Viveka von Rosen is internationally known as the “LinkedIn Expert” and has been listed as a top social media influencer in Forbes multiple times. She works with B2B companies and executives, helping them achieve business success through the use of LinkedIn.

Viveka von Rosen Leader Assistant Podcast

In this episode, Viveka highlights the importance of building an online personal brand via a LinkedIn profile. She also shares ideas on what assistants can do to help their executives manage their LinkedIn profiles, tips for improving your LinkedIn profile, and how to get your entire company to up their game on LinkedIn.

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LEADERSHIP QUOTE

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

– Warren Buffett

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Leader Assistant Viveka von Rosen Podcast
ABOUT VIVEKA

Viveka von Rosen has been speaking on stage since she was 7 years old. After a brief 30 year hiatus, she started speaking again to audiences of all sizes in 2007. Her first introduction back onto the stage was as the keynote social media speaker at the Waldorf Astoria Ballroom to a room full of millionaires and billionaires.

She is a natural, comfortable with her subject and her audience.

She speaks on LinkedIn regularly, on stage monthly at various events all over the world.

Internationally known as the “LinkedIn Expert,” Viveka works with B2B companies and executives, helping them achieve business success through the use of LinkedIn. From Auckland to Vancouver (and just about everywhere else in between) Viveka has been on stage educating and entertaining audiences about the power and potential of LinkedIn. Author of the best-selling books, LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day, and LinkedIn: 101 ways to Rock your Personal Brand, Viveka has been listed as a Top Social Media Influencer in Forbes for the past 4 years and a Top 25 Social Media Expert by LinkedIn.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Jeremy Burrows 0:00
Thank you for listening to The Leader Assistant Podcast.

Podcast Intro 0:06
The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident game changing leader assistants.

Jeremy Burrows 0:17
Hey friends before we jump into today’s interview, I wanted to share a brief note about this episode’s sponsor, which is life squire. Life squire is an assistant resource center focused on matching executives with assistants and creating relationships where both sides thrive. They would love to help you find the perfect job or work with you to enhance your skill set. You can check them out at lifesquire.com/leaderassistant. That’s lifesquire.com/leaderassistant.

Viveka von Rosen 0:51
Hi, my name is Viveka von Rosen, I’m the Chief visibility officer and co founder of vengreso, the world’s largest digital sales transformation company. And one of my favorite quotes is by Warren Buffett quote is it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. And I like this quote for for many different reasons. First of all, I believe he actually said this before social media. So now it’s maybe it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five seconds to ruin it. You know, and and in the climate that we’re in right now, business work religion, you can pretty much be assured that everything you do is going to make it online or become public at some point. And that’s why it’s so crucial. I think, as far as creating your brand, as far as being engaging in all the socials, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, that you keep in mind that anything that goes out there is going to represent you. And so it is so crucial to make sure that you’re authentic, because I think the big problem, people make mistakes. And if you’re kind of authentic in your mistakes, and you didn’t try to be something else, or portray yourself as something else. People are more forgiving. But if you present yourself as you know, this untouchable guru of everything, and then you make a mistake, and it comes across on on the socials, then I think, to Warren Buffett’s point, it can ruin your reputation immediately. So I think that authenticity is key. And I think that’s an interesting place to start this conversations because we’re talking about the world of executives and virtual assistants. And that VAs in fact do a lot of work for us. So how do we stay authentic? When a VA is in essence, speaking for us and representing us?

Jeremy Burrows 3:00
So Viveka What was your very first job? And did it involve any sort of social media?

Viveka von Rosen 3:08
Yeah, no. I just say, you know computers barely existed my very first job so I’ll give you a hard no on that one. I folded clothes at Benetton now. I don’t even know if Benetton still exists. You know, back when I was 15. And I won’t even say how many years ago that was. I became involved in social media. In in my previous day job before I started my previous company in this company. And you know, social media was really the birth of social media. It was Facebook wasn’t around yet. Twitter wasn’t around yet. You know, we had MySpace and match.com. And then, of course, Reed Hoffman, in the end, the guys over it at LinkedIn said, Hey, let’s do a, you know, let’s let’s do a match.com for businesses. And in fact, a lot of people don’t know this, but Reed Hoffman had created previous to LinkedIn, a dating site. And so he was, you know, realizing that maybe there wasn’t a need for a dating site, but that there was definitely a need for business professionals to start out in the California area and in the in the, you know, SAS and software arena. He created LinkedIn. And so that’s I was introduced to LinkedIn pretty early and I just realized what a powerful business tool it would be. And also, I don’t give short answers. So no, social media was not around when I had my first job. So

Jeremy Burrows 4:41
how did you kind of transition into making the LinkedIn world and being an expert and trainer and LinkedIn kind of your full time gig?

