This week’s show guest is Chris J. Reed, who I like to call the “Jedi Master of LinkedIn.” Chris is the founder and CEO of Black Marketing, and he also is one of the 100 most influential LinkedIn bloggers, one of LinkedIn’s top social sellers, and one of the world’s most viewed LinkedIn profiles with over 70,000 followers. He’s also a best-selling author of multiple books including LinkedIn Mastery for Entrepreneurs and Personal Branding Mastery for Entrepreneurs. Today we sit down and we talk about LinkedIn and about how all entrepreneurs should be using this powerful platform for their business. Let’s get right on to the show.

Jay: Chris Reed, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m very happy to have you on here, and I think that we’re going to have a very enlightening discussion because you have expertise in something that I believe most of my audience needs to here. Chris, why don’t you just introduce yourself to the audience.

Chris: Sure. I am Chris J. Reed. I am the only CEO with a mohawk, and I run four global companies. They’re all focused around or centered around or using, like a catalyst, LinkedIn. They are four companies including Black Marketing, which does LinkedIn; Dark Art of Marketing, which does personal branding and beyond LinkedIn; Mohawk Marketing, which does TripAdvisor entrepreneurs and then exploits it on LinkedIn; and Mastery, which is our masterclass brand all about LinkedIn.

Jay: So you are basically a LinkedIn Jedi. We had an awesome fireside chat not too long ago at Startup Grind. I definitely knew that I had to get you on the podcast because you delivered so much value there, and I think that, for anyone that’s an entrepreneur or even just a business professional, they need to hear what you have to say.

But first, before we dive into LinkedIn, why don’t you give us some background on how you became an entrepreneur because that’s also something that I like to feature for my guests because I like to hear the story, the back stories, and I think our audience appreciates that too.

Chris: I’d love to share that. It was very much in my family tradition. My uncle was an entrepreneur. My father was an entrepreneur. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. So I very much wanted to be an entrepreneur when I was young, and I realized pretty quickly you needed to build up a network and connections. And so as soon as I felt like I had enough connections and knowledge and experience, and I formed my first company when I was 30. That was a very successful partnership marketing company, sold it, formed another one, and then went through five years of that, and then moved to Singapore to become an entrepreneur in Asia, forming a completely different company.

And that’s the spirit, I think, of being an entrepreneur, is you basically adapt and iterate and look out for opportunities. I had no idea I was going to be a LinkedIn entrepreneur when I came across to Asia. I did not know a single person, started using LinkedIn for networking and job hunting and then sales and marketing for those particular jobs. Nobody else was using it, but I was getting fantastic success.

So I thought, “Wow. This is my calling. This is what I need to do. This is how I need to help people. And this is how I can actually build businesses as well.” So hence, Black Marketing was formed five years ago.

Jay: That’s fascinating. It’s very much in line with a lot of successful entrepreneurs where they’re trying to basically solve a pain point for themselves in their personal lives and then they realize “You know what? I’m not the only person that’s struggling with this sort of thing, so maybe I should make a business out of it.”

And why did you choose Singapore, Chris?

Chris: That’s very easy. Having been in London for like 20 years, I just got very, very tired of the weather, the taxes, the people, the underground girls. Coming the Singapore, the weather is beautiful. It’s always hot and sunny. The girls or sexy, and they’re not wearing very much because it’s hot and sunny. The tax rate is zero. It has the best airport in the world as opposed to the worst airport in the world. It has the ability to travel everywhere. When I was in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago with you — it’s three hours away. I go to Sydney next week — it’s seven hours away. I go to Bangkok, Indonesia, Vietnam — they’re only a few hours away. It’s an amazing place to be an entrepreneur. It really is. I can just say, “I’m going to go to Vietnam for three days, and I’m going to meet a bunch of people there through LinkedIn.” I’m going to investigate things. And that’s one of the reasons I chose Singapore over Hong Kong — it was very, very near — was exactly that pivotal point about the fact that Singapore, and Changi Airport, allows you to travel across the whole of Asia Pacific seamlessly.

Jay: That’s absolutely right. I don’t travel nearly as much as you do, but I definitely have an appreciation, every time I come to Singapore, at how seamless and how quick the immigration process and just getting through. And literally, you’re 15, 20 minutes — depending on how fast your cab driver is driving — away from the city. It’s amazing. And that’s something that…even Hong Kong, obviously it has its nuances as well. And Hong Kong airport is still a good 40, 45 minutes away. So Singapore definitely beats Hong Kong in that regard.

