LinkedIn, Social Recruiting Conference: A tale of great content marketing
I recently attended LinkedIn's @hireonlinkedin #socialrecruitin conference at the Business Design Centre in Islington.
The conference was aimed at staffing agencies looking to gain the latest insight on social media, technology and recruitment.
The event started brilliantly, compèred by Deborah Frances-White @DeborahFW who likened the fear of public speaking to a fear of getting eaten, and then introduced the Gazelle vs Lion concept to the audience.
Whilst picking out people from the audience and getting us to mimic the different 'animal' behaviours, she explained how the majority of speakers would instantly categorise themselves as a gazelle, look down and back away from the audience.
The Lion on the other hand comes toward its audience with no fear, and takes no prisoners. Deborah was there to turn us all into Lions!
Rather than take a vain attempt to re-tell her story I will share her Ted Talk here so you can see her in action, which I would urge anyone to watch.
The result of her approach - was huge social impact and viral sharing and I am sure I am not the only attendee who went away from the event remembering her great delivery. You only need to follow the #socialrecruitin hashtag to see for yourself. Even James Caan who was another keynote speaker on the way was equally impressed and chose to write his own blog on it too!
She combined humour, storytelling and practical insight into one and this in essence is what the marketing industry is trying to achieve. Even now, two weeks later, I am still thinking about it!
Humour (she is incredibly funny!) and storytelling makes for a memorable experience, you don't have to be a comedian to inject some humour and light-heartedness into your content.
Talk to people as individuals not companies (in B2B or professional services). Deborah didn't care which companies we represented, she picked out a common challenge for us 'public speaking' or what she called 'getting rid of stage fright' and tailored her content to each and every one of us.
Allow people to engage with your content for the best results (Deborah picked people from the audience to answer questions, but she also got us all to interact with the head-shaking exercise, (apparently if you can't control your own head you can't expect to be in control over anything else when speaking!)
