Do you need a personal brand? Wait, is that even a question in today's social media heavy landscape? Of course!
On this episode of The Chad & Cheese we welcome personal brand and marketing specialist, Carlos Gil, to the show for up close and personal talk on:
- Personal Brand - AI Influencers - HR AI aka Robot Resources and Stop Being a Wimp and POKE THAT BEAR!
All brought to you by the Bear Pokers over at Smashfly - bringing great User Experience (UX) to job seekers all over the globe.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
James: Hi, I’m James Ellis from the Talent Cast. You may not be aware of this, but a couple years ago I lost a bet, so now I'm contractually obligated to say nice things about Chad and Cheese. Well, I took that, let's say, lemon and turned into lemonade. I took interviews from Chad and Cheese and turned it into a book, but I added a lot of other people you're going to want to talk to, it's called Talent Chooses You. It is Hiring Better with Employer Branding, and it is available on Amazon, June 15th, you should go and buy it. Bye.
Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Oh yeah. What's up boys and girls, we're back from dance. You know what we do, that podcast thing.
Chad: There are a lot of people to talk to thing.
Joel: We'd have a lot of people to talk to. A lot of great people at this conference. A lot of interesting folks. And on that note, we are joined today by Carlos Gil, who really has more titles than I have time for. Like what-
Chad: Bestselling author slash ...
Carlos: Depends on the audience, right? Because you have to play to the who's in the room. So there's times where its bestselling author and then I just say that The End of Marketing is my company. Gil Media Co, is my marketing agency. So I'll say, owner or CEO, brand marketing executive.
Joel: Yeah.
Carlos: Titles are just that, its titles.
Joel: So this was interesting when we came down to meet you, you came up to me and said, "We have history." And I knew who you were, and you're the rare marketing guy on stage preaching to the choir, who actually started out as a job board in Florida. So, you rarely get asked this probably, but tell us your job board story and how that was a springboard into where you are now.
Carlos: It's funny Joel, because when I saw your name come over on a text message saying, "These guys want to interview you for their podcast." As soon as I saw the name Joel Cheeseman, I was like, oh my God.
Chad: Not that fuck. Not that fuck.
Carlos: I'm thinking, oh, man, this is the same guy that I was like, 25 year old, starting off in HR with a job board in 2008, just knowing the shit of everyone in the space, and it's cool that we're at this intersection in time, right? Where-
Joel: Our roads are crossing.
Carlos: ... We're both older in our careers, right?
Joel: Yeah.
Carlos: There's that mutual respect. But, I started my career in social media marketing at 25, I worked in banking and I lost my job. And the same day I lost my job, I joined LinkedIn. And this is November 5th, 2008. And as you remember back then, the economy took a nosedive. There were 100's of 1000's of people losing their jobs and I was a naive 25 year old that just wanted to help people find jobs. I felt like, I've got a young family, I'm getting fucked by this whole thing. I was working for AIG, I got low severance.
Joel: Oh shit.
Chad: Just fucking way.
Carlos: Within just a day of joining LinkedIn I realized, there's so many other people out there, that are in the same position as me and I became motivated to help them. And I didn't have a background in HR whatsoever. I learned how to code, and bought a script and then customized it, and made my website, which is Jobs Direct USA. It's funny that we're sitting here, because it's embarrassing. I didn't have the best product out there. It sucked. It was really basic.
Joel: You didn't have to back then.
Chad: But most job boards did suck back then.
Joel: And Craigslist still sucks.
Chad: And they still do.
Carlos: It's true.
Joel: And it's making a billion dollars a year.
Chad: Exactly. And they still suck. But again.
Carlos: One of the key moments of my career early on was, I remember, within being like a month into Jobs Direct USA, it was through networking on LinkedIn. I meet this venture capitalist in Jacksonville, Florida, where I lived at the time. And I'll never forget this meeting, because this was a very much pivotal moment of my life and my career. We meet three days in a row, the first day, the guy absolutely loves me. The second day he tore me to shit. The third day, he's like look, you don't need my money, what you need is to actually go out and build a business. And if you go out and get 50 paying clients, meaning you go through the onboarding process, as a vendor for 50 different companies, come to me and I'll write you a blank check. I never saw the guy again. I went out, I hustled, I worked. I started doing these events called pinkslipped parties, all throughout the U.S. And in the process I learned social media marketing. I started building a network. Yes, I was like the King of spamming through email back then, but who wasn't. And it led me down this path where I'm at today, where I've had the pleasure of working as an employee for some really cool brands, including LinkedIn.
