The 2018 LinkedIn Connection Competition

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

The 2018 LinkedIn Connection Competition

04/30/2018

[Music]

Intro: Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software, Metadata… Got the world turning as fast as it can, hear how technology can help, legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to The Kennedy-Mighell Report here on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode #212 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas. Before we get started, we would like to thank our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy: First of all, thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring our show. Communicate Smarter with TextExpander. Gather, Perfect, and Share Your Knowledge. Recall your best words instantly and repeatedly. Learn more at  HYPERLINK “http://www.textexpander.com/podcast”textexpander.com/podcast.

Tom Mighell: We would also like to thank ServeNow, a nationwide network of trusted, prescreened process servers. Work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high-volume serves, embrace technology and understand the litigation process. Visit  HYPERLINK “http://www.serve-now.com/”serve-now.com to learn more.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we discussed what some have called the End of Windows. We also mentioned that the second edition of our book The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies is now available on the ABA online bookstore.

In this episode of the podcast, we’re doing something very special. It involves some special guests, LinkedIn and a contest. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be having a LinkedIn contest with our special guests, Julie Tolek and Laurence Colletti. Dennis promises that this is going to be a great and fun way for us to up our LinkedIn game and for all of our listeners to do the same.

You can play along at home, and as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots that one-tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, our LinkedIn challenge and contest, those who listen to the podcast know that we have talked many times about LinkedIn on the show. And although I will always tease Dennis that LinkedIn is the third most popular social network, he will come right back and remind me that it is the most important social network for lawyers to be using.

So, we thought we’d devote a special episode to having some fun and getting more out of LinkedIn. Dennis, where do you want to start with this?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, let’s introduce our special guests, Julie Tolek and Laurence Colletti and we should also introduce you as well, Tom, because people sometimes forget all of the things that you’re doing. So, I want everybody to introduce themselves first by reading their LinkedIn headline, and then, maybe adding some more detail about themselves if they feel their headline is a little bit inadequate. That will get everybody thinking about how others actually see them on LinkedIn.

Tom, do you want to start that process?

Tom Mighell: Sure. So, my LinkedIn headline is pretty short and sweet. It says I am primarily a Vice President of Service Delivery at Contoural. I am also a technology speaker and writer, author, podcaster, and tech blogger. That’s my headline.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, Julie?

Julie Tolek: My headline says, Firearms Law and Family Law, Founder and Solo Attorney at Think Pink Law, Associate at Skylark Law & Mediation.

Dennis Kennedy: And Laurence?

Laurence Colletti: Hi there. Hi there. Mine says Executive Producer at Legal Talk Network. I like long walks on the beach and showering with dish soap.

Dennis Kennedy: Nice. May be a little bit too much information on that one Laurence, but actually, I think you guys all have good interesting headlines and I think as we do this contest and you start to add people, one thing you’re going to notice is how a lot of people just don’t take advantage of headlines.

So, let me give a little background on the contest idea and let me give credit to the person I call the hardest-working man in legal showbiz, Laurence, and this idea came up after Laurence and I recorded a podcast with Chuki Obiyo at TECHSHOW 2018. And I had mentioned to Laurence my belief that many people underestimate the value of quantity of connections on LinkedIn and the value of what I call weak connections.

So, there are strong connections, those are people that you know really well and some people limit LinkedIn to just those people. But a lot of times on LinkedIn and in the real-world, it’s the people that are sort of friend of a friend or you know slightly, who actually can make introductions and referrals and provide valuable information to you.

So it’s those weak connections that become really interesting. And so, the more sort of good quality but weaker connections that you have on LinkedIn that you can develop through just increasing quantity can pay off benefits on LinkedIn.

(00:04:57)

Laurence was also impressed, I had added a good number of connections over the past year on LinkedIn. And then, I also made a claim to Laurence that I believed a serious LinkedIn user with good real-world networks could add a thousand new connections in one month, if they really worked at it. So, the result was this idea for the challenge in the contest.

And so, let’s first take a step back and talk about my favorite LinkedIn question, which is what are you hiring LinkedIn to do?

So, I always try to say, if I’m using LinkedIn what I hope to accomplish with LinkedIn and I think if we kind of step back and look at that question, then the idea of adding a bunch of new connections will start to make sense.