Viveka von Rosen 4:52
Yeah, I in the job I had I was I was part owner and running a co share space, and we called the Dixon could have offices back then. But, but a co share space. And what I learned pretty quickly about myself was I was really good at marketing, and pretty good at sales and really bad at management. And unfortunately, this job had a huge element of managing people and clients. So I did really, really well at you know, creating networking events for our, for our clientele, and introducing them to each other and, and, you know, helping them with with with the networking, live networking, because this is before social networking. And I, one of the events that I created was to introduce the world of web 2.0, which again, tells you how long ago it was. And the idea that your website did not have to be brought just a brochure that it could actually engage with the with the modern or with the buyer. And so at the very end of that presentation, the woman that I brought in, Laurie mekomo, blue skies marketing, she mentioned this thing called LinkedIn. And I was like, Oh, that’s pretty cool, because I’d managed to double our business in a year doing face to face networking. And I believe there were 7 million people on LinkedIn, on the LinkedIn network at that time. And to me, that was a huge number. Because we didn’t have Facebook, we didn’t have Twitter, we didn’t have Instagram, we didn’t have these 100,000 200,000 2 billion people mark. So 7 million people. And the potential of reaching out to a big portion of those 7 million people with my virtual services was huge. And so I just kind of dove in. There was only one book on that on on LinkedIn at that time, which was Jason Alba’s, I’m on LinkedIn. Now what I reached out to him, he was very gracious about responding, we became, you know, friends online. In fact, he wrote the foreword to my first book. And, you know, we really, I really kind of engulfed myself in this thing called LinkedIn. And thankfully, within a year, an association that we were a member of heard about me and said, Hey, come come to New York and speak at the Waldorf Astoria to a roomful of million and billionaires about this thing called social media. And that that was pretty much the launch of my career, it took another year until I was able to release the the executive offices and move full time into LinkedIn to business, which was my previous business. But that that’s basically how that happened.

Jeremy Burrows 7:25
So talk a little bit about the importance of having kind of an online presence or an online personal brand.

Viveka von Rosen 7:34
Yeah, I think it’s crucial now more than ever, and you know, especially for executives, but also for the people who assist them, like the virtual assistants and the and the executive assistants out there. You know, your brand is, is crucial. And to Warren Buffett’s point, you know, you don’t want to you don’t want to ruin your reputation by having a bad brand out there. And so, when it comes to LinkedIn, especially because it plays so high in the Google algorithm, you need to make sure that you’ve got a strong brand, whether you’re, you know, your entry level VA, or the CEO of the company, because the modern buyer, it’s 62, I think this was in LinkedIn, most recent status sales report 62% of modern buyers research their, the, their vendor before going with them. And of course, they’re gonna Google them. And if they Google them, their LinkedIn profile is going to show up, and we don’t know who they’re researching in a company, are they researching the CEO? Are they researching their salesperson? Are they researching the back office production line person are, you know, are they researching the engineers? Who are they researching and so it’s, it’s crucial that certainly the CEO and the leadership of the company have a strong brand that represents both themselves in the industry, but also their company. But just as crucial, I think, is for you know, who we for the other folks who might be behind the scenes, but if they’re, if they’re being researched, and if the company is being researched, they need to create a strong brand too. And that’s more than just throwing your resume up in 2007. On LinkedIn, you know, and that’s I think we’re a big issue starts to arise is you get you got buyers who are looking for a product or service they’re researching, they click over to the CEOs profile, it looks like crap because no one’s done anything with it because he doesn’t need a job. And that’s what you know, back in the day, people thought LinkedIn was just for job seekers. And so people start hunting around the company. And you know, if the company does a bad job of representing itself through its employees, they might move on. And that’s the last thing we want is for your brand to cost you business. We wanted to help build your business.