Joel: So did you sell the job board? Did you just say, "I'm moving on and close the doors, does it still exists?"
Carlos: Man, such a good question. I didn't have a seven figure exit, like a lot of people nowadays exit from their businesses. The easy answer is-
Joel: Not from job boards.
Carlos: ... No, the easy answer is no. The business just went away. I got hired by Winn-Dixie, which is a supermarket chain based in Jacksonville, to start social media for them at the end of 2011. And for about a year, I moonlighted where, yeah, I still had the job board. I hired someone to do job fairs because I'd learned in the process that job fairs were actually pretty profitable, at least back then they were. And then about a year and I was like, you know what? I'm good with my six-figure cushy marketing job. And then the job board just went to the wayside.
Joel: So it does not exist anymore as far as you know?
Carlos: It does not exist as far as I know.
Joel: You don't own the domain.
Carlos: I don't own the domain.
Joel: Okay.
Carlos: What is fascinating is that the LinkedIn group that I started back then still exists, has about 35,000 members. But what I did, and this was like growth hackery, to grow the job board that I said on day one working at LinkedIn. Your first day working at LinkedIn, every employee in new hire orientation has introduced himself or herself to Jeff Wiener, the CEO. And you have to say, what's one thing that's not on your LinkedIn profile? So what I said on my first day was, "I know how to growth hack LinkedIn." And I did so, to build the startup during the recession and he was first thing, he was like, well, how'd you do that? I said, "Well, what I did, was I created multiple LinkedIn groups." And everyone was like New York jobs, Atlanta jobs, Chicago jobs.
Chad: Yeah.
Carlos: And if you guys remember, back then you could customize the welcome message, to your group on LinkedIn. So every single time someone would request to join a group on LinkedIn, they would be prompted with an email that will come from LinkedIn. And it would say, "While we review your application, visit jobsdirectusa.com, to sign up as an employer or as a job seeker. And I did this enough times to grow the database. And ultimately, the email database of Jobs Direct USA. And it was all using LinkedIn for free.
Joel: So the auto reply grew the job board essentially?
Carlos: 100%.
Chad: And Gary V is just now finding this out.
Joel: So Winn-Dixie, you had an interesting story. Tell our audience about your presentation, where you talk about, because it's obviously guerrilla style, not which you would typically expect at an event. So what do you typically focus on in your presentations and what did you to talk about here at the gathering?
Carlos: So my presentation here at the gathering is based on my book called, The End of Marketing. And for starters, I'm not a textbook marketer. It's very apparent when you see me speak on stage, that much of what I teach throughout my book, what I teach here are my keynotes, has been self-taught. It's what we're talking about here. It's actually getting in the weeds and trying to start a job board with no marketing budget. So, the whole premise of not just my book, but the talk is, really how to form human connections through social media, how to be less a brand on the corporate side, how to depend less on your logo and how to rely more on your people. So it's very much walking marketers through the harsh reality that today, you're not just competing against your traditional brands, but you're competing against people. Every one of us, three of us, we all have reach, we all compete for market share, not just against each other, but against other people out there. And brands just because they are billion dollar, trillion dollar companies, are not immune to the fact that we're all competing for digital market share in this giant digital ocean as I refer to it. And in order to stand out and rise above the noise, brands need to start relying more on their employees, which is where I think HR really should be taking notice of employee advocacy, isn't just a nice to have, but it's really a must have. And as I walk marketers through this progression of where we are today to where we're going, AI, artificial intelligence is getting ready to replace a lot of core functions, in the workplace today. And if professionals don't start honing in on, first of all, what makes them unique as personal brands and then B, how that cascades over their jobs, they're really going to be in trouble, over the next decade.