Chris: I thought you were going to say 45 years behind. You’ve got one terminal. You’ve got one terminal. It’s working on its second. Singapore is working on its fifth terminal.

Jay: You know, that’s funny. I always see Singapore, Changi Airport, winning all the awards. Literally, every year, they’re the best airport in the world or something like that — at the top.

Chris: Six years running, the best airport in the world.

Jay: Amazing. I’ve definitely looked at Singapore myself. I have a family now with three little kids, so it’s definitely much more kid friendly, as well as Hong Kong.

Let’s dive right is. Can you give us a brief overview of the digital marketing environment for entrepreneurs? Obviously, it is something that goes hand-in-hand right now with entrepreneurship. You literally cannot be successful as an entrepreneur unless you are online and out there. But, like you said, you had a pain point that you were trying to solve yourself via LinkedIn. Have you dabbled in some of the other social media networks? And what are your thoughts on that versus LinkedIn? For me, I’ve dabbled as well, and I just literally cannot keep up with all of them — Twitter, Facebook. They’re just a lot of noise. So I was actually pretty happy when we got to talk about LinkedIn, and I was like “I actually want to deep dive and focus on one social media channel.” And LinkedIn was the perfect one, from what you told me. So maybe you could share with the audience a little bit of your views.

Chris: I don’t think you can be a jack-of-all-trades. I firmly believe you have to be a master of what you believe in, and I’m very, very much a master of LinkedIn. But I admit freely I know nothing about Facebook. I’m not even on Facebook. I know nothing about Instagram. I’m not on Instagram. But as we saw at the talk, Jay, very interestingly, Ashley, who actually is a fellow entrepreneur, who is on all these platforms, actually said the same thing. She said that actually Instagram and Facebook are useless for business, and she got all her leads and engagements — real people and real professionals — on LinkedIn. And even she, who had tens of thousands of followers on things like Instagram and Facebook, said it doesn’t work. You get people basically that don’t have any money, and there is not future there in terms of business. It’s very much B2C platform. And she has now chose LinkedIn as well and believes that.

So I believe that LinkedIn is very much the only professional network in the world. There are only two countries you can’t get it, and that is Russia and North Korea. So you can get it in China, which is phenomenally important, obviously. And it dovetails quite nicely with WeChat in China, which is also very important. But there, literally, is nothing else like it. I haven’t bothered looking at anything else.

We use YouTube, for example, to support the videos we then put on LinkedIn, but we don’t find any leads on YouTube. We have a mirror Twitter, only because it’s linked to LinkedIn. But I have not got a single bit of engagement or single bit of sales through Twitter. And in Asia, it really is completely useless. I don’t know anyone who has won clients through Twitter in Asia. There’s a reason why they closed down their Hong Kong operation and half of their Singapore operation, because people aren’t using here. People in Australia who used to use it are now saying LinkedIn is more professional, and it drives more traffic than someone like Twitter does in that country, which is quite amazing. I think the only country who uses it is America.

Jay: That’s absolutely right. I have a very small Twitter following, but I can tell that people out in Asia don’t care about it. And you brought up an interesting point, Chris, about China. Obviously, Facebook, Google, and the likes are actually banned in China. So the fact that LinkedIn is not banned, that’s a huge… Obviously, China is a huge market. I think it’s quite interesting.

We talked about this at the Startup Grind event. Basically, I think it’s probably about 18 months now since LinkedIn kind of came back on the radar after their $26 billion sale to Microsoft. People were like “Wait a minimum. What’s going on here? Microsoft is not a stupid company. They are not just spending $26 billion on nothing.” So I think it perked up a lot of ears. People were basically like “Why are they willing to pay this amount of money for this professional network that not a lot of people were on?” People were more interested in Facebook and this sort of thing at the time. But now, it kind of makes sense because, for a professional network, it’s really the only way that you can go.

LinkedIn, we’ve gone over the other platforms. Basically, the other platforms, if you’re a business professional, it’s not really that useful to you. LinkedIn itself, I think a lot of people need a bit of coaching, even a 101, because I don’t think a lot of people are doing LinkedIn right. I know myself — we kind of talked about this even at the talk. People just throw up a picture and this sort of thing. What are some quick 101 tips that you could share with the audience, just to get started and just to not look like a novice on the platform.