Jeremy Burrows 9:54
Yeah. I like to talk to assistants about how We as assistants should be one of the best salespeople in our organizations. And I personally believe LinkedIn is a huge part of this, could you share maybe an example or two of how you’ve seen maybe some non sales roles, end up generating business for their company or organization using LinkedIn?

Viveka von Rosen 10:20
Ya know, a perfect example of this is we’ve got a whole division actually, for personal branding. I’ve got a whole team of profile writers. And you know, it’s a natural conversation, a profile, right, we’ll be working with, and a lot of them are profile writers, because they, you know, they’re like, oh, I don’t want to say I don’t want to have a sales conversation. Yikes. And it’s ironic that, you know, the perfect time to have a conversation about the next steps, is when you’re writing someone’s profile, because the client will ask you, you know, hey, great profile. Thanks so much. Now what? To reflect Jason’s book, I’m on LinkedIn with an awesome profile. Now what? And so just recently, actually, one of our writers is she she just happened, Sophie Bucha, who Great Canadian, but happens to be our senior leader, she was having a conversation with someone that she wrote a profile for. And, you know, and and it was just it was, it wasn’t scary, it was a natural conversation for her. But she was able to glean that. A, not only did the CEO, think that other people on my team need to have a good profile to, but now what and so she was able to, you know, reach out to our sales department and say, hey, you know, this guy’s interested. And by the way, she you know, she gets a nice fifth out of that to a lot of times whether it’s whether it’s obvious oak, or I don’t know what we’re doing, we’re to use covert, I don’t want the that to be negative to have a negative implication, but our VAs are engaged in for us. And so we need to be able to train them in such a way that they can start to have the first conversation for us. In my case, you know, as a writer, another thing is, I’ve got a I’ve got a personal Well, we’ve got, I’ve got an assistant with vengreso itself, but I also have a personal assistant. And, you know, she has been with me for so long. She can speak in my voice, she knows who my buyer persona is, she knows how to initiate those conversations. She knows, buying signals she knows to reach out to me when she sees a buying signal. And I think that’s absolutely crucial that our VAs and our assistants are able to do that. And it’s easier, certainly with someone who’s been with us forever, because, you know, it’s training that’s necessary, I think, for someone new to to our company.

Jeremy Burrows 12:47
Yeah. So you mentioned your assistant, help you kind of manage your, your LinkedIn inbox? Do you have tips for executives who might struggle to give up control of their, their main inbox or even they’re just LinkedIn messaging?

Viveka von Rosen 13:03
Yeah, yeah. And trust me, I’m one of those. So I’ll say that with a caveat that our VAs are not supposed to be on LinkedIn doing stuff for us. That that kind of goes against LinkedIn, the end user agreement, and you know, a lot of busy executives, they’ll have one to 300 invitations to connect in a day, and there’s no way they can manage that. So with the caveat that of course, this goes against LinkedIn and user agreement. I think it’s important, as I mentioned, for your your VA, to know very clearly your buyer persona. So one of the first things that Nicole does for me is go through my invitations to connect, and if someone is not a buyer persona, and if they are not, if they haven’t customized an invitation to connect, I have created a basically a video reply, and she’ll, she’ll be, she’ll send that to everyone. And in the video reply, and in the message itself, it says, The please let me know if you have any questions. You know, I’m happy to answer any questions and happy to connect, you know, if there’s a reason for us to, and so it’s, you know, it’s it’s interesting, because I will say 90% of the time, I never hear a response. And so my guess is that for myself, and for a lot of the people out there, there’s someone’s automating some lead generation system, which so goes against LinkedIn, send User Agreement, and they have no idea they’ve invited me to connect. I, you know, she’ll, she’ll alert me immediately if it’s a if the person has invited me to connect with a, with a private message that’s, you know, relevant, like, hey, we want you to speak at our next event. Or, hey, we want to learn more about vengreso and what you do because we need some personal branding and we need training on digital sales, transformation and social selling Essential, of course, alerts me right away. And I see that on my email too. So it’s just kind of a backup. And then if it’s personalized message, but not, again, not not crucially relevant, she’ll, she’ll kind of give me a digest at the end of the day, as does LinkedIn. But it’s, again, it’s a good backup, I manage on my personal messaging. So I, you know, she doesn’t manage that for me. Now, I know for people who are more pro proactive on inviting people to connect, they’ll use their VA to do outreach. The problem of that, of course, is when you’re does outreach to a friend or a colleague or a client or a customer, who you already know, with, with the kind of more formalized Hey, we don’t know each other. But I noticed that you’re doing this and I’d love to connect. That’s always you know, kind of embarrassing. So I don’t actually recommend a VA does outbound activity on on LinkedIn ad, because it goes against the use End User Agreement, the because it can make could end up with your foot in your mouth. But but definitely things like managing an inbox, managing your invitations. With guidelines, you have to have really strong guidelines. The other thing that a VA can do, of course, is post for you, you can use a scheduling tool, of course, we use everyone social, but Agora Pulse is great, Hootsuite is great. I mean, there’s there’s a lot of good scheduling tools out there, we have found that posting natively gets you much better results. And so that’s a great thing for VA to do, not only to post but to manage the likes and the comments, and similarily to my inbox, my VA will look at the activity on my posts and say, hey, you know, this CEO of this SAS company in San Francisco, asked, you know, a question about your, your, you’re your video, and, you know, you might want to respond to it, and then she’ll actually send me the link, right to the response, so that I can jump in there and and engage with that person immediately. So she’ll more, you know, keep monitor than then engaged on those things. But if she sees something that needs activity, you know, she’ll call it out to me, and that way, I don’t have to spend 3040 50 minutes a day reviewing all the activity on my timeline. So those are, those are just a couple things that she does. Another thing that a VA can do is helped to manage once you’ve created a template for your company, a profile template for your company, the VA can manage help to manage with that activity of all of your employees, upgrading their profiles, and that’s, that’s one thing that our see our customer success manager, she’ll work with our big corporate teams, she’ll work you she’ll usually work with someone on the other side to you know, make sure that the profiles are getting in and and dealing with passwords and, and making sure the right media is in there. And so that’s that’s a great job for virtual assistant is to help manage the, the upgrade of all personal profiles within your company.