So, Julie, let me ask you the question first, what are you hiring LinkedIn to do and sort of what do you hope to accomplish by adding a large number of new connections?

Julie Tolek: So, this is super-interesting to me because I’m not really a big user of LinkedIn as it is, and you guys know that I’m all over social media all the time, but if we consider LinkedIn, on another social media network, it’s one that I use very rarely unless I have something big to update in my profile, like a new position or starting — when I started my practice, I made sure everything was up to date.

And more for SEO than anything, so this challenge, this contest is intriguing to me because I want to learn why people like LinkedIn so much. So I don’t know if that answers the question as to what I’m hiring LinkedIn to do but I hope to learn how I can use it better and why people like it so much in the process.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, that’s great and that’s the common question I get is that people feel that LinkedIn has some value but they just haven’t unlocked it, and they’re looking — they know that they could be using LinkedIn in better ways and so I think your question is a great one, and probably a lot of people listening have the same question.

Laurence, what about you?

Laurence Colletti: Well, come on, during the show, ABA TECHSHOW, we were talking about doing that interview, I use LinkedIn to the connections I use within that kind of speak for me, I use it as currency to book shows and so for me, if I can reach out to somebody, if I can’t get them by email, I’ll try to connect with them via LinkedIn and oftentimes, we’ll have shared connections because most of the people that we book on Legal Talk Network happen to be legal professionals.

And so, if they have a similar connection it just kind of gives me just a little bit more, I guess it’s kind of like a reference, even though, it’s kind of a small thing, it makes booking the shows a lot easier. So, when I was chatting with you and I found out that you had so many people in one year, I wanted to do that for my profile because I think that’ll make what I do here at Legal Talk Network a whole lot easier.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think a lot of that is the notion of weak connections. So just the fact, when you reach out to somebody they see that you’re already connected with maybe 20, 50, 100 people they already know, it’s just going to make that initial entry point to them so much easier.

Tom, how about you?

Tom Mighell: Well, like Julie, LinkedIn is the social network that I probably use the least, and it’s one that I like to have a presence on because I think it’s important to be present there but I’ve never needed to use it for some of the traditional reasons why people have wanted to use LinkedIn.

I’ve not used it tremendously for job hunting purposes, the networking opportunities, I’ve not really taken advantage of that, but one of the things that I was really struck by, and Dennis, you might want to go into this a little bit more is that what you’ve noticed as part of your growth of your LinkedIn connections is that you’re getting a lot more requests to speak or to join things or to be a part of things, and that intrigues me.

There’s really two reasons why I find that most of my network are lawyers and I don’t spend a lot of time in the law as much anymore. I’m more in the information governance world now and I don’t have a lot of information governance connections. So, I want to improve on that, and I also want to improve on the ability to sort of get my feet back into legal technology speaking, and writing, and talking, and presenting, and all sorts of things. And so I’m intrigued to see whether increasing connections can have an effect on that.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and that again, Tom, that’s a perfect example of why you might want to build a large number of connections in a short period of time to build out that type of focused network. I mean, other obvious examples are if you’re leaving a job, looking for a new job or if you’re changing geography, as I just did, that you want to build out a local network; and so, some of these techniques to increase connections, the weak connections can really help you.

So, let’s go to the contest and so sort of three things I want to find out to get us started, so from everybody, let’s establish the starting point. So, how many first-degree LinkedIn connections do you have right now? Laurence?

(00:10:03)

Laurence Colletti: I have 1,630.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay. Tom, what about you?

Tom Mighell: As of today I have 1,315.

Dennis Kennedy: And Julie?

Julie Tolek: I have 587.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay. So, those are our starting points. I really do think that all three of you can add at least a thousand if you really work at this.

Tom Mighell: Hey Dennis, by comparison we need to understand from a contestant’s standpoint and from a listener’s standpoint that we really are talking to someone who knows what they’re talking about. Tell us and share with us how many connections you have today?

Dennis Kennedy: 7,050.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, that’s just insane. That’s just crazy.

Laurence Colletti: Well, I think you got to ask how many did you add in the last year?

Dennis Kennedy: It’s over five — essentially 5,000.