Chris: As you saw in the presentation and as you see from people’s profiles, the easiest things and the simplest things sometimes, when I comes to LinkedIn — having a picture, having a photograph which is actually engaging and actually communicates your personal brand, not your personal brand on a night out, not your personal brand at the zoo, not your personal brand at a wedding or a funeral or on a holiday. It’s not rocket science. It’s business. So put a nice personal brand up there in terms of pictures so people, like at a networking event, get a positive impression of you.

And then have a strapline. What is your strapline? What are your keywords? Mine is “the only CEO with a mohawk.” Mine is “the most recommended LinkedIn entrepreneur.” What’s your strapline? What describes your personal brand and describes your business? Put it there so people know who you are?

And then do a background picture. People don’t even realized the blue background to your picture on LinkedIn is actually your advertising space. It’s free, and it’s on LinkedIn, so the real estate there is worth millions of dollars. If you were to sell that, it would be worth millions of dollars. LinkedIn sell that space, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars on every single day. So use that to market your brand. So at the moment, I’m marketing, for example, some of my events I’ve got coming up, some of my locations I’ve got coming. I market my recommendations, my books, my talks, my businesses, my brands. I use it differently on a daily basis, a weekly basis. I change it around because people get bored of it, so change it around.

And then have a summary section. Again, this is not rocket science, but so many people don’t have a summary section. It’s like a bio. It’s like your CV. You don’t need CV these day. Your CV is your summary section on LinkedIn. Describe your journey. Describe what you’ve done. Describe why people should be interested in you. Describe why people should be engaging with you. Give them reasons. Don’t put nothing there. People will go, “What do you do? I’ve got no idea. Move on to the next person.” Put some media there. Put some YouTube videos; put some links to your website. LinkedIn is the number one driver, after Google, to drive people to people’s websites from a B2B perspective. So if you’re not using it, other people are. We drive so much traffic to our YouTube channel and our website through our LinkedIn. It’s just phenomenal.

And then the simplest one, the final one, would actually be having a content marketing strategy. You are in charge of your own content marketing strategy. So if you’re not engaging; not getting any traction; you’re not sharing properly; no one is liking, sharing, and commenting; no one is getting involved with you, it’s because you don’t have a very good content marketing strategy. It’s as simple as that, Jay.

Jay: I think it takes a bit of work. You have to understand the platform. You have to understand how the platform works. I think it’s something that, if you’re lazy, and you just try to hack it or do shortcuts, then you’re not going to reap the full benefits of it.

You mentioned a few things like setting up your profile and this sort of thing. As far as content marketing, how frequent should, say, an entrepreneur be posting on LinkedIn?

Chris: I would argue that you need to have a specialist strategy, which is called 4-1-1, which most social media use, which is, basically, for every hard-sell post about your business… If I post something daily about LinkedIn, I need to make up for it with one soft-sell post about the industry — it could be about social media or digital or content — and then four completely unrelated posts. I might talk about Hong Kong. I might talk about Singapore. I might talk about employment issues in Singapore. I might talk about being an entrepreneur in Asia — something that people can engage with me on and empathize with me on, that they are also thinking about, and they think, “Chris has got a point there.” Or, “That’s good of Chris to share that.” And then you hit them with the hard-sell post about your business.

Now, if you do that every single day, you’ll end up with about six or seven posts on a daily basis. So you complement that with videos, interviews, pictures of you at work, pictures of you at an event, a picture of you interviewing other people, interviews of you interviewing other people and sharing that on LinkedIn. You have a good mix of a content marketing strategy that people aren’t going to get bored with.

You could, obviously, be more conservative and post two or three times, but you have to remember that basically people do not use LinkedIn like you and I do. People use LinkedIn, generally, once or twice every single week for half an hour here and 10 minutes there. They’re not using it 24/7, checking it every single minute like I do and like my team does for our clients, because they don’t have time and because their focus is on things like Facebook and other platforms, or they’re out there doing business themselves.

So you might think posting five or six times a day is actually excessive. I don’t, because you’re targeting different time zones, whether it’s across Asia, across Europe. We have clients in Europe and America. We have clients in Australia and New Zealand. Different time zones access LinkedIn at different points. So if you’re not sharing, you won’t appear on their feed, somebody else will. They get the traction and engagement; you won’t; and you missed an opportunity to sell. So actually being bolder and being more assertive and slightly more aggressive in your content marketing, as long as you’re giving as well as selling — and that’s the key, I believe, Jay, to success from a content-marketing-platform perspective on LinkedIn.