Jeremy Burrows 18:10
That’s great. So let’s talk about the profile then for a second, what what’s kind of one or two tips on improving LinkedIn profiles for assistants.

Viveka von Rosen 18:21
Yeah, and this is great, because you can you can make these changes pretty quickly on everybody’s profile and the company, again, with the understanding that you’re not supposed to go in and do something for for an employee, but you know, knowing knowing knowing the shortage of time, will just say manage these these events. So the a couple things that you can do right away with your profile, to make sure that your profile to make sure that your executives profile and to make sure that all your employees profiles are well branded, branded, and aligned is a background image. One background image that everyone in the company uploads or a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll have several different background images according to where employees you know, are located or what areas of expertise or silos they’re in, in a particular company. And so but having that background image I can immediately make a statement about the company and help with the branding of that company and make the company actually appear much larger than it actually is. Especially if you get all of all of the employees utilizing you know things like the background image. The other thing that you can do is upgrade as it were the the headline which is where most people put title at company, which doesn’t really say anything. It’s it’s there’s nothing there attractive to a buyer, especially if your title or your company doesn’t really mean anything like mine’s CVO of vengreso Well, first of all, no one knows what a CVO is its chief visibility officer, and no one knows what a vengreso It’s like, is it soup? Is it a race car? What is the vengreso? Right. And so it’s, by the way, it’s it’s Latin for Ventus, and ingresos, which is sales revenue. But, but anyway, if I just had CVO vengreso, that would do nothing for my brand. So instead, basically using that headline to tell people, you know, who you help and how you help them, it’s 120 characters, that’s going to go a lot further towards attracting buyers to your to your profiles. So just changing up the headline and again, giving we usually give 10 options to our clients, who they are and how they help. And then expanding on that in the summary section, that can be a little bit tough, because you know, the summary section really is more about your role within the company and who they help and how they help them. But it’s easy to upload media. So getting compiling some media links that they can upload to make their profile more of a resource than a resume, and then creating a description of the company for the experience section that, you know, again, aligns with the company’s values, it’s actually what the company does, because a lot of times people will pull one or two lines from their resume, or they might not put anything in that description section, which by the way, is 2000 characters. If we’re lucky, they’ll pull it from the about us section, but they might have pulled it from the about us section six years ago. And since then, we’ve gone through 16 rebranding things, and so it’s completely inaccurate. So making sure that they’ve got the most accurate company description, the most accurate media to upload the best basic, you know, the best headline that really talks about who you serve, and how you serve them, and then a strong background image. And then the other thing is the contact information, make sure that the folks have the right landing pages on their profile, not their old company’s link, and a VA can help with at the very least checking to make sure that everyone in the company is aligned, or even, you know, helping them do that.