Laurence Colletti: In one year?

Dennis Kennedy: In one year. Yeah, and so, I think that I do want to reflect on the numbers that you have. So these are solid numbers to me. For people that I take seriously that I think of is actually using LinkedIn, I need to see 500-plus connections.

So, if somebody sends me an invitation out of the blue and they don’t have 500 connections, I am hesitant to connect to them unless I know them or there’s a really clear shared interest.

Also my approach and we’ll talk about this because I think this applies to all of us on the podcast, is that, this is a potentially way to connect to audience. So, we all have podcasts and writing and other things, and so using LinkedIn as a way to build out those audiences and to deliver information to them is another reason that you might want to significantly increase the number of connections you have.

So, a second question for each of you is thinking about that, and I know that you were all competitive because you’ve decided to play this contest and you’ve heard my number, do you feel that your current number of LinkedIn connections actually reflect the people you know or should be connected to on LinkedIn, Tom?

Tom Mighell: So, that’s a two-part question. First is the people that I know. I think that’s part of the problem is, is that the connections do reflect people that I know. With other social media networks and maybe more Facebook than anything else, I tended to be very circumspect about who I would choose. I really only wanted to be people that I was friends with. If I’ve met you in person then you can be my friend in Facebook.

On LinkedIn, I can be less careful about that, less cautious, but on LinkedIn there tends to also be I’ve noticed more of a sales opportunity, and if somebody wants to connect with me so they can sell me a product, then I’m skeptical about all that.

So, I would say that that’s probably one reason why my connections are, have kind of been in this particular range? Now, should I be connected, does it reflect who I should be connected to? Like, I mentioned before it doesn’t. I want to be connected more to people in the information governance field and I also want to be connected more with people who might be interested in having me speak or write or talk to them. So, I think there’s definitely a room for improvement there.

Dennis Kennedy: And Julie, how about you?

Julie Tolek: I totally agree with the first part of Tom’s answer to that question. One of the reasons my numbers are so low on LinkedIn is because those “cold calls” via LinkedIn, the cold friend requests annoy me. To be honest, I mean, I am all about building relationships and organically and finding things in common with people genuinely and organically, and I feel like when I get these cold friend requests or things that say, oh, I see you know so-and-so, can you connect me to them?

From somebody that I’ve never met in my life, in-person or online, that kind of turns me off of accepting those people, number one, I don’t accept them; and then it kind of turns me off of using LinkedIn in general.

So, my connections on LinkedIn definitely reflect the people that I do know or have met at least a little bit or we have some kind of rapport at least. They’re not people that I don’t know at all, but I think that there’s pros and cons to that. I think that because I’m so skeptical of those random people, I’m not maybe meeting or connecting with rather more of the people that I could be and should be connected to.

And for me personally and this is kind of I guess a side-note that maybe we’ll talk about more, but for me I always thought of LinkedIn as people looking for jobs or connecting with the people that are kind of doing the same thing you are doing or that I am doing, but I don’t know, I would like to learn more how to use it to reach clients as well, not just my peers or other professionals or other people in the biz, but also if it can be used to market to prospective clients.

(00:14:51)

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and that’s a common question and Allison Shields and I when we speak about LinkedIn in connection with our LinkedIn book usually answer that question by telling lawyers that by the way that you would use LinkedIn or to think about using LinkedIn is can you kind of create and nurture a referred network, so that the connections that you’re adding are less, so the potential clients themselves, but more the people who are likely to refer to you.

So, that’s another way to think about it, and then, also your comment about getting the invitations not knowing who they are. That’s a common thing that people say about LinkedIn. And so, for me I’m at the point where I’m not interested in the person who sends me an invitation, I just don’t pay attention to it until it doesn’t even bother me anymore.

But I think when you say I’m reacting to those, I think you start to forget about the possibilities that you can create by doing the outreach yourself, and that’s one thing that this contest will help clarify.

Julie Tolek: Yeah, that’s a good point to distinguish the difference between people reaching out to me and me reaching out to them, I don’t do much outreach, so that’s a good point.

Dennis Kennedy: Lawrence, how about you? Your number of connections reflect all the thousands of people you actually know?