Jay: Chris, you gave a really good analogy. I don’t remember specifically. Maybe you know off the top of your head. Last time when we were talking, you said, first of all, most people have this misconception that LinkedIn is purely for finding jobs or posting jobs and this sort of thing. And then you gave a really good analogy. I think you had two different companies. I don’t know if you can recall what they were in the example you gave, but it made it crystal clear that one company was purely posting just jobs ads, and it was like a company you wouldn’t ever want to work for. But then the other company—

Chris: Qantas and Air New Zealand. We have that in the presentation. They’re in my top 10 tips. So Qantas — very engaging content. We’re talking about how they all go out for wine after a long, hard day, how they were featuring wine entrepreneurs, how wine entrepreneurs travel in business class. They talked about wine, wine, wine. And basically, their whole page on LinkedIn, Qantas’ whole page is about content, about engagement. It’s about employer branding. It’s about “we do other things at Qantas” as opposed to this, that, and the other. So it’s all about doing that.

Whereas Air New Zealand just had job, job, job, job. And that’s all they had. And their jobs weren’t very exciting — like sustainability jobs and really, really boring jobs. They weren’t even really trying to engage. But there were thousands of jobs on there, which just made Air New Zealand look very desperate. So who do you want to engage with? Who do you want to work for? Qantas — with the wine and the social side of things and the entrepreneurial zeal — or Air New Zealand, who look desperate to employee anybody?

Jay: I think it’s a very smart way, and obviously their marketing team has worked on this and formulated this plan. But I think that people misunderstand the network, first of all. The sooner that you realize that LinkedIn is not just a job set up platform or jobs board, then the more effective it’s going to be for you.

As far as… I want to dive in a little deeper. Obviously, some of the stuff you do is proprietary for your clients, but you did mention Sales Navigator the last then we were speaking. I think that most people don’t even know what that is. They think there’s Linked In; there’s LinkedIn Professional. If I pay, maybe I can get more leads. Can you just break it down, give us a 101 on what Sales Navigator actually is and why people are missing a really big thing here?

Chris: Of course. It’s really interesting. I’m interviewing at the moment because we’re doing lots of recruiting because we’re growing the Black Marketing team. And I ask them — every single person — “How many platforms are on LinkedIn, and what are they called?”

And people go, “Huh? What do you mean ‘there’s different platforms on LinkedIn’?”

Half of the people don’t even know that Recruiter exists. They’re just going to approach when it comes to jobs. They know about LinkedIn Executive, which is the main platform, but have no clue about Sales Navigator. So they’re amazed that they have this amazing platform called Sales Navigator. So there’s Recruiter for recruitment people. There’s LinkedIn.com, which is the executive version, and there’s the main feed, and then there’s Sales Navigator.

The Sales Navigator is a must and essential for every entrepreneur, every executive who wants to find any kind of client anywhere in the world. And that’s the key. Sales Navigator delves into the data, tells you who is active, tells you how many shared connections you have, tell me if these people have moved jobs recently, tells you if they’re in the news, tells you how active they are. And they also say to you whether they want to be mailed — for free. And you can get all this data on sales.

Now we’re going to create target lists, which enables you to then generate leads on a daily basis using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform. So I use it. I set up all my meetings in Hong Kong the week I was there, and I won eight clients that week based on meeting people generated through Sales Navigator, by targeting people who are actually entrepreneurs and founders of businesses, who are active, and they were on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. So we use it all the time for ourselves. We you it for our clients. This works anywhere in the world. It works in New York. It works in London. It works in Sydney. It works in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh, KL, Jakarta, Bangkok — anywhere. Because it’s all about the data.

Jay: So how much does Sales Navigator actually cost?

Chris: The irony is — it’s just amazing to me — it’s the same price as LinkedIn.com’s business executive, which is about $100 a month, from a Singapore perspective, so that’s about 80 USD or at 300 to 400 Hong Kong dollars. And it’s the same price as LinkedIn Executive, but it has 10 times the functionality. It’s like it’s a misnomer that LinkedIn keeps selling LinkedIn.com’s executive, when it doesn’t have the search functionality. You can’t save searches. You can’t do a search on specific CEOs. You can’t do a search on company size. And Sales Navigator is like the amazing thing that people just don’t know about on LinkedIn. And so that’s why we do so much of our talks about saying, “Did you know about Sales Navigator?” We don’t even touch the Recruitment side of thing. We don’t have any clients who ask us to do recruitment because we look at everything from the personal branding, employer branding, and social selling point of view. That’s to achieve their objectives. But it’s all centered around Sales Navigator.

