Hack LinkedIn Networking (the people skill, not the tech skill)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] three years ago in this right here in the city of tel aviv i was laid off with more than half the startup i was at now at the time i was a relatively new immigrant no family in the country and really very few connections not really a unique story here in israel but it's not a fun one to say the least months into the job hunt i came across a man by the name of yol israel who was showing how to use linkedin more effectively now if you're like me you probably think of linkedin as a boring professional platform for people in suits or like i was at the time one more place

to throw up my resume in desperation but what he taught me was that it completely changed how i viewed my career and my networking one thing i'm going to go back over here to my notes i went from having no connections to my last two jobs coming from linkedin not because of an easy fill application but rather because of the connections that i made now i have connections to professionals all across the globe these are amazing individuals that i have built relationships with that i can reach out to for support feedback and professional insights one of them is my boss today and i got the pleasure of meeting chris in person here at the here at the b-sides

what this taught me is the saying is true your network is your net worth and in fact as a cyber professional you already have the skills that you need to strategically grow your network we just need to reframe it for you in the context of networking professionally on linkedin so let's start now like any good project you need to determine your goals there's a few things you can do on linkedin but you need to be clear where you are today so that you can act with focus and intention because like jax points out creating an effective network is done through those those two things so are you job hunting then you want to look for people that have the role that

you are aspiring to and connect with them but don't just stop there look for the managers also of those roles and additionally consider professionals that work in collaboration with those roles reach out connect to them and build relationships if you're looking to grow your skills linkedin is full of an amazing cyber community of people that are doing free webinars podcasts trainings they download free notes all the time they have discord servers and mentorships it's really great community so go and check it out and don't forget to connect with other learners because when we teach someone else we learn even better now in looking at our target it's important to note that we don't want to just grow

the size of our network you also want to grow the diversity network scientist ron burt performed a serve a study that's been repeated many times and it shows that simply by having an open network versus a closed one is the best predictor of career success what's a closed network well it's basically like a pinball machine right where everyone already knows everybody and you're just bouncing around within a closed system an open network is one that's full of clusters of professionals and they're not directly connected but you are the free agent that can connect between them and as you see opportunities thus making opportunities for them as well it's a win-win now to give an example for myself i've

kind of identified three broad categories that i like to connect with i have my cyber professionals such as yourselves my fellow marketing peers and then i have a hodgepodge of like small business owners and entrepreneurs and freelancers does this mean i never veer from connecting to other people who don't fall into that categories no but it helps me to stay focused and intentional and reduce the noise in my network so and hopefully hopefully also the bots and the fake profiles we know are there so now we've defined our broad categories of who we want to connect with you want to narrow it down because i said we can do this in 10 minutes a day right

so what we're going to do first off we're going to remember linkedin is just like any other social app it's designed to keep our attention on the platform but you don't have time for that so how do we avoid the vortex of the scrolling feed we're going to identify just five professionals inside our target audience but not just any professionals we want to look for professionals that i like to call the the five mvps the big three and the two little two now what is the big three the big three is going to be professionals that have a large following approximately 10 000 or more but they don't just have a lot of followers they're also going to have

and they're going to be actively posting and they're going to be not just re-sharing content but actually putting forth their own unique feedback their own professional insights their opinions they're going to be thought leaders but last we're going to look at one more parameter for them to make the cut they need to have an engaged audience i don't mean they're just liking and clapping but they're actually having comments and conversation because in total what these professionals are going to be doing they drive conversation because it's a conversation that you can join the small 2 is very similar except they're just going to have a smaller audience they might have a little bit lower engagement but you're going to see

consistency so now that we've identified our five mvps it's time to work smart not hard we want to gain and maintain access so basically first connect that's easy usually and then we want to engage them but we've got it we want to keep it to 10 minutes because you're busy so what we're going to do is my low tech hack or no tech hack basically you're going to open up the professional profiles for each of your five mvps you're going to scroll down to the activity section and then open up that view now i know this isn't a secret to anybody who's done osint on linkedin but for our purposes we want to change the view so we want to actually go to

there we go we want it to change to the posts now what this does is it gives us a url directly to their post feed so i can bypass the scroll of the linkedin feed i can go straight to each of my professionals and see what the latest conversation is that they've started then i'm just going to simply bookmark the url put it in a bookmarks folder every day commit to 10 minutes a day five days a week for a month and then you know all you need to do then is evaluate and adjust see what conversations open up and see what new professionals may have come across your radar now i call this talk hacking linkedin

networking but like most of the big hacks it's a long game after all you're building relationships it's important for me to stress here that linkedin is the tool the people are not what i've laid out for you is simply a strategy for you to jump start your networking from there it's all about being a digital and almost got it chris almost got it don't tell ryan from here it's all about being a human in a digital world thank you ryan consistently show up and enrich the community now in marketing we also have white hat and black cat tactics but if you ask a white hat marketer or sales person they're going to tell you people buy

from people the same is true for networking and the same is true for getting hired so be honest be authentic and be about the people and you'll build an amazing network you don't have to be like me from three years ago get started today change how you think and look at your skills to reevaluate and apply them to be strategic in your networking to grow your network and therefore grow your net worth while you're at it i'd love to connect thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]