Laurence Colletti: I would say, yes, a lot of ways. We travel around a lot and so a lot of people are folks that I’ve met at conferences or people that we interview, and so to a large degree that number does represent a lot of people that I’ve met.

It also represents people that I’d like to meet and so I routinely reach out because obviously the legal community I want to learn more and I want to reach out to more people out there, and I think for the same reasons that both Tom and Julie are hesitant about accepting new connections makes this LinkedIn a pretty meaningful social media tool for me, because I think most people feel that way. Your résumé is online, like where you went to school is online, some of the experience that you have and what are the skills and everything. I mean, it’s pretty public and it’s pretty professional, and so I think that’s what makes it a meaningful social media platform, and I think people are a little bit more reserved, and for me that makes it a meaningful point of connect.

One thing I would like to add kind of to what you guys are saying Twitter and LinkedIn are my two favorite social media platforms and when I get a new request or a new follow request or a connection request, I do look at the shared connections and I look to those for a reference, and so like if I see this person also follows, or Dennis also follows them, that means a lot to me, and so that’s I guess kind of social credentials there and kind of helps me make that decision whether or not I want to connect with them or not.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, perfect. The other thing I want you all to think about is that since Microsoft bought LinkedIn there’s clearly at some point going to be an integration of LinkedIn and Outlook and that’s one of the reasons I started to add a lot of contacts or people who I had interacted with in the past, because in a way LinkedIn is this really cool self-updating contacts list.

So, you find out when people have new jobs. You can use messaging in LinkedIn when you know somebody has changed a job and they might have a different email address.

So, that’s another reason that I decided to experiment with quantity is I do see that Outlook contacts in LinkedIn, merging in some meaningful way in probably the next year or two.

So, let’s go to the contest. Each of you will start with the number of connections you have today. You will add connections between now and May 18^th, which I believe is 30 days from now, and we will have a follow-up episode then to announce the results, and I think to share the experiences and the learnings that people have. We can keep it simple, so although we have lawyers here and probably at the end people will want to argue the rules a little bit, but that will make it interesting as well, but the person who adds the most connections, just number of connections will win a special Kennedy-Mighell Report prize; so I hope you’re all ready.

The thing I’m going to do to start you out is to sign you a homework reading of an article Allison Shields and I wrote about adding a lot of LinkedIn connections and when you might want to do that, as I said, when changing job or geography or if you are playing in a Legal Talk Network LinkedIn contest, for example. So, first of all, any questions about the rules for the contest?

Tom Mighell: My only question, Dennis, is can you get us the link to that article so we can both read it and post it in the show-notes for everybody else to read?

Dennis Kennedy: That’s going to come up in my parting shot, but part of having LinkedIn skills is to be able to look at somebody’s profile and find those types of articles.

Tom Mighell: So, that’s part of the challenge, I see. Okay.

Dennis Kennedy: That is a little bit part of it, because there’s great information for you all there once you find the article.

Tom Mighell: Okay.

Dennis Kennedy: There are several ways to get to it. Other questions?

Laurence Colletti: I have one, are there going to be any participation trophies?

(00:19:55)

Dennis Kennedy: Well, if the Legal Talk Network provides participation trophies but I think this is like a winner-take-all contest although the — if you come in next and you have get great opportunities that come out of adding connections, you probably won more than the trophy is worth. Julie.

Julie Tolek: Oh I was just going to say so, are the numbers that we are starting with are the numbers that we said a few minutes ago, right. So like if I send you prize request during this show, those will count for my contest?

Dennis Kennedy: Yes.

Julie Tolek: Okay.

Dennis Kennedy: Because the only record we have is what we have you recorded is saying, so —

Julie Tolek: Perfect.

Dennis Kennedy: So everybody’s on the honor system there and at the end, and I think you are all close enough that we don’t have to do anything different with percentage or anything, I think pure numbers will do that. So as I said to make the contest really valuable for our listeners, we are going to have each of you report back on what you learn from the contest; especially, great new connection stories, which I think you will find opportunities, advice you have on what you have learned.

Julie, for you, there’s kind of an interesting; for me, always an interesting question in the approach that women take to adding people they don’t know as connections and the willingness to do that versus males that’s something that, you might think about when you report back on the contest because that’s sort of a really fascinating question for me.