Joel: You have a great story, Publix versus Winn-Dixie. And Winn-Dixie's main competitor in the grocery chain business, was Publix and you had an idea of how to poach Publix customers into Winn-Dixie, but you were turned away. Tell us that story.
Carlos: I'm glad that you bring that up because again, putting on my old school startup founder hat, I learned in the early days of social media marketing, that social media marketing back then isn't much different than what it is today. What social networks really are, are search engines and you can find virtually anyone depending on the social network, speaking about any topic that's of interest. So back in the early to mid-2000's, I was looking for people that were hiring. I was looking for people that were looking for jobs. When I got hired by Winn-Dixie, I was looking for people that were buying groceries and not just people that were buying groceries at Winn Dixie, but buying groceries at Publix. So, I recall, and this was 2012, going into my CMO's office and I had this revelation I wanted to share with her. And it was literally screenshots from Twitter. I was like, "Hey, look Mary, these are people that are mentioning us in Publix and they're never tagging at Winn Dixie or at Publix." That means that nobody on Publix's community management team, is paying attention. This is an opportunity for us to swoop in and engage with them. Maybe we send them a link to sign up for our loyalty program and we have $25 loaded on their loyalty card. Now this is new customer acquisition. We know that they're going to go into a store, they're going to have to spend the $25 gift card. No one goes into a supermarket chain and just spends 25 bucks. They're going to spend more money. This is a brilliant idea and we're going to be able to do this and no one's ever going to know about it. She looked at me and literally said, "This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard."
Chad: Why was it a bad idea? Why did she think it was bad idea?
Carlos: Her literal words to me and I will never forget is, "We don't want to poke the bear."
Chad: We don't want to poke the bear.
Carlos: Yes.
Chad: We're comfortable where we're at right now. Don't kick Publix in the nuts.
Carlos: Correct.
Chad: Okay. That sounds, not like a growth organization.
Carlos: I looked at her and I was shocked and said, "Well, with all due respect, Mary, where we're at right now is down here," referring to the bottom.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Yeah.
Carlos: "And our competition is all the way up here. Do we want to be even halfway in the middle? Or are we okay with being down here?" And she literally looked at me again, said "This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Thank you for your time."
Joel: Wow!
Carlos: And I walked back to my cubicle feeling so rejected, like a complete failure and I said to myself, "One day someone is going to find value in this." And it's a story I tell throughout my book. It's a story that now I'm telling marketers and professionals like yourselves, at conferences. Because the fact of the matter is, look, social media is what it is, it's a search engine.
Joel: And you know that, even before you probably did that there was a handful of recruiters that thought of social networks as a search engine and were looking for people, commenting on how they hated their job, to recruit them for their company.
Chad: Easily.
Carlos: You guys telling me that.
Chad: Easily, yeah. Because recruiters, especially the good ones, okay?
Carlos: Yeah.
Chad: They're the ones who like reverse hack everything, right? So companies have these huge marketing presence and you were talking yesterday, about being very corporate and very sterile. Those marketing organizations are run by people. They understand what they like, but yet they're putting out this corporate sterile bullshit. Why is that happening? I just don't understand that.
Carlos: Yes. There's so many reasons. I think we could just sit here the rest of the afternoon, talk about this, there's so many reasons. First of all, silos. Every single organization has silos and most of the time they don't speak to each other. So I always advise any client that I work with today, that if you want, for example, launch an employee advocacy strategy at a company, you need to work with each silo individually and create a strategy for them because they're the client at the end of the day. So you go to HR and they are your business partner, and they are your client also. And you develop a strategy for them, then you go to sales and you develop a strategy for them. You go corporate comms and PR, you develop a strategy for them. That's not happening.
Chad: No.
Carlos: Most companies or most departments are in their own little boxes. And let's just be very honest, I'm all about the real talk. Most people that work in corporate, are just trying to get that check. And stay under the radar, and stay in that cushy job as long as they fucking can.
Chad: And stay comfortable, like old girl at Winn-Dixie, right?
