A Matter of Trust

The most important way to be trustworthy online is to show up continuously and showcase your mission, vision, values and expertise in a way that is congruent across platforms. I'm interested in how to showcase depth of expertise and I'm going to use my personal profile to illustrate how you can go beyond the completed LinkedIn profile to build trust. Note that I'm not a LinkedIn trainer but I definitely enjoy applying my expert knowledge to optimize my LinkedIn presence.

Say My Name

Easy ways to establish consistency using the same profile picture, branding colours, username, headline and bio on every platform. Although you may have to edit slightly because of character count restrictions, there should be no doubt that anyone reading is going to recognize you. This is entry level personal branding. Consistency and congruence are some of the easiest ways to be recognizable. People are watching how you behave, what you write and will notice small differences.

My primary colours are hot pink and turquoise. I use accent colours of black and white, yellow and lime green but the pink is always attached to my name. I selected these colours in 2021 because I heard that the Barbie movie would be happening and I wanted to showcase my ability to spot trends years ahead of time but the success of the media campaign greatly exceeded anything I expected.

At it's heart, a strong personal brand encourages people to want to work with you or for you, refer you, cheer you or absorb your expertise.

This means that people need to know who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it. Notice what's not important? Where or when. You don't differentiate yourself based on your location of work or when you do the work. Which is really ironic because the focus of my work is flexibility - the when and where of work.

I use the title of hybrid/remote futurist and this is my headline:

Rethinking hybrid/remote through a trust lens|LinkedIn Top Voice Decision Making, Organizational Development|Organizations hire me to make hybrid/remote work just work|Transforming strategy??into operational magic ??

This headline helps me do several things.

1. Identifies that I'm a B2B consultant who connects strategy and operations.
2. Highlights trust signifiers like the LinkedIn Community Top Voice badges I've been awarded for my writing on decision making and organizational development.
3. Illustrates my high-level thinking on hybrid/remote and trust

The job title of hybrid/remote futurist is unique and if you search LinkedIn or Google, you find me. The purpose is bigger than SEO - I want to create the impression that I'm not just focused on hybrid/remote strategy that needs to be designed and implemented right now but also needs to work 5 or 10 years from now. The decisions we make about work now need to be sustainable. We rarely get the opportunity to redesign work at large scale. I want to be at the forefront of this opportunity because the status quo has never served me.

Trust: A Confident Relationship With The Unknown

I've spent most of my career working in customer service in financial services. Shifting to organizational transformation consulting is a significant career pivot and I need to demonstrate both my expertise and my credibility. In short, I need to demonstrate why organizations who don't know me should trust me to do the work I want to do.

I need to be trustworthy.

According to trust researcher Rachel Botsman, there are 4 traits of trustworthiness that are assessed as character and capability:

Character:

Integrity

Benevolence

Capability:

Competence

Reliability

Climbing The Trust Stack

• I need people to believe in me as a person so that they believe that I have good intentions and they can align their thought processes with mine.
• I need to demonstrate how my skills and abilities from my past work transfer to the new work.
• I need to explain my motivations to do the new work.
• I need to explain how I plan to do the work going forward and how I can help them (WIIFM is a question everyone asks).

Using Content To Establish Character

When you are changing careers, you need to control the narrative about what people think they know about you. This is where a storytelling strategy can be incredibly helpful. You can shine a light on what you need people to perceive and cast the rest into shadows.

Sharing content that makes people think, teaches them something, stimulates imagination and curiosity and generally is helpful and useful is what I try to do.

I've done a lot of valuable work but most of the work that fuels my credibility in hybrid/remote strategy was work on behalf of the company beyond the scope of my job description.

At some point, we all have to choose, between what the world wants you to be, 
and who you are.

- Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow (2021)        

The Story of Me

If you look at the descriptions of the work I've done, I list stories I'd love to tell you. I've used many of these stories in my content over the last 3 years as they highlight leadership, innovation, creativity, expertise in hybrid/remote. These stories help people know, like and trust me. The bullet points are just teasers designed to spark curiosity and encourage conversation. Since I have no intention of doing the same work I was doing, it serves no purpose to flesh out the job descriptions which I found limiting for many years. When I was deciding how to pivot my career in 2020, I realized that the work that I found meaningful and purposeful was the work I did to create and implement hybrid/remote strategy, employee advocacy and engagement and the innovation work that was future-focused. The stories below help me pick out the skills that illustrate my competence to do the consulting work I want to do.

In fact, an episode of my podcast with Erica Ehm highlights exactly how effective she finds my work on social media. Although I've known about Erica for 20 years, we didn't interact prior to 2017. This episode was the first time we ever spoke.

