's contacts who reshared it. Then I made a post and everybody reshared it. Then your friend made a post and everybody reshared it.
What would our feed look like? Now somebody might say, “Well, my feed is already filled with a bunch of people requesting.” Well, that's because you have been telling the algorithm you want to see that content by liking, commenting, or engaging with their content. So the algorithm's like, "All right, you're part of that 10%. We're going to keep shoving content at you." Even if all you're doing is what I call liking.
A like on LinkedIn is an indicator “I did not find your content interesting.” I liked it. What? No, a like means I found it interesting. No, it means you did not find it interesting and enough to stop and participate in the conversation. You drove by.
Paula Edgar: What if I love it? Does it matter if I choose another emoji?
Richard Bliss: Because LinkedIn's like, “No, we're here not to entertain. We're here to drive conversation.” If you were sitting around at a dinner table and you were talking and everybody at the table kept going like this, they're like, “Yeah, does anybody have anything to say?” Yeah. Good job. Let it go. Congrats. You're like, “You're just talking to yourself.”
LinkedIn's like, “That is not valuable at all.” Instead, what happens when your post goes live, LinkedIn starts tracking it immediately and determining there's a value associated with every interaction, the like being the least valuable interaction.
But if somebody reposts it, I just said it's not going to do any good for them, it will give them 10 points of value to your post unless they leave a comment with the thought. You know how to repost your comments?
Paula Edgar: Yeah.
Richard Bliss: Then it's only three points of value. LinkedIn hides it from 99.9% of your audience and it counts as your one post for the day.
Paula Edgar: That was shocking. Jaw open on the floor, I thought, “Of course you want me to say things and my people to see it.” I was like, “Wait, you may say my people aren't seeing it.”
Richard Bliss: That's right, nobody's seeing it. Instead, what we need to realize is that on LinkedIn, comments are picked up and shown to our audience, which means if you want to reshare and then leave a comment, leave the comment on the original conversation.
Don't try to split the conversation because what people don't realize—and I'm watching our time to make sure that we stay in time—but what people don't realize on LinkedIn is that 100% of your comments are pushed to your network.
This is something for us to be aware of. Just for fun, I'm going to look at your last few comments. “Amanda, I will.” Let's see. Let's see your next comment. “I love to play dress up.” Hang on. Let me look at your next comment. “Can't wait to see you.” Okay.
Paula Edgar: It's all true.
Richard Bliss: It's all true. But we are trained by social media to talk to the person who wrote the post, to talk to the author. We forget, or it's never dawned on us, that every comment is being overheard by our audience, by our network.
So let's come back to brand. LinkedIn, to build your brand, is not about creating content on their platform. That is not the secret to building your brand on LinkedIn. The secret to building your brand on LinkedIn is participating in conversations where you add value because your audience and your audience's audience will hear and see your comments as you participate in a conversation.
Right now, you and I are having a conversation back and forth. If all they heard was your side of it, and then a bunch of thumbs up from me, there's no value, but because we're going back and forth, so as you're talking to the individual, realize just like this podcast, people are listening, and LinkedIn wants to build your brand, so they're going to take every comment you make 100% and push it to a portion of your network.
This means if you want to build your brand, you need to be commenting at least three to five times a day. Those comments need to add value. They can't be, “Congrats. Well done. I love you.”
Paula Edgar: I feel like you're pointing at me when you say that.
Richard Bliss: “Can't wait to see you.”
Paula Edgar: “You go girl.”
Richard Bliss: “You go girl, awesome. Thanks for sharing.” All right, the challenge here is that sometimes that is the appropriate comment. But if we really want to build our brand, what we're going to do is we're going to go find people who we want to be associated with, we're going to find their content and we're going to add value to the conversation. Nobody posts content on LinkedIn hoping nobody sees it.
Paula Edgar: True.
Richard Bliss: So if you post something on LinkedIn, so you post something, let's see, I'm going to look at your last post. Your last post on LinkedIn was about, “Don't say I didn't warn you, today is the last day to purchase your tickets to the Metropolitan Black Bar Association's 40th Anniversary Awards Gala.”
This was four days ago. “Ticket sales end at midnight.” Okay, and then you've got a nice little image there, and you got 16 comments on that. You know what you did? I know what you did is you responded to, some of those are yours, but you responded to these.
There's a conversation happening. Every time that Trish commented on your post, that post and her comment got put in front of her audience. More than clicking the reshare button, leaving a comment is the best and fastest way, one, to promote somebody else's content, but also to associate because you responded to Trish, which means Trish's comment and your comment got put in front of your audience.
So Trish didn't just talk to you, Trish talked to a huge portion of your 16,000 followers. What Trish would want to do is like, “Okay, if I'm going to leave a comment and I know that a huge portion of 16,000 people are going to read it, what do I want to say? Not just what do I want to say to Paula, but what do I want to say?”