Carlos: And you know what? I say this now because I'm on the flip side of it.
Chad: Yeah.
Carlos: Right? I worked my ass off in corporate for almost 10 years and I worked at four different brands, in very similar roles and I realized, there's a reason why I don't last at companies. And it's because I pride myself in being a disruptor and I bring that entrepreneurial experience to the brands that I worked with as an employee. And now on the flip side, same thing. Most people aren't wired that way. They want to just coast to the 15th and the 30th. And they will do the bare minimum to what it takes, just to stay employed.
Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, especially when you're sending candidates into a black hole, which is why you need friends like Roopesh Nair, CEO of SmashFly on your side.
Joel: Having someone submit a resume that just goes into the black hole is devastating for candidate experience. Do you need to close the black hole and ensure everyone has a great experience when applying?
Roopesh: Well, we're doing a group of things out there. One is to ensure that the application experience itself is seamless, by integrating with ATSs meaningfully and providing that status as back and forth. And ensuring that the levers communication are activated every time there's a status coming back and forth from the ATSs. So just kind of providing transparency, in the application process, by leveraging our candidate relationship management solution. The second aspect is then actually ensuring that we're using our matching algorithm, to bubble up people pretty quickly, where they are a great fit for that particular role in the company. And ensuring that the conversational engagement starts right away, and the recruiter is notified while the engagement is going on. It's critical, then that ways, we are prioritizing those engagements which are needed to the most important applicants right away. And then eventually ensuring that anyone who is not necessarily a good fit at that point, we are continuing to engage them, whether it is the job they applied for, or for any other job, or for that matter, just general brand awareness and general engagement around, what might be a good fit for those guys, ensures that that black hole is minimized.
Chad: Let SmashFly help, activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit, smashfly.com
Joel: And in your message, in your session was, if you want to survive and thrive, you have to be able to get through that. You have to bust through it. And you have a great example of Wendy's, where I've enjoyed many a burger and how they're not ashamed to take on the competition, put it in Chick-fil-A's face. So talk about that and how hard you think that is to get marketers to do that. And how much more difficult it would be for employers, and talent acquisition teams to start doing that.
Chad: So poking the bear.
Carlos: The challenge that loud marketers have that I see, is that they themselves... So the marketers that work inside of brands, they themselves don't have personal brands. They're not leaving work at the end of the day and consuming content. Again, they're working their nine to five job and they know what they know. In order to thrive in this space, you really have to be a practitioner first.
Chad: Well, this sounds like it runs parallel with HR.
Carlos: 100%.
Chad: Because recruiters should have their personal. I mean, the hiring managers, I mean all the way through, there's got to be personality there, which is what we're lacking, right?
Carlos: 100%. And that's very much the basis of my talks and my book, which is going forward, you need to replace the logo with a human face. So if you're at a company where there's 20,000 employees, you should be doing everything you can to activate those 20,000 employees, to tell your brand story for you. Empower them, teach them. Teach them how to use Instagram stories, empower them to take over your Instagram account.
Chad: And don't be afraid for them using Instagram stories and tagging you in it. I think many companies are afraid, oh, wait a minute, what the fuck are they going to say.
Joel: Legal is going to have a problem with this.
Chad: Yeah, legal is going to have a problem.
Carlos: Fuck Legal.
Chad: Exactly. I think, well, yeah. You don't ask for permission, right?
Carlos: You just do, because here's the thing. At the end of the day, you're trying to do what's best for the organization, and that's to help the organization grow and thrive, and create stickiness through content. The reality is this, your employees are already on social media. They're already indicating on their Facebook that they work for you. Even if they never speak about you, they're indicating on their LinkedIn. They have it in their bio on Instagram, what they do. So, you can't escape that, whatsoever. What you can do is you can train your employees and teach them how to advocate for you and give them the keys to the Cadillac. And if they fuck up, they fuck up. There's guidelines right in place. There's rules, but-
Chad: It's their personal brand though. If they want to retweet something, or like something that's not on brand, well fuck you, it's not your brand it's my personal brand, right?