Jeremy Burrows 22:16
So once your profile is kind of nice and clean, and snazzy and engaging, what’s kind of what’s the next thing for, you know, again, these executive assistants, personal assistants, virtual assistants, what’s the next thing they can do to kind of develop as a thought leader or really just cause their LinkedIn profile and their LinkedIn presence to be more than just a nice looking one page profile?

Viveka von Rosen 22:46
Exactly, exactly. Well, the next part of it is engagement. Well, the next part is keeping an eye on your inbox and make sure you’re not missing out on any business there. But after that comes engagement. And so you know, whether you’re doing this again, for for an executive at a company or for yourself, and why not do both. It’s about finding content that’s relevant to your buyer persona. So it’s always important that you actually know who that person is, it’s important for you to know who you serve and how you serve them. That is key. I mean, you might have more than one buyer persona, and that’s fine. But what you’re gonna want to do is start to curate content, not just from your own blog, not just from your own company’s YouTube channel, but content that is of interest to your buyer, to the industry that they’re in, if you are, you know, creatively inclined, and you can create content, great, but if not curate content, curate, infographics, quotes, blog posts, checklists, videos, you might even create some native video to upload that is reflective of the industry in general, you probably just don’t want to use a competitor stuff. But that’s reflective of the industry in general. And then of course, once in a while you throw in your own company stuff, but you don’t want it to appear like it’s an advertisement. And it’s interesting CSO insights, which is a Miller Heiman Group company. They just did some research on this. And what they discovered is that, you know, as far as trust factor, people are a lot less likely to trust the CEO of a company, or the marketing team of a company, but they’re a lot more likely to trust influencers within the company, employees within the company, and so and thought leaders within an industry who share content, and so, you know, yeah, you want to create this for the CEO, but really, you might have more impact as the VA sharing this content, because it shows enthusiasm and engage meant and hey, if if if a virtual assistant is enthusiastic about this company and sharing content, then there might be something here and I’m going to keep reading a little bit more the other thing, and I cannot remember where this where this stat comes from, if it’s from LinkedIn, digital sales report or where it came from, but anyway, or it was HubSpot, maybe it was something like winning vendor or buyers, buy from vendors, where they’ve read five to six pieces of their information. So vendors gonna read five to six pieces, or five to seven pieces rather of information about your product or service before they buy from you. And the problem is, some people are social selling savvy, and they might be your competitors. And if your competitors are sharing content on LinkedIn, and your buyers are reading it, that’s who they’re going to trust is the thought leader. And it just doesn’t take that much time and effort to find content your own or industry relevant content and post it to LinkedIn, and become the curator of your timeline, and become the curator of industry expertise and start to associate yourself with that expertise and thought leader positioning. And I’ll just say one more thing about that. Don’t just share a link, you’ve got about 1200 characters, to write almost a mini blog post, and you don’t have to be a writer, and you don’t have to be a marketing expert, and you don’t have to be an author. In order to do that. All you have to do is tell, you know, identify the audience who the article is for, Hey, are you a marketing or sales professional, you might want to read this article, take, take five minutes to click through or three minutes to click through or 12 minutes to click through, you’ll learn about bullet point bullet point bullet point bullet point. You know, if you have any more questions, please feel free to reach out to me and comments below. Hashtag hashtag at mentioned at mentioned. So it you know, it might take you five minutes to craft the description of the content that you’re sharing. Again, just identifying who the contents for what the contents about what they should do with the content and and of course make yourself accessible to them. If they have questions about the content. If you just do that once a day, once a day you find some good content to share. And again, you can replicate this for if you’re if you’re managing a CEO, or someone an executives profile. You could do it for them too. But once a day, you do that and it will massively increase your visibility and engagement on LinkedIn. And that that drives business. Yeah.