And I will give you one big tip to start with, really strongly consider getting the basic LinkedIn Premium Job Hunter account for this month and you can just — I think you can do it as a 30-day trial even but having the Premium account, gives you a couple of little features especially in being able to reach out directly to people and to get information about people who viewed your profile that I think will be really helpful in this contest.

And like I said, I think you can do it as a free trial but I started experimenting with the Premium account just to see if it had any value and I have stayed with it. So I think it’s a — that is a worthwhile purchase on LinkedIn.

So that’s the one tip I have and then I am going to let each of you ask a question to get some coaching help, for me since I co-wrote the book on LinkedIn for lawyers. So you can think about your best questions and we will take a break for our sponsors right now.

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[Music]

Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. It’s question time for me in a way for you and the audience who we encourage to play at home to get some LinkedIn coaching tips and advice. One question at a time and one for each of you, Julie, we are going to let you start first.

Julie Tolek: Great. My question is how important our groups, I think there are groups in LinkedIn, right, to building your contacts and what’s the best way to utilize groups to connect with people?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, groups can be a really an efficient way to add people. So if you’re already belong to a group or there’s a group you think you should belong to, you are going to see a list of the members and they are sorted. And so, obviously the key to the connection game will be finding the second-degree connections because those are the ones that are easiest to add and you can see in a group the list of second-degree connections.

So Tom is the Former Chair of ABA TECHSHOW, if Tom went to the ABA TECHSHOW Group and looked at the second-degree connections, I would say that if he sent invitations to all of them, his return on those invitations would be extraordinarily high because people would know who he was, and he was Chair of TECHSHOW and they already had the interest in TECHSHOW.

So that’s how groups can help by showing you who the second-degree connections are in and then also you can see some of the key people who are in those groups, then work to reach them.

(00:25:05)

So you can build, say somebody is not a second-degree connection to you but there are third degree, you can start to figure out who might be in between and then once that person becomes a second-degree connection, it’s easy to send that invitation.

And so that can get you some of the more prominent people in a field or some better known people and then you can build off of that. So it’s sort of — it is very analogous to the real world where you say, if I meet these people who know these people and I establish some credibility, I can get to the person that I want to meet.

So groups, I would say groups, alumni connections and if you worked at a big place, the people who have also worked at the same place are really fertile ground for adding new connections because they are likely to have the same interest and may know you or of you.

Julie Tolek: Great. Thank you.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay Laurence.

Laurence Colletti: I have a two-part question, can ask a two-part question?

Dennis Kennedy: Of course.

Laurence Colletti: So just in terms of adding contact, so I — when we were getting ready for the show, I looked at my profile strength and it’s medium or intermediate. So I was wondering how important is profile strength and then my, the second part of that is will writing or sharing articles help in the building of connections?

Dennis Kennedy: The profile keys a lot of things. So the more complete your profile is it makes it easier for people to find you. So this comes down to the — I would sometimes call it the high school question, like should I put in the place I went to high school. And because I mean I grew up in a small town in Indiana, as I would like to say, so if there’s somebody who’s from that that same small town, whatever they lived there, who reaches out to me on LinkedIn, I am going to accept that invitation.

So you think of the profile as a way that it works hand-in-hand with connections. So the more that you have – that it shows places that you have worked, that you have gone to school, that you show interest, that’s going to make it easier for people to find you and then, you are going to be able to take advantage of those areas as well to locate new potential contacts.

And gets you thinking about it, because you say, well, actually the alumni area could be really positive and it’s not just the people I graduated with, it’s the people who were at school at the same time I was, and maybe, it’s just alumni of the school in general, depending on the school you are at.

And it could be your college is really good, territory, but maybe law school, not as much, but anyway it gives you some ways of thinking about that and then so by completing the profile, I think you are better off and you are more attractive.

I would usually give the advice to really concentrate on your headlines. Although, I think that you guys have good headlines but as you start to look at the lists of the second-degree connections, you are going to see people’s headlines and you are going to learn a lot about how adequate or inadequate headlines are for people. And I think you guys are all good, but I think you probably see ways that you can improve yours.