Carlos: … Here's what I tell brands when I go in to consult for them on employee advocacy. Instead of thinking about this, of what your employees can do for you, you need to have the mindset of what you can do for your employees. Employees don't give a fuck about you. They give a fuck about the paycheck and they give a fuck about their careers. That's just facts. So, what you need to do is make them feel like you're empowering them to grow their personal brand. Because what's going to happen is this, two years, three years from now, when that employee leaves you, his or her LinkedIn is still going to have your logo on it. So you want to ensure that where they go, they're set up for success, because you want to share that whoever comes through these doors, always is going to go, to a better opportunity, or do bigger things like, look at me, right? I'm proud of the companies I've worked at. I haven't always had smooth transitions out of them, but hell, look where I'm at in my career now compared to where I was 10 years ago. I was a social media manager, working at Winn-Dixie.
Joel: So, talking about careers. There's a part of your talk, where you get into AI and none of you are going to have jobs in the future. And that's one of the things that we talk about quite a bit. And you even have a segment where you talk about companies that have CGI created Instagram accounts, where you don't even need people to go be advocates for you on social media.
Chad: That is just so fucking weird.
Joel: Let’s talk about that.
Chad: It's like animate shit.
Joel: And how that might affect the talent acquisition.
Carlos: I think you guys and girls in HR are going to be the ones that really mess things up.
Chad: As soon as they do any type of AI that can do a podcast, we're fucked. Okay?
Carlos: Yes and no. But, what I will say is if you can take... How many episodes have you guys done?
Chad: Over 300.
Carlos: Over 300. If there is some sort of technology that can take all 300 episodes, it already knows your voice, it already knows every word that you say and just mixes it up, then yeah, you really don't need, you guys anymore.
Chad: We can live on though. That's the beautiful part, right?
Carlos: That's the cool thing that you can live on. But, what I refer to through my talk and why personal branding is so important, is because once AI can replace human jobs, then why do you really need a person? And that's where I call it the battle of AI versus human or AI judgment day. Because people will always relate to people, I have no interest in following or engaging with a CGI influencer. Because I know it's not a real person that will ever be able to meet. Some people find this shit cool cause there's an art aspect to it. But again, where I say, I really think HR is going to be the one that drives the ship on this, is as you learn how affordable AI technology is, you're going to have conversations with your clients or you're going to have conversations, if you're listening to this and you work on the inside of a brand. You'll have conversations with your executives, you're going to say, “Hey, we're paying a marketing manager 65 grand a year. We're paying a graphic designer 75 grand a year. We could actually pay an AI $12,000 a year. We can pay this company that's going to program AI to do all these functions. No health insurance, no 401(k) match, no benefits.”
Chad: No sick days.
Carlos: No sick days.
Chad: No kids that you got to get-
Carlos: They're always on, 365, 24/7 right? That's, the world that we are getting ready to be living in very soon. And you're already seeing it happen. You're starting to see IBM Watson. You're starting to see, these commercials popping up for AI. It's always going to be presented as a value added benefit, but this is where it goes back to, if you, right now in the year 2020, are not focusing on growing a brand for yourself, I feel sorry for you.
Joel: So, I'm the HR person that's doing the layoffs now. I'm the one having those meetings and I eventually know that I'm going to have to look in the mirror and say, AI can do my job too. What advice do you give that person?
Carlos: Such a good question. What I would say is, you always have to be the individual that's steering the strategy, steering the ship. You can't make yourself be replaceable and there will always need to be human bodies around to manage, even an AI workforce, as crazy as that sounds.
Joel: Robot resources. Yeah, we talked about it.
Carlos: Well, think about, how you can be the leader, steering the ship. Not everyone will, there will be thousands of people that lose their jobs as a result of AI. But one thing is for certain, people will all always relate to people. People will always trust and confide in people. And I think we're going to take marketing from where it is today, where it's very noisy. And we are already starting to see this happen with Slack groups, WhatsApp groups, private communities on Facebook. I think we're actually going to go right back to an early 2000's, type era, where marketing communications is very much siloed in a way. And it's not as open as it is because we're going to start valuing one-to-one and peer-to-peer group communications much more, than we do today.
