Today I get to talk with Goldie Chan all about LinkedIn and how she became one of the first video creators on the LinkedIn platform.
Goldie is #1 creator on LinkedIn, a regular contributor to Forbes, and the founder of social media strategy agency Warm Robots. Known as the “green-haired Oprah of LinkedIn,” she was one of the first people on LinkedIn Live and currently has the longest-running daily channel on LinkedIn with fully original content.
Goldie believes everybody has the capacity to make engaging content—the trick is just figuring out which kind is best suited to your talents.
In this episode, Goldie recalls the resistance she faced when she decided to make video content on LinkedIn before any other platform, explains why innovation is a driving force in her work and helps you figure out what style of content creation you’re best suited for.
HOW GOLDIE BEGAN CREATING FOR LINKEDIN
Brandon Birkmeyer: You mentioned repurposing. That’s the kind of thing we tell people to do when we’re giving advice for marketing one-on-one. We’ll create in one place and then distribute to a lot of places.
In the beginning, was that something you were considering? You didn’t go that route. Why did that not end up on your agenda?
Goldie Chan: I will not name them, but there was another creator that started at the same time as me. What they did was put all their videos on YouTube. At the same time, they were lecturing me that I was really dumb that I didn’t put my videos on YouTube. They said everything should be YouTube optimized.
I was in digital marketing for over a decade before I even started doing it on LinkedIn. I just said, “I love making content that’s specifically tailored for the platform that I’m on. Because this is a new wild, wild west platform, I’m going to experiment instead of trying to force YouTube format onto LinkedIn.”
I believe if all of us in that early group had just done completely beautiful YouTube-style videos, that would likely actually be the format that everyone adopted, but that wasn’t the case. I have to say that for better or for worse, the vlog format is because of me.
WHY VLOGGING WORKS ON LINKEDIN
Why did I choose a vlog format? I’m in the Producers Guild. I actually produced pretty serious content, but I never learned how to edit because I always could hire an editor.
When I was doing these videos, I thought, “I don’t want to put budget behind this. My team is working on other bigger projects. I’m just going to learn how to do it myself.”
My first video for LinkedIn I accidentally deleted, so I had to shoot it all over again. My first thirty videos were completely unedited: no text, no clean cuts, nothing. There’s that weird wobble when you’re holding it.
I did vlogs because I didn’t know how to do any other kinds of video because I didn’t know how to edit. Everyone saw what I was doing so they started to think that vlogging is the proper way to do a LinkedIn video. That is the great irony.
CREATE MEANINGFUL CONTENT ON LINKEDIN
Brandon Birkmeyer: It makes it so that it’s accessible. Anyone can do it. This format lends itself to being more raw and making mistakes and sharing that.
However, it’s hard to imagine what’s going through your head when people are telling you you’re just straight doing it wrong. You have courage.
Goldie Chan: I will say the first three to four months that I was doing daily consecutive videos, people said I was wrong all the time. My mentor said, “Please go get a job if that’s what you want to do.” My friends would ask, “Why are you spending so much time on this thing? You should be on Instagram.”
I live in Los Angeles, and a couple of my friends are Instagram influencers. They have a huge following, and would say, “Why are you wasting your time on LinkedIn? That’s weird and uncool.” I will say somebody at LinkedIn said, “Goldie you somehow made LinkedIn cooler.”
I think it’s just bringing that enthusiasm that other people have for other platforms onto the LinkedIn platform and helping people understand it isn’t just a resume site. You can create really thoughtful, meaningful, helpful content on LinkedIn.
YOUR VIDEOS NEED PURPOSE
I don’t mean salacious trashy attention-grabbing content. I mean, actually very interesting, useful educational content. For myself, I don’t actually like videos where people just rattle off a ton of names because they’re just trying to get people to like that video because they’ve been mentioned. To me, that’s not educational content. That’s attention-grabbing content.
However, I love seeing videos from people who say, “I’m doing this series of five videos on mental health. I’m a mental health care provider.” I loved those videos because they’re trying to give information back into the ecosystem. That’s something that I’ve tried to really instill in all of my videos.
Even my silly, “Hey guys, I’m visiting Pixar today,” even those videos I tried to put in an element of education or thoughtfulness. If you were making an animated version of your life, what would be key bullet points in your business career that you would put into that?
I just love giving people questions that make them really rethink their trajectory at a very minimum, where they want to go next, or where they’ve been. I think those are always helpful.
WHAT PURPOSE MEANS ON LINKEDIN
Brandon Birkmeyer: I’d love to hear a little bit more about what you think of as the types of things you talk about. What is your north star? How do you come up with some of these ideas that you have?
Goldie Chan: One of my friends gave me a tagline, which I now use. I will say even my hashtag #dailygoldie was crowdsourced because my audience wanted a hashtag. About sixty to seventy videos in everybody else was giving themselves hashtags.
I just asked my audience, “What do you want?” A bunch of them said, #dailygoldie, and I said, “Done. That is my new hashtag,” and I love that.
When I think of my north star, when I think of my purpose, that is my tagline. My tagline is “Social media with purpose.” I always think purpose leads down to one word, which is “why.” Why are you doing what you do? Why are things working? Why are things not working? How can we get them to work better for you? How can we get closer to our goals?
I always think it’s like the big why and then the how? That’s what I use to drive all of my content. Why am I at this place right now? How can it help you? How can what I’m learning here help you or help my audience out so they can get some learning lessons from it?
FIGURE OUT WHY SOMETHING WORKS
Maybe it’s very experiential in a way that other people can’t participate in. I was at the Stranger Things pop-up in Hollywood, which was very cool. I love that because that’s experiential marketing.
I love dissecting things in a way. Other people go through and say, “Oh, I just love Stranger Things and I’m just here and it’s fun.” I love having people think about why it’s fun and how you can apply that kind of fun to your own business in your own brand.
I’m obsessed with branding and personal branding. I think the most fun thing to do is to help people understand better their brand or the brand that they’re part of and trying to build.
Brandon Birkmeyer: What was your path? Do you think that there’s a formula to it?
Goldie Chan: Gosh, I wish there was a formula because let’s bottle that up and sell it!
I don’t think that there is one formula, no one size fits all for if you want to become a more creative being if you want to become a creator.
Most people don’t want to label themselves as a creator. Even if they are creating content, they want to be taken seriously as a professional because they want to be able to be gainfully employed, which I would never fault someone for.
LOOK TO YOUR PAST FOR YOUR FUTURE
However, I think that when you’re just starting out, when you’re just starting to have an idea of, “I want to make videos or I want to write more. I want to be putting something out there in the universe that’s not just my nine to five job,” I think it’s good to think about what you naturally gravitate towards.
I think most of us naturally gravitate towards writing. Some of us naturally gravitate towards video. Some of us are really beautiful behind the camera. We take wonderful photographs or we have a really interesting visual perspective. We’re designers.
I think it’s good to know what you’ve always naturally gravitated toward. I like to ask clients sometimes what they enjoyed doing as small children. When they were really left alone and they didn’t have to make money, what did they spend their playtime doing?
What were they playing at? Were they making imaginary games? When they are making the imaginary games, some of them made the rules. Some of them, when they made the magic games, they were just the person to try and break all the rules. They were the wild ones and they led the bunch. Or they were the ones that just wrecked everything.
HOW GOLDIE DECIDED TO USE LINKEDIN
I think it’s helpful to know as a child what you naturally gravitate towards. For me, I love stories. I love narrative. When I was a kid, I always made up a million magical stories. I’d drag people into playing games with me and doing fake TV shows and things like that.
I’ve always thought that video is wonderful, but I did a lot more writing to be totally honest. I was in marketing; how could I not have just done a ton of writing?
I was just really doing a ton of writing, very little video, some still images. However, I also wanted to do video on LinkedIn because I thought no one was going to see it. That’s also why I can put myself on camera because nobody’s going to watch this. It’s fine. I’m just going to put myself on a platform that no one will watch.
Nothing will happen with this and that’s fine and dandy. Then in three or four weeks, I will get off of my tush and I will get a real job in the industry that I’ve been working for over a decade.
There were already people who said, “Hey, I just saw you left this place. Would you think about coming to us?” I said, “Something interesting is happening. Give me a couple more weeks.”
That couple more weeks became what’s now two years. It’s pretty amazing to think about it because I looked up, and all of a sudden I was like, “Whoa, that was two years of daily consecutive videos.”
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
YOUR WHY REQUIRES COMMITMENT
The first year I would wake up in a cold panic that I had not uploaded that video. Here’s a disclaimer: I still dream about uploading content onto LinkedIn or watching that bar crawl by. For those of you that don’t know, with all other content minus videos, you can schedule it. If I wasn’t doing native video, like YouTube videos, I could also schedule that.
However, with native video, I have been in the past two years manually and painfully uploading. This includes when I’m on a transatlantic between one country and another country. I still have to upload within that twenty-four-hour block of time to make sure that I make it.
I’ve had some really close calls. I was with my friends in the desert (desert desert because I live in Los Angeles). I made them double back about twenty to twenty-five miles to a Starbucks in the middle of the desert just so I could upload just a crappy, (let’s be honest,) not even the best video. However, it was a video because there was no way I was going to break that streak.
HOW GOLDIE PUT SO MUCH CONTENT ON LINKEDIN
Brandon Birkmeyer: You made this commitment to yourself. This isn’t something that someone was holding over you. you’ve committed to yourself. I think that’s important: you keep your promises to yourself. I think there’s a driving force there.
Goldie Chan: I think that if you want to do something, that’s not even daily videos, but you want to put out a bucket of content, say even ten written posts, ten videos, or ten somethings, you have to make that commitment to yourself. Unless a client is paying you to do that, (that’s very different), if you’re not getting paid to do it, you won’t do it if you don’t believe yourself that you should do it.
You will hold yourself absolutely accountable for making that happen. There were so many times when I was just done. I was going to stop. Then I was thought, “No, I really want to get to 365. I want to hit that one-year mark because no one else has done this before.”
Then somehow, very painfully, 365 became 730 because I made a commitment. Once I passed that one-year mark, I would try to get to 500. And 500 became 600, 600 became 700, and at 700 I said, “Well, we’re just going to hit two years.”
Guest Links:
Goldie’s website – https://www.goldiechan.com/
Goldie on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/goldie/
Goldie on Twitter – https://twitter.com/GoldieChan
Goldie on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/goldiecylon
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