Because oftentimes we forget, we think it's just a personal conversation happening between the two of us. Yeah, that is, if it's on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, I mean, it's semi-personal. But on LinkedIn, it's actively being pushed. This is how you transform the way you think about LinkedIn, commenting. Here's my advice to your audience.
Paula Edgar: Please, go.
Richard Bliss: Promise, if they go and leave three comments a day on three different individuals, first-degree connections, colleagues, people they want to be known for, people in their industry, in the law profession, people maybe if they're solopreneurs, if you do three comments a day, that's all you need to do, and you do it for five days in a row, I guarantee the number of people who look at their LinkedIn profile, the number of people who look at your profile will jump by 300% to 500% in that same week.
Do you want people to pay attention to you? Go comment. Not just add a “Boy, great job,” but comment and add truly the value you want to be known for, the brand you want to build. LinkedIn will reward you and start putting you and your profile in front of a whole lot of people.
Paula Edgar: This, this, everybody is what I want. This is when I was like, “Oh, he has to be on the podcast.” I already knew. So number one, before we even come to my closing questions, because of course we have to close now, you got to come back.
Richard Bliss: This time we'll come back and actually talk about LinkedIn.
Paula Edgar: We're going to do a part two, y'all, and yeah, we're going to talk about how to be blissful on LinkedIn. That's going to be the next one. Fascinating, I'm really sitting here like, “Oh, my gosh.”
First of all, I hope all of you take the challenge and do it and then send the message and tell us how it worked out for you because I want to know. I ask everybody in my podcast two questions. One is stand by your brand. It's essentially what aspect of your personal brand will you never compromise on?
Richard Bliss: I truly believe that we are all in this together. I really want people to know what I have to share. You'll never find me hocking something. I don't believe in affiliate links. Look, if I'm going to tell you about it, it's because I believe in it.
Some would consider me an influencer with 120,000 followers on LinkedIn, 25,000 to 50,000 followers on Twitter. No, I don't use that for any kind of monetary. Am I making sense?
Paula Edgar: Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Richard Bliss: That relationship I have with my audience is sacred to me, and I will not jeopardize that relationship simply to make a buck.
Paula Edgar: That definitely resonates. Like on my website, I have a list of people who I refer about certain things for people that ask me about coaching, et cetera, all the time. I have it on there. It's either I know personally or someone who I trust has told me. That's how you get on there because I care and I want people to. So I get it.
I think that leads back to your being giving, like you said at the beginning, that you give a lot and that's giving in spirit and giving in time, talent, and treasure, and that always comes back.
Okay, so Branding Room Only, my podcast, is a play on standing room only because I'm clever. As such, I ask people, what is the aspect about you that people would be only standing room in a room to experience, observe, et cetera, about Richard Bliss?
Richard Bliss: I was presenting to a group of IT professionals in Denmark, several years ago. After the presentation, I got feedback. It was the best feedback—and this was many years ago—that I've ever received because I was talking about SMTP gateways and IP addresses, it was a very deep technical presentation.
The individual—I was told that Scandinavians are all like Stoics—he walked up to the organizer and said, “I would pay money to listen to that man speak.” Because at the time I was there as a guest and I gotta tell you, the magic is that when I share my background, to take it all the way back, I have seen what it means to not know something. I have seen what it means to want to understand and not know how or who to ask.
The magic that I have, and you've probably witnessed it here, is I have the ability to see inside of you and anticipate the very things that you don't know but which you did know and don't know how to get access to that.
I have felt it my whole life growing up of being on the outside and not knowing. Now that I get to be on the inside on things, my magic is being able to help people understand what it is and what they can do to take that very, very next step and make it so easy and accessible. I would say that is the magic that I bring.
Paula Edgar: Wow, that was awesome. Richard, it has been wonderful to have you on my podcast, being in the Branding Room. How can folks connect with you and learn more about you and how you add value to the world?
Richard Bliss: They can follow me on LinkedIn. I don't tend to connect with everybody, but you can still follow me. You can email me at rbliss@blisscorp.com. They can email me and if they want to have a conversation, my EA can put that in touch. But those are the two main ways for them to find me, track me, and keep on top of that.
Paula Edgar: Fantastic. Everybody, if you decide to reach out to Richard, make sure you told him you heard about him on the podcast.
Richard Bliss: Absolutely.
Paula Edgar: It's been wonderful. Thank you so much for being in the Banding Room and I'm holding you to it, you gotta come back.
Richard Bliss: We gotta come back and talk about board games. That's what we're going to talk about.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, talk about so many things. All right, it's been wonderful. Everybody, tell a friend, make sure they don't like it, make sure they comment on whatever goes with this. We'll talk soon. See you again next time in the Branding Room.