Joel: I was talking to a colleague and talking about 30 years ago, if you wanted to apply to a job, let's say a very simple job, you went down to the local grocery store, restaurant and you said, "I want to apply to a job." And the GM came out, gave an application, probably said, "Hi, my name is so and so." You introduce your.... There's actually a human connection there and there's actually a brand transaction, right? "So, hey, would you like a Coke? I'll get you a soda while you fill out the application." Where today it's so much colder. And to me I feel like we're just starting to realize that we've dehumanized the application process so much that we're losing out on that human connection. I think part of the reason why Chad and I are at this conference is, how do we get marketing to realize that there's a connection that can be made there with that? And so when I think about AI, maybe am I being too optimistic to think? Maybe we'll go back to those days where there is a human-to-human interaction, where we do have job applications and people at companies actually talking to each other, when they get together.
Carlos: I'd say 100%, we're going to need to go back in time. And in the last chapter of The End of Marketing was, the hardest to write, because I don't have a crystal ball. I can't predict what the hell is going to happen. I can only go based on data and make very much educated guesses. But what I do predict, is we will go backwards in time to where one-on-one relationships means more than anything. The value of your social network, the people you're connected to will mean more than money itself, because as we all know, we can all attest to it, where would will we be today if we didn't have our LinkedIn network? Where would we be today if we didn't make the investment 10 plus years ago to build our own brands? So it goes back to what I said before. If you're just getting started now, you're very much behind the eight ball, but there's still time to catch up. Now, in terms of like the application process for jobs, I don't think you'll go backwards that much, but I think the criteria, I'd love to hear your thoughts since you guys work in the weeds and HR. And I think nowadays, when someone Google’s you, that's really the first step for them to see how legitimate you are as a potential candidate. Is that a safe assumption?
Chad: Yeah, that's a safe assumption. I literally don't think we're going to go back to the humanto-human. And the reason why, is scale. We talked to Yeti today, where they post a job and they get 30,000 resumes, right? So you can't scale that human-to-human. So what you need to do, is you need a ... And there's also research, I think Sherm paid somebody to do some research that showed that job seekers really would rather get touched by a chatbot, not a human, than go into a black hole. So I think what's going to happen, and it's almost, like folding in what you're talking about, with regard to automation. We're going to automate ourselves out of this, because it scales faster, it learns faster. So all those things, I don't think we're going to have that human-to-human until, we get to the point where we know it's whittled down to the core group of who we want to interview, right? And who knows what that interview process looks like at that point. Because it might not be a human, right? It might actually progress out of that, because humans want to use their gut. And research shows, your gut sucks. So where do we go from there? And that's the hard discussion, for recruiters. It's the hard discussion for HR. I was a hiring manager. That'd be fucking awesome, I hated interviewing people. I hated all this gut check stuff, right? To make that last decision over two people. If I just had an algorithm that said, "Hey, history says this," right? And it worked in all the diversity components and things, and gave me a diverse slate. Fuck yeah, let's do it.
Joel: And see, I think... I have 6,000 some LinkedIn connections. I literally know could actually call up about 100 to 150. And a lot of studies show that, you can only have 150 or so actual human relationships before your brain blows up and you can't handle it anymore. So, when I think about the future, I think about the gig economy and knowing that 100 to 150 people. And can you make a living, knowing 150 people and you probably can, you can probably work for a dozen companies, people, projects, to make a living as opposed to just, I'm going to work for one company for the next three to five years. So when I look at the future, although I think networks are important, I think they're very shallow. And I think we have to get to a point where, I have like 100 people, that I love, I do projects for, they do projects for me. And that little community, is what gets me through.
Chad: But link LinkedIn as a social network. I think that's where we start going to a marketplace, right? So the marketplace actually demonstrates and shows the projects that are available. And then that matches up against the individuals who have the skillsets. Who are looking to do projects?
Joel: Yes. But you can only take on so many projects.