- being a finalist for the innovation challenge for the bank just 3 months after taking the role

- being a brand ambassador

- winning the Canadian voting for the CEO for a Day contest (cancelled due to COVID-19)

- founding an ERG called Family to support parents during the sudden pivot to remote work

- leading the communications team for the women's leadership ERG conference on power & influence

- winning sales contests within 6 months of landing the only job in Canada based where I live

- dominating the social selling metrics - Hootsuite celebrated me regularly in meeting with execs

- being the only member of the sales team to publish an article on the bank website

- volunteering to test AI voice recognition

- starring in change management videos to facilitate office redesign and different ways of working

- growing an audience for the Voice of the Employee HR community by 1000%

-creating the best Grade 9 day ever for my kid despite working 100% remote and not having an assigned office - this was my training ground for media exposure and an episode of my podcast

-I was the face of relationships valued at over 2 billion dollars

-getting a US Senator fired from his day job

-I pioneered work from home

-being listed as a subject matter expert so many times, I had to decline more responsibility

-I trained the team on WebEx and webinar presentation best practices

-I created strategy to save the remote relationship management team

-travelling for business and learning how to advocate for wellness and boundaries

-learning to use Yammer and LinkedIn to raise my profile and get a job in the Canadian division

-building a network beyond my department

-starting to take my own advice when I noticed all my friends got promoted

-breaking down siloes

-nearly dying during my commute even though I was only working one day a week in the office

-using a volunteer communications role during the global hackathon to secure a job interview

-demonstrating deep expertise during the innovation challenges by participating the most

-it took 14 people to cover my workload when I finally left

Linking Skills - Professional and Educational Development

LinkedIn is very useful for the first goal of demonstrating how my skills and abilities transfer. I've added the maximum of 50 skills I can to the LinkedIn platform and then I've cross-referenced those skills to the jobs I've held at 5 large corporations since 1994. If you analyze this carefully, you can clearly determine how and where I've developed my skills over the years. The skills section also connects to courses I've completed as well as my professional experience.

Here's a quick overview of the places you can see skills on my profile:

I also weave in some AI to demonstrate my top talents: embracing diversity, innovation and decision making. I currently have a LinkedIn Top Voice badge for decision making and organizational development due to my contributions to the LinkedIn AI collaborative articles. The Plum assessment is also an AI product that supports my leadership and decision making capabilities.

Video Killed The Radio Star (Podcasts Brought Her Back)

Although I love writing, I know that my speaking abilities elevate my content. This is why I created a podcast Hybrid/Remote Centre of Excellence and also why I do guest appearances on other podcasts - you need to hear my confidence, my knowledge and stories. Trust is highly contextual and interviews allow me to provide the context which increases trust. I also do some video versions of the podcast as video allows you to see my facial expressions, posture, body language.

Almost Famous

I've been quite fortunate to have been showcased in the media. This helps me with my business but also serves as a resource for impactful conversations between leaders and workers. For years, I've researched corporate communications, PR crisis communications and how to pitch to the media. This has informed much of my approach to marketing. Most of my media work in major outlets in Canada - CBC, CTV News, The Toronto Star - came to me, I didn't pitch the stories. One of those reporters just came back to me for another piece - now she works for a new company and has won awards for her work. I've been featured on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. I showcase the media links on my website but also in the link in the top card on LinkedIn and under the entry for my business Nola Simon Advisory - you can add media to your experience section. I like to add 3-5 guest podcast appearances and other media pieces annually.

In fact, my work to showcase my consultancy and provide resources to the public has received rave reviews from PR and corporate communication experts. This one is special because the author used to work for the same company I did and knew me before I started my consulting work:

Karma - Comments, Reviews, Recommendations

Social media is reciprocal, just like trust. I like to write reviews and recommendations to celebrate people who have been particularly helpful and generous to me. I try to write more recommendations than I receive because I prefer giving to taking.

Most of the time, I focus on thoughtful comments. Comments fuel algorithms on most platforms more than any other action and they are the best way to demonstrate expertise and to build relationships. A discussion started in the comments can move to DMs and convert to real business. Sometimes comments can be featured in work by authors you admire - the last photo about loyalty was featured in the newsletter of trust researcher Rachel Botsman, whose work has inspired this newsletter. She has 75,000 subscribers so it's a good visibility opportunity.

Comments go along way to demonstrating character and capability. You'll notice that the comments I'm featuring below talk about my insight, leadership expertise, integrity, care and thoughtfulness. The fact that I have a whole host of examples solidifies my reliability as does the fact that I consistently comment and respond daily. Sometimes I repurpose comments into posts, articles, newsletters or podcasts. They often deserve a longer and deep investigation.

Remember what I said we are working to illustrate?

Character:

Integrity

Benevolence

Capability:

Competence

Reliability

The comments are not only personally validating but amplify trust. The goal is not to fish for compliments but produce work that is inspiring to others. The compliments are nice and useful for marketing but this is external validation and not the reason for the work.

Looking for a consultant to help you transition your company to hybrid or remote work? I'm trustworthy. DM me or email me at [email protected] so we can discuss how I can help you.