Jay: Sales Navigator is a LinkedIn product.

Chris: Yeah. It’s three platforms. There’s Recruiter; there’s LinkedIn; and there’s Sales Navigator. There are three distinct platforms, but it’s all under LinkedIn.com.

Jay: Okay. So they are earning the revenue, but for some reason, it doesn’t seem like… Like I had never heard of it, honestly, Chris. And I’m embarrassed to say this, but I’d never heard of it until I met you.

Chris: Nobody has. 95% of people have never f***ing heard of it. It’s just amazing. It’s just ridiculous. I don’t understand it. It’s like they don’t want to sell it. They are lazy. They just want to sell you a Recruiter Platform, advertising, sponsored updates, that kind of thing. They do not want to sell you Sales Navigator. And it’s just bizarre to me.

Jay: On LinkedIn, you also have this professional or whatever that you can… It’s like a gold emblem that you can pay for. I remember you saying that that was literally worthless. Don’t spend your money on that.

Chris: You mean the premium one?

Jay: That’s right.

Chris: Sales Navigator is premium. Recruiter is premium, and you can get premium in the middle bit on LinkedIn.com. So it’s an worthless. It just doesn’t mean anything because if people don’t know what it means, then it’s kind of pointless. What’s better is to have an open-profile network. An open-profile network is where — again, if you see on Sales Navigator, it tells people that you’re open to being mailed. And that’s phenomenally important if you’re in sales and marketing or you own a company like I do or you do, Jay, and you can be mailed by someone for free on Sales Navigator. Now you only can tell open-profile people on Sales Navigator. That’s a slight misnomer of LinkedIn. It doesn’t actually work on LinkedIn.com. It doesn’t work on Recruiter, but it works on Sales Navigator. You can tell people who actually want to be mailed.

Jay: And within Sales Navigator — I’ve actually never used it. It’s literally like a very detailed search function that you can basically create targeted lists for your prospecting?

Chris: Correct.

Jay: I don’t think anyone has actually… Unless you’re a practitioner of LinkedIn, you would not have heard of that. I think it’s a great little hack that you definitely need to look into. I’m going to look into it myself. Thank you for sharing that for free with my audience. I appreciate that, Chris.

Let’s talk a little bit about your various businesses. You mentioned them earlier in the introduction — Black Marketing. You obviously have a mohawk, and you have a mohawk related brand as well. So what are the different business lines, and what are you working on right now?

Chris: Black Marketing is the core business. It basically was set up five years ago. It was my first business in Asia. It enables LinkedIn view. So it purely does LinkedIn for professionals, entrepreneurs, and CEOs across the world. Most of my clients are not in Singapore. I just happen to be based in Singapore. It mostly does the social selling side of things. So it does the Sales Navigator.

Then we have the Dark Art of Marketing, which does personal branding beyond LinkedIn. So we basically take a personal brand of an entrepreneur or a bestselling author, celebrity chef or TV presenter or someone famous like yourself, and we get them exposure and talks — the talk we did, for example. We get them exposure in something like the South China Morning Post or China Daily or the BBC or Fox News, or it could be the Guardian, it could be Tech in Asia. It could be wherever. But then we exploit that presence on LinkedIn, and we get them interviews. We also get them awards. We write books for them. We do bestselling books. We do YouTube channels. But again, it’s all exploited on LinkedIn.

So if I get you into The Financial Times, for example, you might have maybe a thousand people, 10,000 people read your article, for example, because there’s a paywall. But if you put that same column on LinkedIn, and say, “I was in The Business Times” or “The Financial Times today. Here’s my column,” you would bet 30,000 or 40,000 people reading it, and you get the kudos of being in The Financial Times and The Business Times. You get the best of both worlds. So that’s what we do. We exploit a personal brand beyond LinkedIn, but we use LinkedIn as an amplification platform.

Then we have Mohawk Marketing, which obviously is named after my mohawk. We do TripAdvisor marketing, again, for entrepreneurs. So entrepreneurs and CEOs, your own groups of hotels and also things like bars, restaurants, and we’re basically generating revenue through MICE and through corporate hospitality and through bookings for businesses, for example. We manage their TripAdvisor page, but we then manage their TripAdvisor with a B2B perspective and take the reviews and put them on LinkedIn. And then, again, we use the Sales Navigator platform to target event organizers and people who book rooms, and people who book hospitality to then book MICE into LinkedIn — for themselves, for their hotel, or their restaurant or their leisure venue or their tourism venue, for example, but a, literally, B2B perspective. That could be as diverse as Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong or it could be Hong Kong Disneyland. And you’re thinking, “Why Hong Kong Disneyland?”

Actually, they have a MICE perspective. They have a MICE objective. Because, literally, a MICE — I just realized, MICE-Mickey Mouse — but they actually have a MICE, as in Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Events objective as well. They want people to come to events there. It’s a great place. It’s half an hour outside of Central. So people want to go there, but not many people know you could actually make a booking for a conference or an event there. So they’re talking to us about using our service for that, Mohawk Marketing, and actually marketing Disneyland Hong Kong as a venue for MICE events. But you could do that on LinkedIn by targeting the event organizers. So we do that for people who don’t realize the power that you could actually use Sales Navigator to do that.

And then my fourth one is Chris J. Reed Mastery, and that’s masterclasses that engage, delight, educate, and entertain. And that’s what we do there. And that’s all about LinkedIn masterclasses, personal branding masterclasses. That’s very much where multinationals come in and say, “We need to hire you to train our team. We need to hire you to train our sales team, our marketing, or our C-suite.”

Jay: You just reminded me of something else that you brought up in the Startup Grind talk. You had a great example. I think we were talking about hashtags and the importance of hashtagging and basically tagging people. And you talked about Ritz Carlton. Can you share that story with my audience? Because I think that’s phenomenal.

Chris: Yeah. That’s a fantastic example of content marketing. Very simple, authentic, and original, compelling content marketing. I arrived at the Ritz Carlton, not last time but the time before, and my room wasn’t ready. So I said, “Look, I need to freshen up, and I need to have some meetings.”

They said, “It’s no problem at all. You can use our boardroom, and we won’t even charge you for it.”

I thought, “This is phenomenal.” So everyone got brought into the boardroom, I’m at my meetings, and everyone is going, “Wow, this is amazing. Chris has got to boardroom at the Ritz Carlton,” the highest hotel in the whole world with the most beautiful ballroom in the whole of the world. So I posted a picture of me sitting on the table of the boardroom in my ACDC Back in Black t-shirt. I got 55,000 views and hundreds of comments. People go, ‘Wow. That’s amazing. The Ritz Carlton is amazing. The Ritz Carlton’s customer service — incredible.”

And then the CEO of the group that owns the Ritz Carlton basically saw that picture on LinkedIn, commented, shared — because somebody else within the group shared it with him — arranged for me to meet him two days later. He then becomes a client as a result of that, and then recommends everybody else within the whole group to become clients as well. So as a result of that, we work for him, we work for the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong, we work for the Ritz Carlton in Shanghai, we work for the W in Hong Kong, which is all owned by this particular group. And then we’re kind of looking at other hotels as well. But as a result of one photograph on one occasion, we picked up four clients.

Jay: That’s incredible. I was saying to you earlier that that should be your marketing plan in every city that you visit, in every hotel. That’s a perfect example of the power of LinkedIn if you do it right and you do it correctly.

You mentioned you have your four business lines. Anything else on your radar for 2018? Is there anything that you’re super excited about — whether it’s personal or one of your business lines or with LinkedIn in general?

Chris: I’m very, very excited. We’re about to launch another company, another brand called Spark, and it’s called LinkedIn + Tinder = Match. And what we aim to do there is we aim to get entrepreneurs, we help them find love. But we help them find professional love. I don’t mean professional love is, not professionally you pay for the love, what I mean is… We’re not doing that. What I mean is that when you’re on Tinder, and you see some terrible profiles, that reflects on whether you can actually then have a relationship with someone. So we basically look at how you enhance your profile on Tinder but then back it up and have it linked to your LinkedIn. Because a lot of professionals want to connect and want to go out with other professionals. I live in Singapore, and I use Tinder all the time, but a lot of people that are on Tinder are domestic helpers, they’re people who just aren’t professionals. And I’ve been out with a few, and it’s fantastic, but you’re never going to have a long-term relationship with them because you’re just not on the same wavelength. If I can actually look at someone’s LinkedIn, what I tend to do is try and find their LinkedIn when I connect with them on Tinder, for example, to see who we both know, what they do, what they are, and then see how much we’re going to have in common when we chat, for example.

And vice versa. I put mine on there and say, “Check out my LinkedIn.” And also, what this does is it reassures the woman that actually you’re a real person for a real profession, and they can see you are, have that all, “I don’t want to meet someone because it’s dangerous” side of things. That’s all totally removed. I’m in Singapore anyway, so it’s very safe. But even so, people are still nervous about meeting people, and women are more nervous than men. So it’s very well to say, “There’s my LinkedIn. Here’s my recommendations. Here’s people we both know. Here’s the profession we’re in. You’re safe, and you’re sound. And this is what my brand is. Let’s talk about that.”

So it basically reassures people. I had lots of people check me and say, “Thanks very much for doing that. It’s fantastic. Let’s meet up, and then let’s see what goes from there.” But vice versa, I want to see other people’s LinkedIn. So we help people actually do that on Tinder, and we’re going to launch that mid-April. We’re just doing the creative at the moment. But I’m very excited about that because all we’re doing is looking about how else we can use LinkedIn to basically  help people in their lives. And if we can help them become happier professional because they found love, then that’s one way of making them a happy professional and a happier person in the world.

Jay: That’s a great idea. I feel like I’m surprised that doesn’t exist already. I’ve been married for a long time, so I’m not in the market or anything. But I know that, for a fact, it’s very easy to whip together a “fake” Match.com profile or Tinder, what have you. But it makes perfect sense. If you have a professional profile up there, that’s your credibility and social proof that you’re actually a real person; you’re not a psycho and this sort of thing.

Chris: And it also gets around the fact that lot of people on LinkedIn, for example, say LinkedIn’s not for dating. Actually, I disagree, because actually, where do you meet most people? Where do most people meet their spouses or their partners? At work. I have met so many people at work, in my co-working space, at an event — people either become partners or clients — at a networking event. And they’re all at work in one respect. Those same people are on LinkedIn. So why shouldn’t LinkedIn be about dating in a professional context? What this does is it takes it away from LinkedIn because I can understand why people do not want to be messaged on LinkedIn itself — no problem with that at all. So you move it away to Tinder, and then you have the back of it saying, “Here is my professional profile. You can now check me out, and I can now check you out.” So it basically achieves that objective for people who are looking for love in someone who is in a business community, but it takes it away from LinkedIn while still using the LinkedIn profile.

Jay: That’s brilliant. That’s such a good idea. What is that business line called again? Is it Spark?

Chris: It’s called Spark because Tinder is all about flame, so I thought flame, it touches the spark and then — boom! — hopefully you have passion.

Jay: Very, very smart. Chris, it’s been so good talking to you. Thank you so much for always bringing the value wherever you are. I think that the audience is going to get a lot out of this podcast. What’s the best place that people can find you, follow you, or connect with you? This is kind of funny because we obviously know it’s LinkedIn. But if people want to know a little bit more about what you do or maybe even work with you, because I know that you have a very serious… You’ve helped a lot of people in LinkedIn, and it directly affects their bottom line. So where can people find you?

Chris: They can obviously find me on LinkedIn. You can message me for free on LinkedIn. All my recommendations, my 525 LinkedIn recommendations are there. So you can check those out. We’ve got 25 of our staff who are also listed there. We basically have everything from our case studies in terms of people talking about, our YouTube channel, and lots of my blogs there as well. So you can check all that out. You obviously can read both of my books as well, which is LinkedIn Mastery for Entrepreneurs and also Personal Branding Mastery for Entrepreneurs available at Amazon in every single format going. But contacting me on LinkedIn is the easiest way to do it because then you can check our my LinkedIn profile, and I can check out yours, and we can see if we can help you.

Jay: And is BlackMarketing.com the—

Chris: Correct. BlackMarketing.com, MohawkMarketing.com, ChrisJReedMastery.com, DarkArtofMarketing.com, and, of course, ChrisJReed.com as well. We have all the dot-coms.

Jay: You’ve got it covered. Thanks so much, Chris. Really appreciate it. Had a great time today. And we’re looking forward to implementing some of the tips that you gave us. So really appreciate it.

Chris: Best of luck.

Jay: Alright. Take care. Bye.