Jeremy Burrows 27:51
That’s a great tips. What about LinkedIn groups? Do you have any thoughts on how to engage with LinkedIn groups or, you know, right

Viveka von Rosen 27:57
now I’m kind of put a pass on LinkedIn groups. I think there’s so much opportunity. And unfortunately, LinkedIn when there was so much spam with groups that LinkedIn went, Okay, we’re not going to let spammers in anymore. And so they just locked groups down so much, including notifications, that even if you’re active in a group, you know, chances are, you’re not gonna get notified that your discussion that you posted is getting any engagement. So you’re ignoring it, you’re forgetting about it. And it’s just sitting there. And that’s why in my humble opinion, groups aren’t very good right now, also, a lot of people will create a group not realizing that it is an effort to manage and monitor that you need to be a community manager of that group if you’re creating it. Now, you know, a exception to that rule is, there’s a there’s a group in that I follow on LinkedIn. And it’s me see if I can, Sue feet is the is her name, she’s She manages the group. And she’s she, she she does the best job of monitoring a group I think I’ve ever seen Scott step into the spotlight. And I mean, her whole profile is even about it. And she’s got very, very, very, very, very strict guidelines about what to do within her group. And and you can only ask questions, you can’t get in there. You can post, you know, a blog post or something in a response to a question, but you can only ask questions. And because people are asking questions, they’re getting answers. And she’s really, really good about monitoring the group and notifying people if they’re not responding. You know, so she’s she’s done a phenomenal, phenomenal job with her group. And she see, she’s really the only one who’s impressed me. And so, the long and the short answer is, unless you’re willing to invest in a group invest your time in a group, it’s probably not worth it. And if you are could it could you know, her whole business basically runs on and through this group. So she’s done a phenomenal job of it, it’s T su fit, I’m probably mispronouncing your name. And if I am, I apologize, but T su fit, you can look for her on LinkedIn, you can see step into the spotlight and see what she’s done about that.

Jeremy Burrows 30:31
Awesome. And I’ll put that link in the show notes too. So people can perfect. Awesome. Well, is there anything that your assistant or one of your assistants have done that? I’m sure there are many of these things, but maybe maybe you can describe a time when your assistant saved the day?

Viveka von Rosen 30:47
Oh, yeah. So um, you know, it’s interesting. So I told the story about how I kind of got started on on LinkedIn. And for three years, I was a solopreneur bootstrapper doing everything myself, I mean, everything myself, and there’s probably a lot of entrepreneurs solopreneurs, who feel me on that. And then finally, and you know, I was kind of struggling as you do. So finally, it’s like, I cannot do this anymore. I’ve got to hire someone. So I reached out to my friend, Jessica Peterson, who had a VA. And I said, you know, who can you recommend? She’s possibly the best networker I’ve ever met in my life. And she said, Well, you know, my VA needs some extra hours. Why don’t you you know, why don’t you train her up? And so crystal was my first virtual assistant. And I will tell you, she paid for herself in the first month like I, you know, I was barely making my own paycheck. But she paid for herself with within the first month and she started generating revenue within the second month, because I could I could, you know, I was using her to do at the time LinkedIn done for you and stuff like that. And so plus, she let me do what only I do best. And she did the rest. And so I you know, there was a lot of stuff I didn’t have to deal with that I was bad at anyway. And then when when Krystal moved along, you know, she I said, Okay, do you know anyone who would be really good? And so she said, Oh, Nicole, you should, you should, you know, talk to my friend, Nicole. And so Nicole started working for me, almost full time right away. And it was it was during that time that because I had the extra time because she was taking care of, you know, for one of a better word, the menial tasks, it freed up enough of my time that I was able to do more blogging, I was able to create more visibility online. And that’s when that’s when Wiley reached out to me and said, Hey, we really like the blog that you’ve got on LinkedIn. It was an app back then you could pull blogs into your LinkedIn profile, actually spoke 2009 I guess I really liked the blog that you have on LinkedIn. Do you want to write a book for us? Major publishing house asking if you want to write a book for them? Okay. And so I there’s no way there is no way I would have had the time to write the blog to create the visibility without Nicole’s and crystals assistance. And and I just, that’s I so value, the industry of VAs and executive assistant EAS because it allows us to do what we do best. And God bless because I you know, Nicole, I don’t even know how she tests it day in and day out. But I probably need to give her another raise. But I really do. I really do. Yeah, and and I just there’s, there’s no way a company can function without an effective and a functioning VA or EA presence. I just don’t think there is whether you’re literally a bootstrap solopreneur or a fortune 50 company. They’re absolutely integral to our success, in my humble opinion.

