Speaker announcement: Mark Williams

Our next speaker is known as Mr LinkedIn! Welcome to Mark Williams, who's coming from North Wales to speak onstage in Birmingham at UpLift Live about advanced LinkedIn strategies.

TRANSCRIPT

Who would have predicted this time last year that AI would be even anywhere near LinkedIn, you know?

Welcome back to the UpLift Live podcast. This is John Espirian from the Mission Control team for UpLift Live, which is the UK's first LinkedIn-focused conference for LinkedIn specialists, power users and enthusiasts.

It's time for another speaker announcement, and this time we're chatting with Mr LinkedIn himself, Mark Williams. I call Mark the Swiss Army knife of LinkedIn, as he knows so much about the platform and is probably the single person from whom I've learned most about LinkedIn.

I chat with Mark a lot as we're both Liverpool Football Club supporters, and I'm a regular contributor on his podcast, Linkedinformed. We're turning the tables today and I'm interviewing him.

Let's hop aboard and get to the interview with Mark!

Mark Williams, welcome to the UpLift Live podcast.

You are going to be one of our speakers in Birmingham.

It's a great honour to be able to host you.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

I can't wait.

I can't believe it's so long to wait till March.

It's seems a long time away for me at the moment.

But I'm sure once we get past Christmas, it'll come upon us in a flash.

Yeah, it will a bit.

And it feels odd to be saying this, given that you are Mr LinkedIn, but tell us, for the people who don't know who you are, what do you know about LinkedIn? Oh God! Where do you start? I think, you know, one of the things I would say about me and LinkedIn, I mean, it changes so often.

And there's so much complexity to it, that I don't think anybody could ever claim to know everything about LinkedIn.

But I have been doing this a long time.

And I think one of the things I feel is a strength with regards to knowing about LinkedIn is just that, that sense of knowing the company, the direction that they go in, and sometimes they make a change and you think, oh, you know, I assume this, or one would assume this from what they're doing.

But sometimes when you've been doing this, as long as I have you kind of go oh, I'm not actually sure that's true.

I think it's probably more like this, you know, and interpreting and understanding the platform from the perspective of users and how users have changed the way they use it, you know.

I guess again, the longer you've seen it, the more you've been around it, the easier it is to be able to make that kind of crossover between what the platform or what the company are doing, and how its users will actually want to use it.

Yeah, it's one of the things I appreciate most about your Linkedinformed podcast is that you actually cogitate and digest this stuff and then think about what it might mean strategically and explain that really well on the podcast.

So, if anyone hasn't come across Linkedinformed, it's just gone through its 400th episode.

It pretty much is required listening, I would say.

If you're going to be coming to this advanced conference for LinkedIn specialists, you need to be listening to Mark's podcast, go and check it out.

It's a regular for me on a Saturday afternoon.

Now, Mark, I often think of you as the Swiss Army knife of LinkedIn, because you just know so many things about so many parts of what is a massive beast.

We're too far away from the conference for you to tell us any specifics about what you're going to talk about but can you say something about the kind of state of LinkedIn and where you think it's going and maybe give us some idea of the kind of advanced things that you might want to talk about? I mean, it's funny, isn't it.

Every year, or certainly for the last few years, in January, I do a sort of prediction of what I think's going to happen over the next year.

And I usually get it quite wrong.

So, I've given up trying to really predict on where LinkedIn is going to go.

But the one thing we do know is that it's going to change, and it always does.

And it always will.

I think there are indications from LinkedIn that they are making a real concerted effort to try and stem the tide of personal content.

And then trying to kind of dictate to us that they want to see more business content.

And that's a good thing and a bad thing, you know.

It's a kind of a good thing in the sense that maybe people do go a bit too far with personal content on LinkedIn.

But it's a bad thing, also, in the sense that it kind of drives me a bit mad that LinkedIn feel they can dictate to us what they th...