For writing an article, possibly you can see who has liked it and if somebody’s liked it you can reach out to them with an invitation, depends on the audience you get for the article. So if it’s a few hundred that might be — it’s a contest right, so is it worth writing an article to get a couple of hundred people or five hundred people who like it and then send them invitations. What is the potential return from that versus something else that you would do?

So writing articles can be really helpful. I do it and had good success but it’s mixed. In this contest, I probably would not take that approach.

Laurence Colletti: Okay. Thank you.

Dennis Kennedy: How about you, Tom?

Tom Mighell: So my question overlaps just a little bit with Julie’s but it’s a little bit different. One of the ways that I see as being a good potential for adding new connections is to look at the People You May Know feature on LinkedIn but as I have mentioned to you before, when I look at the People You May Know section, it is primarily the people that I really don’t want to start attracting.

It’s the lawyers that I used to be part of in my prior career as a lawyer, and although, it would be nice to be connected to them, they really aren’t going to get me very far in the audience that I want to attract.

So how do I change that — can I change that dynamic in the People You May Know list to really get the people who I want to know and start connecting with them?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and this is a great question. And Tom, you know that, part of my original science experiment in adding connections came from asking myself the question, does the LinkedIn algorithm after the 15 years or so LinkedIn has been around, is it better at identifying connections than I am.

And so, I went into the People You May Know and I started to look at that and so what I will tell you is that because you are not adding a lot of connections, so you haven’t been for a while it’s going to feel pretty static.

(00:30:04)

But as you start to add new connections, those recommendations are going to adjust, and as you start adding people from those recommendations, it will adjust some more.

And you can do some things where you would say, so like when I knew I was moving to Michigan and I started to look for more connections in Michigan, then I got more suggestions out of Michigan than I did before because of that.

So what you might do is start identifying the people in the record. It’s management space that you want, getting some of those connections and then, waiting a day or two and then sort of experimenting with the people you may know and see if those changes have started to filter through.

And then I would say that typically you’ll see significant changes in the people you may know list about every 24 hours. So I noticed they tend to change them like at the end of the evening, at least they did it at one point when I was paying attention to it. So you can do that and you can also kind of work your way through.

My strategy on that was always to say, I wanted to find somebody who had 500 or more connections because I thought that indicated they actually used LinkedIn, that we had some commonality of interest. And then, I usually looked for — I don’t know I would say like, it’s kind of — I don’t know what you guys are going to find given the number of connections you have, but I typically look at something like 20 shared connections as a threshold point, where somebody became interesting to me for adding as a potential connection.

But that algorithm will surprise you, I guarantee that over the next month, if you pay attention to that and what it’s suggesting and how it goes from identifying people that you really know, that you thought maybe you are already connected to, to potentially reaching a point where there’s nobody that you actually know in person, it doesn’t seem like.

But there is a lot of people with tons of shared connections and they seem like people you should know and your return on those invitations can be really high. And then I’ll also just briefly speak about sort of the gold standard in adding connections and sending invitations is to personalize it, even if you’re using a standard personalization rather than the default.

I could tell you that there’s a number of cases especially if you have a lot of shared connections and if people probably already know you, you can just drop the default on them and they will accept. But give some thought to like a standard personalized invitation that usually will work better. I think that’s still the gold standard but it’s not as necessary as I once thought.

Okay, I hope I’ve answered your questions and given some tips. So I thought maybe we would end with a good round of trash-talking, do each of you want to tell the others exactly why they should expect to lose the contest to you.

Laurence, I think you’re the favorite on this one, even though you call yourself the underdog, are you going to tell us why you expect to be the winner?

Laurence Colletti: Well, I’m definitely going to win because I’ve been doing finger push-ups and thumb yoga.

Dennis Kennedy: Nice. Are you going to exercise your mind too, or you just going — it’s just going to be pure — you’re going to outlast everybody physically?

Laurence Colletti: I haven’t given it that much thought.

Dennis Kennedy: And then Julie, what about you?

Julie Tolek: Well, I mean I think I have the most room to grow here, so and I’m a natural, so I think — I think I’ll win.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I kind of — if I have to bet, I kind of like your chances. Tom, I know you got a lot of trash talk.

Tom Mighell: Well, I’ll only say that I tend to win everything on this podcast. So I’ll just leave it that.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, you want to wrap us up and maybe get some contact information from our guests and we will encourage obviously, all the listeners to send invitations that will help to all the contestants and to me as well, for not already connected and I encourage the listeners to go ahead and personalize that and if you say that you’re sending the invitation to help us in the contest, I think your odds of getting that invitation accepted will be sky high.

Tom Mighell: I think so too. I think we want to thank our guests Julie Tolek, Laurence Collett, how about before we head to the last part of the podcast, once you all give us other than connecting with you on LinkedIn, what’s the best way to get in touch with you, if people want to get in touch with you. Julie?

Julie Tolek: For me, the best way is probably email, which is  HYPERLINK “mailto:[email protected]” [email protected]. And you can also text me at my phone number 617-752-1739, it’s a business number but I get text there too, so that’s the quickest way.

Tom Mighell: And Laurence, people want to be on the show or find some other route to being part of an amazing world of legal podcast broadcasting.

(00:35:06)

Laurence Colletti: Well, I think the best way is Twitter. I like to use Twitter so that’s @LaurenceEsq, short for Esquire and that’s Laurence spelled like Olivier, not spelled like Lawrence Welk.

Dennis Kennedy: Nice. Now, it’s time as usual for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: So this is actually not a new tip I learned, it’s new to me but it’s probably not new to everyone which is that there’s a feature in PowerPoint that I wasn’t aware has been around for maybe a year or two called Summary Zoom. So if some of you may be familiar with the new — not new, but the Prezi Tool that people have been using to create presentations and I’ve never been a huge fan of Prezi, it kind of makes me dizzy but I appreciate the creativity that people bring to presentations or different way of breaking out of your standard PowerPoint mold.

Well, if you want to use PowerPoint, but still have some of the features of Prezi, use the Summary Zoom feature. If you head over to the Insert tab, there is a button called Zoom, and all you have to do is you select a number of slides, and it creates a single slide where if you click on part of it, it will zoom into that particular slide. It’s a great way to take a series of things you want to talk about and stay on one slide the whole time and then zoom in to each topic as you want to talk about it.

It’s a new and different way to present in PowerPoint. If you didn’t know it was there, it’s on the Insert tab, it’s called Summary Zoom. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, Prezi has always made me nauseous. So this is not my favorite tool at all. So I want to mention one thing really briefly because I know we are going to come back to it in the future is, I have a new iPhone X, and I’m just really digging the facial recognition.

So anybody who has the chance like if you are around an Apple store to give a test drive on facial recognition, it’s pretty cool and it’s something that I know I’ll be talking about in the future.

But for my parting shot, I really want to mention again the article that Allison Shields and I wrote on growing your LinkedIn connections significantly in a short period of time, because it goes into the philosophy and gives six different strategies that I’ve touched on certainly in this podcast. But we spell it out.

It’s a good article and it’s a good homework assignment to see how well you can use LinkedIn, because it should be pretty easy to find on both of our profiles. It’s split into two different parts that point back to each other, which was an experiment that we did. It also shows the value of the Publishing tool in LinkedIn which we used.

And we also put it together as a full article and you can find it I think on both of our blogs. So it should be easy to find but if you can’t find it, you might want to think about getting some refresher courses in how to use LinkedIn. But that will be some really great tips if you want to play along at home in this contest and I think you should play along at home.

Tom Mighell: Or maybe just check the show notes after the podcast is posted and we will make sure that the article is posted there to make it easier for people to find. So that wraps –

Dennis Kennedy: I don’t want to make it that easy, come on.

Tom Mighell: It’s a contest, we don’t want to make the contest about finding the article. So that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode at tkmreport.com.

If you liked what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site, where you can find archives of all of our previous podcasts.

If you would like to get in touch with us, please don’t hesitate to send us a connection request on LinkedIn or talk to us there. We are available on Twitter and once again, we do love getting your voicemail questions, that number is 720-441-6820. Please call, leave a question, we’ll feature it on an upcoming podcast.

So, until the next podcast, I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy and you have been listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an Internet focus.

If you like what you heard today, please rate us in Apple Podcast and we will see you next time for another episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together’ from ABA Books or Amazon, and join us every other week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.

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