Jeremy Burrows 34:02
Totally agree. Totally agree. All right. Well, let’s let’s finish the amazing interview with with the last question, Should we be concerned about or even worried about investing so much time and energy into LinkedIn, which is a social media platform that hypothetically could, you know, become obsolete someday? Or they could change our algorithms overnight? And, you know, what do you think about that, as far as his LinkedIn here to stay in? Should we, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, you need to have your own website, you need to own your content, you need to own your platform. That way. If the algorithms change, you’re not screwed, you know, what are your thoughts on that?

Viveka von Rosen 34:45
Yeah, you know, yes, of course, build, build, build, build your house on your own land on somebody else’s land for sure. And, but and Microsoft invested 26 plus billion and it’s twice 6.2 or 26. Wait for Billy in with a B dollars in LinkedIn, it’s not going away, right? Like they invested in Skype, Skype hasn’t gone away either. And so LinkedIn is most definitely not going anywhere. The other thing is LinkedIn is a lot more conservative than the other social networking sites. And on the one hand that drives me nuts, like they just came out with with LinkedIn live, and I still don’t have it. But but, you know, other social networking sites have been for two or three years. But the other thing you don’t see are all of these crazy swings and shifts and you learn how to do one thing, and then you know, all of a sudden is gone. And that’s, that’s there’s a lot of that going on on the other on the other social networking sites. And yeah, I don’t think Facebook’s really going anywhere. There’s too many people using it. I don’t think Instagrams going anywhere, it’s too popular. I don’t think YouTube’s going anywhere. I mean, except for that they’ve shifted their model a lot to be more of a network even than just a place where you pop your videos. And so I just I absolutely obvious, obviously, my whole company is built on the fact that LinkedIn is around to stay. I absolutely think that utilizing LinkedIn, especially if you’re, you know, business business to business. If you’re, you know, if you provide services to businesses, it’s 100 is 1,000% crucial, I think, to your success, so yes, invest the time invest the effort. I mean, worst case scenario, and I just can’t see it ending other than, you know, an apocalypse. Should should LinkedIn go away and something else come up, you can still bring your brand and your marketing and your network with you, wherever, you know, happens to pop up next, but not if you don’t have one. And so yeah, it’s absolutely worth investing the time and effort into LinkedIn.

Jeremy Burrows 37:09
Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Viveka, thanks so much for taking time out of your day. Great tips and tricks? Where can we find you online? And where can we find out more about LinkedIn and improving your LinkedIn presence?

Viveka von Rosen 37:23
Sure. So if you just Google LinkedIn experts is why I love LinkedIn so much. If you just Google LinkedIn expert, my profile should be the first second or third thing that shows up under the paid ads. Just click through and invite me to you can follow me right away. But if you click on the three dots, you can invite me to connect, just make sure you customize the invitation either on mobile or on on your desktop. So as I said, so that I actually see it and that my assistant, but yeah, I’d be more than happy to connect on LinkedIn, you can find us on At vengreso VENGRESO just went us, Vengreso We’re not the soup, vengreso.com. And, you know, we’ve got our blog, we got two podcasts and a blog and just like more information than you could possibly consume in a lifetime on social selling. So you know, enjoy, enjoy browsing around through through our podcasts and our blog, truly about anything you ever needed to know about LinkedIn. And similarly, our YouTube channels, fantastic. We’ve got training videos, testimonials, case studies, interviews, I mean, we’ve got so much on our YouTube channel. And you can find us on YouTube, just go to join, join on youtube.com. Follow on twitter.com, join on linkedin.com. All of those places will take you to our vengreso presence online.

Jeremy Burrows 38:50
Awesome. Well, I’ll share those links in the show notes as well. And thank you so much for taking time out of your day. And yeah, we’ll talk soon.

Viveka von Rosen 38:58
Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Jeremy Burrows 39:00
Thanks again to Viveka for a great interview. Be sure to check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/83. And just a quick note that we actually recorded this interview a little over a year ago and things got a bit crazy with the world and my schedule. So I’m finally publishing it. And now they’ve actually has LinkedIn live. So if you want to see how LinkedIn live works, check out her profile as well. She’s been doing a lot of LinkedIn live videos. All right, until next time, keep leading well and have a good one.

Unknown Speaker 39:46
Please live you on Apple podcasts. Goburrows.com

 

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