Chad: No. And that's when you're done, right? When you-
Joel: Yes. Everyone will have to start in a marketplace and get that one or two things, get your brand out there, get your name, get that referral and then you're off to the races. So I think the marketplace has to exist for that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: But I think it's those deep communications are what's... Because I've worked for the same people or with the same people for over a decade. And I can just keep going back to them like, I got an idea or hey I want to help you do this, or they come to me. So the future I see is something like that, as opposed to the big corporate model of big brand.
Carlos: So it goes back to personal branding though?
Joel: Yeah, it does.
Carlos: You have to make yourself marketable as a candidate.
Joel: Yes.
Carlos: Because when you're using these resources... I don't look at LinkedIn as a social network. I look at it as just a directory because-
Joel: And that's how Microsoft looks at it's staff.
Carlos: And that working isn't really happening on LinkedIn. Nowadays, LinkedIn is where you have your own presence on the web, but it's also very limited. I think we can admit, because it's, one professional headshot, your professional accolades. But if you really want to get to know someone, either A, you go over to Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook or B, what we haven't really addressed is the value of in person networking. I see tremendous value in doing this right here, coming to a conference, going outside of your comfort zone. Even if you make a handful of good solid connects here, at a conference, its worth so much more than just arbitrarily connecting with people on LinkedIn that you will never meet.
Chad: I totally agree. But wait a minute, the gathering, so this our second year here, right? And we go out as who we are, right? It just, it is who it is. We go to most of these events, they're HR, recruiting events. And there's that person that's inside that doesn't come out, because it's a professional event right? Here, it's like a safe place and everybody talks shit. And we know, I mean we're on stage with Yeti and he's like, yeah, I know we haven't figured this shit out. As a matter of fact, he's taking notes, as we're going through and he won the Icon Award last year. Right? I mean, and he's just so human, and that's what we're seeing here. But most of the events we go to, we can't have these discussions.
Carlos: Can I tell you why?
Chad: Yeah, please.
Carlos: Because, you're speaking to the wrong audience. You have to go outside of your comfort zone and go outside of your circles in order to thrive.
Chad: Where do I go?
Carlos: You have to speak to people that are not in HR.
Chad: That's what we're doing here.
Carlos: So I struggle with this too, because I go to a lot of events and I have a lot of marketing homies, that do social media marketing for a living, but I also have different pockets that I go into and weave in and out of. So, this right here, these are the homies that I used to be one of them, corporate marketer. I'm not corporate marketer anymore, but I know their jobs very well. So I can blend in here, in a couple of weeks. I'm getting ready to go, social media marketing world. Six, 7,000 social media marketers, they're going to be there. We all know pretty much the same tactics, the same hacks, the same everything. So it's more of a social thing. I'm not going to go there necessarily be teaching someone new tricks, because we all are on the same level playing field, which is like what HR is for you guys. So I think, you have to force yourself. I spoke a couple of weeks ago at Upper Deck Trading Cards Conference. I was a keynote there. It was a dealer conference. It was probably one of the best conferences I've ever been to. Such a good question cause I learned. I learned so much, about trading cards. I learned about the business model of trading cards that I left there feeling like thankful, that I went to a conference or actually learned.
Chad: Yeah.
Carlos: And it wasn't the other way around where I'm just there, just to go onstage, teach and then get the hell out.
Chad: You're giving while you're there, but there's got to be some take, right? You got to be getting something and that's one of the things that again, I love about this conference.
Joel: Yeah, I love that you force yourself out of those comfort zones. And for me, weirdly enough, that's YouTube. Like I'll think of something I want to learn more about and I'll take my ass to YouTube, I'll learn more about it, than I ever thought I ever could.
Chad: You're so much of that. Yeah.
Joel: Now I don't know if that helps you professionally or not, but I think it helps me as a person. Well Carlos, man, thanks for hanging out with us. For our listeners that want to know more about you and your personal brand, where do they go?
Carlos: You can follow me @carlosgil83 on Twitter and on Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. If you're into books, I encourage you to go to, endofmarketingbook.com, to get The End of Marketing.
Joel: Thanks man.
Chad: Excellent. We out.
Joel: We out.
Chad: This has been The Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors, because they make it all possible. For more visit, chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome.