Welcome to episode 155, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to deliver an episode last week, the conference was so ‘full on’ I had no opportunity to put together the full episode although I did manage to record a few short snippets.

Now that I’m back, albeit somewhat jet lagged, I thought I would share with you my experiences last week in San Diego

But first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week.

LinkedIn revamps timeline with Trending Storylines: curated, algorithmic news clusters This seems like a good move on the face of it, note that the trends are personalised so not everyone will see the same posts. It’s currently only available in the US (desktop & mobile) so I haven’t had a play with it yet and I will reserve judgment until then.

LinkedIn could be moving firm's IP to Ireland after Microsoft's €24bn takeover So, not happy with making more money from it’s members, LinkedIn want to pay less tax!!

Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW17)

So last week I made the trip to San Diego, a trip I had thought about making every year since this conference started. It was a big commitment both financially and in terms of time….so was it worth it?

The conference was held at the massive convention centre in downtown San Diego. SMMW had c3000 delegates but we barely took up ⅓rd of the convention centre!!

The conference began officially on Thursday but they ran a series of practical workshops on the Wednesday so my first experience was a practical session led by David H. Lawrence 17th and it couldn’t have been a better start!

How to create videos that build authority at a moments notice. David H. Lawrence XVII

I made more notes in this session than in any other. Very impressive speaker with a background as a Hollywood actor!

I met up with listener Gary Stockton afterwards to get his feedback

Key points;

• Good lighting is important (2 in front, 1 behind)
• 
  
• Use the rule of ⅔rds to position yourself. Stand slightly side on and turn your head towards the camera. Look through the camera, not at the end of the lens and look away occasionally.
• 
  
• Never use your RBF (resting Bitch face!) instead always use your BFF!
• 
  
• To correctly position your hands hold your left hand finger with your right hand and position then at the bottom of the shot.
• 
  
• A good lavalier mic is the Audio Technica ATR335015 (I already use this)
• 
  
• A good camera to use is the Canon LEGRIA HF R706
• 
  
• If you are interviewing someone, position yourself on the right of the shot.
• 
  
• Never tell an interviewee what you are going to ask them.
• 
  
• Never explain a question, keep it short “tell me about…” and let the guest shine.

How to create highly shareable social media images - Rebekah Radice

I am a big believer in the importance of images in our posts and articles on LinkedIn so I had high hopes for this workshop……it wasn’t as insightful as I hoped but I still picked up a few tips;

• Understand what images do well in your market.
• 
  
• When using text in an image, use 2-3 different fonts
• 
  
• Infographics are still popular
• 
  
• Carefully name your images with keywords
• 
  
• Great quote “Learn rules carefully so you can break them properly”!
• 
  
• Check out relaythat.com for producing LinkedIn images - some great templates and 10 free downloads a month.

Day two keynote - Michael Stelzner

• Rather than try to second guess the algorithm, focus on understanding the company’s objectives. If you know what LinkedIn are trying to achieve then you can be sure the algorithm will be programmed in line with that.
• 
  
• Facebook posts are not related to the time they are posted so scheduling at specific times does not have an impact anymore….this is definitely not true for LinkedIn though, not yet anyway. Great quote - “Become known as being helpful”

Artificial Intelligence - Christopher Penn

This was a very fascinating but complicated topic and I think I understood, at best about 20% of what Christopher covered! He was clearly a very competent, technical guy and as a result he communicated as you would expect of someone of such a ‘techie’! The main highlights were as follows;

• Machines are very capable of understanding sentiment (in comments for instance)
• 
  
• Google have developed AI that is more capable at lip reading than humans which sounds pretty scary from a privacy point of view!
• 
  
• Machines will be able to write better content than humans within 2 years (Really?!!)
• 
  
• In the future there will be 4 jobs in the workplace;   Those that tell a computer what to do (subject matter experts)   Those that are told what to do by a computer.   Sales   Entertainment
• 
  
• Chatbots are this years big deal in the social media world. Try out Mitsuko and Growthbot

How to become an evangelist - Guy Kawasaki

Guy was one of the real ‘Superstar’ presenters at the conference and he didn’t disappoint! He can be pretty controversial at times but also very entertaining. He was talking about being an evangelist and the things I learnt were as follows;

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.