Jeffrey Mack, VP of Marketing at Agility PR, sat down with Mike for the latest episode of Marketing B2B Technology.

Jeffrey discusses the benefits of having a PR platform that integrates distribution with measurement, and how measurement is becoming a critical component in successful PR strategies. He discusses how measuring PR success is evolving from traditional quantitative AVE data to more qualitative data and how marketing teams can benefit from this shift.

Jeffrey also shares his thoughts on the future of trade publications and why marketeers may have more impact from reaching out to smaller industry publications.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Jeffrey Mack – Agility PR

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Jeffrey Mack

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I’m joined by Jeffrey Mack. Jeffrey is the VP of Marketing at Agility PR. Welcome to the podcast Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Thank you very much happy to be here.

Mike: It’s great to have you on it’s great to have someone who’s involved in the PR side of marketing as well. So I’m really interested, you know, how did you get into the PR? How did your career develop? And how did you end up at Agility?

Jeffrey: Yeah, it’s a pretty, pretty interesting career trajectory that I’d say is sort of characterised as just being curious and wanting to do a little bit of everything. But I actually am a, I guess, a proud law school dropout. So in college, my plan was always to become an attorney and make a lot of money. I went to law school for a year and realised Oh, man, I can’t imagine myself doing this every day for a paycheck. So started getting a real job. So I began my career in sales, actually. And it was a small Fintech startup where we had to call hundreds of people each day and try to get them to open brokerage accounts. And I personally didn’t really like calling people all day long. So I decided, You know what, let me do this a little bit smarter. There’s this thing called the internet, there’s a lot of people who are interested in foreign exchange trading. And I’ll just go infiltrate a Yahoo forum, do my sales pitch in a post and see what happens and sort of did that and ended up being a very successful salesperson setting company records for accounts that were closed in a day, a week in a month, and all of that and got a, you know, an email to go see my boss in his office. And when I went in there, they said, Hey, listen, I don’t know what you did. But we can’t really pay you all this commission. This is crazy. And then also, on top of that, you seem to understand the Internet pretty well. So we’re gonna move you to marketing. So that’s essentially how I ended up as a as a marketer. And again, this was a small Fintech startup. There, I started working on the product side of things, really focusing on trading education and building community, which is a theme that sort of runs throughout my career and ended up working my way up through that company and several other companies and had a lot of experience with sort of storytelling and demand generation and Account Based Marketing, and just was able to dip my fingers in a lot of different areas of marketing, which was a tremendous value for me as I sort of rose through the ranks and eventually spent time at some great companies like LinkedIn at some small companies that have since been valued over a billion dollars. And now I’m at a Agility, which is a great software company, based in Canada that provides software for PR and communications professionals.

Mike: Awesome. So you ended up being sort of moved to marketing because you’re earning too much in sales? I think that’s a great way to start a career pretty much.

Jeffrey: That’s what I always tell people. Yeah, fair, fair. unfair. Right.

Mike: Cool. So you know, the Agility? Can you just tell us what the Agility does?

Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely. So, Agility, we do a little bit of everything. But we’re primarily focused on providing end to end solution for PR and communications professionals. So I like to say that we offer essentially a PR hub, right, which is a platform where PR and comms professionals can start in in their day and allow them to do essentially most of the facets of their job, everything from, you know, discovering the key journalist and media people that can help them sort of amplify their story through distribution. So sending out news wires, press releases, or story pitches to those journalists, and then monitoring their their own medium. So what are people saying about them? Right? How are the stories being told, and then ultimately, just measuring everything and making sense of the true value of their PR and comms programmes, because at the end of the day, you know, you always want to align things back to the business outcomes. So all of those different areas where these PR and comms people are being tasked, we’re able to allow them to do that all in one place in one platform, where they can jump back and forth between all those different facets and really, sort of build a cohesive PR strategy.

Mike: That’s really interesting, because back in the day, the monitoring side was always split from the database side. So what do you think of the benefits of actually merging those two together in a single platform?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s synergy, right? At the end of the day, you want to try to make things as simple as possible for people. And when you think about monitoring anything about database, and you look at sort of the landscape of companies that are out there, they’ve all more or less sort of started in one of those areas, right? And maybe over time, they’ve acquired other companies consolidated to add those together. But you really want to have sort of that that synergistic feel for for people. So if I’m out there, and I’m looking at monitoring and I see some some great articles that are written about my company or my brand. I want to be able to then right from that article, be able to look at that journalist or that author’s profile to see what are their articles are they are they writing? What other themes or areas are they covering, things like that. And if it’s a journalist who’s maybe written about me once, and they cover, you know, the area that’s important to me, and they reach the audience, that’s important to me, maybe I want to build and establish a relationship with that journalist, maybe I want to reach out and pitch further stories. Or maybe I just want to introduce myself, right, and let them know, Hey, I’m here. For future articles or things of that sort, feel free to reach out to me I can, I can give you a quote, right, or I can be a resource for you. So I think making it really simple to go from the coverage that your your brand has directly to that journalist, and get that journalist contact information to, you know, establish and build that relationship, it’s really important, I don’t want to need to log into separate platforms to be able to do that, I want to be able to do that all in one place. With to two parts of the overall solution that talk to each other really nicely. It’s about about synergy. It’s about making my life a little bit easier.

Mike: That’s really interesting, because it sounds like what you’re talking about is quite an intelligent approach to PR. I mean, I think one of the criticisms of, you know, some of the use of database services is people have just pulled a big list of journalists and just spam them with with emails. So maybe you can talk about how PR professionals can be a little more intelligent in the way they use databases, rather than just doing this simple blast and hope kind of approach?

Jeffrey: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. And I wouldn’t doubt that there are some PR people out there that probably, you know, send their story pitches, and the release is to everybody under the sun. And that’s, I think, the wrong strategy, right? You want to be really deliberate with your outreach strategy. The database is great. I mean, it has an infinite sort of universe of people that could help tell your story. But at the end of the day, if you want to have people effectively tell that story, and you want to get value from that, you really do need to focus in on who you want to go out and pitch, right, I don’t think it’s much different than being a marketer, right? You want to understand your audience. But you also want to make sure that based on the audience that you’re deciding to market to, you have a very relevant and potentially personalised message right and in your distribution is in a way that makes it really easy for them to sort of come across your marketing. So I think it’s very similar. When you’re out there, pitching, you know, I could very easily say, here’s 100,000, journalist, here’s my story, boom, go. But what you’re going to end up with is a very impersonal pitch that you’re sending out to people, people are busy, they can see through things pretty quickly and easily. And if there’s a very impersonal message that’s sent out, you’re probably not even going to get a response, or even probably somebody that’s going to look past the subject line. So I think narrowing your focus in your database approach and finding not only the journalists that are going to be relevant to your audience relevant to your sector, but also maybe some that are not, you know, the biggest journalists out there, those are the ones that are probably going to act and say, Oh, wow, somebody’s pitching me a story, right, I’m gonna go ahead and do my best to tell the story in a great way. So I think it’s just about having a strategy, having a little bit more narrow focus, and being very selective in who you’re actually pulling out of that database. And then being very thoughtful about the pitch that you’re sending out. I mean, I would not recommend sending out the same email to 1000s of people. I mean, it doesn’t doesn’t kill you to switch it up a little bit, right. And that could be manually personalising them, or using things like tokens and other things where you can, you know, change the name of a publication or change the name of an industry, something that’s just going to make it feel as though there was a little bit more effort put into it.

Mike: And that’s really interesting. So there, I think you’re talking about some of the benefits you get from combining the database and the distribution together, is this ability to insert tokens. Do you want to talk a little bit more about, you know, how people might be able to benefit from that distribution being integrated with the database?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, I think for one, it’s measurement, right? That’s the most important thing, you can send out a million emails, right. But if you don’t actually know what’s happening on the other end, you know, you’re not really moving the needle forward in any, any way. So with our software, I’m sure some some others that are out there. Since we’re handling the monitoring, we’re handling the database, we’re handling the distribution. Soon as that goes out. We’re able to tell people right away, you know, what are their open rates, sort of what are the response rates, right? And then, again, going back to monitoring, we’re able to see like, are we actually getting pickup? Are we getting earned media? And again, what’s really interesting about agilities software is that we’ve actually created an engineered all of those different components, so that they were built on the same codebase. You know, they were built to talk to each other. If you look at a lot of the other solutions that are out there. A lot of their, quote unquote platforms were sort of built together in a Frankenstein method where they acquired company A and acquired company B, acquired company C, and then they sort of mash them all together, put lipstick on a pig, let’s say right and say, Hey, we have this full full solution, but wasn’t really designed to be used in an integrated fashion. Whereas Agility truly was. And I think, again, a benefit to the end user in that there’s a lot of visibility across all functions of what they’re doing. Again, whether it’s sourcing, monitoring, measuring, right distributing messages, all of that data sort of flows within an ecosystem, that’s going to give you the data back to say how successful or maybe how unsuccessful was like with a specific campaign. And we’re going to take that data, and we’re going to use that to inform our future campaigns to try to get a little bit better.

Mike: I love that idea of like, you know, be able to have that closed loop of, you know, running the campaign, and then getting the data to feedback on how effective it was, I guess, you know, a lot of PR pros are thinking, that’s really useful. But also we need to report to the board, and the board always wants to know the value of PR. So how does Agility approach, you know, giving some sort of value to the results achieved through PR?

Jeffrey: Yeah, and that’s, that’s a, it’s a hot topic in PR. And it’s, it’s really interesting, because my personal background is not a background in PR. So when I joined Agility, it’s like, okay, I understand the marketing bit. And I understand a little bit of the PR piece, but now I really need to sort of put two and two together and sort of understand what is the day to day look like for a PR professional? What are they actually looking to accomplish? And I think the measurement piece is a critical component. And one that is it’s a hot topic of all of the industry events that you go to I just came back from prsa icon, which is, I think, the largest PR conference in the United States here. And when we looked at the content of programming, and I was lucky enough to go as an attendee, so I didn’t have to be there trying to shill Agility to every person that I spoke to, I actually got to absorb and understand what were the topics that were important for our core audience. And measurement was, was probably one of the most important and most popular topics that was out there. And a lot of people be our comms people, you know, they’re understanding that measurement is a critical component to their jobs, what they’re looking for, is they’re looking for a little bit of help on moving away from sort of the traditional way of measurement, which was very quantitative, right, and very much based on outdated KPIs like abs, which is add value equivalencies, that’s the the old way to say, Hey, this is the coverage we got. And this is the value in dollars of what we got. And what we’re seeing. And what we’re actually advocating for is a move towards more qualitative measurement, right. So how we actually measure the impact of our activities and our programmes as they relate to overall business outcomes. And, you know, maybe not the easiest thing in the world, but I think it provides a better picture for, for why we’re doing the things that we’re doing, right. And when we talk about sort of qualitative things, you can essentially break it down into three categories.

So it’s like awareness. So like, are we actually improving awareness? And there’s ways to sort of measure that engagement? Are we seeing engagement and engagement can be a few different things, right? Are we selling more products? Are we driving more traffic to our site? Are we getting more engagement on social media? Things like that? And then also reputation? Right? How are we actually impacting our reputation? Is it improving, right? Are people thinking about our brand in a in a much better way than they were potentially before? So sort of taking all of that into account, the qualitative component of measurement is going to be, I think, what you’re going to see being more popular moving forward. And then there’s also other things like, you know, instead of saying we want pickup in 1000 publications, okay. Big deal, right? I’d rather have pickup in maybe five publications that are on my priority media list, right? So if the New York Times and The New Yorker or The Wall Street Journal are writing about me, that’s much better than the Jersey Shore Gazette, no offence to the Jersey Shore, which is where I live, which is why I use that as an example here. But there is also sort of that component from a quality standpoint. And then also things like prominence, right? Like, where are you actually being mentioned in an article? Where are you being mentioned in a publication, those are not all equal, as well. So we want to make sure that it’s it’s qualitative, we want to make sure that it’s driving impact, we want to make sure that it’s actually measurable. And we want to be able to your point that you brought up when you ask the question, want to be able to ensure that we can sort of summarise these activities and present them up to the executives because I think at this day and age, you know, the C suite does care about the PR and comms initiatives, they do want to see what type of impact is being driven from the work that’s taking place. And I’d say, in order to drive maximum impact, there does need to be a strategy involved.

And you know, I think earlier in our conversation, we maybe talked a little bit about database and I don’t know that we touched Too much news wires. But when we were going back and forth on email, I think that was one of the things you were interested in is like, Does that still work is just still value there? And my answer to that question that I just asked myself would be, yeah, absolutely. As long as your strategy, right, when you think about your press releases, don’t think about as I’m just going to send out this release, and then we’re done. And then I’m going to move on to the next one. And I’m going to send that out. Think about them sort of as a series of chapters and a story that you’re trying to tell. If you think about it. That way, you have a strategy for getting that story out, eventually, you’re going to get the right story, amplified by the right people.

Mike: I think that’s great advice. There’s an awful lot in there. I mean, to me, one of the most interesting things is, you know, we talk about quantitative being things like Avi, which were easy numbers to generate. But actually, the interesting thing is the qualitative results you’re talking about, they seem to be more closely tied to business objectives, the Navy, I mean, the value of advertising really doesn’t impact business objective.

Jeffrey: And I think that’s a trend that you see everywhere, you know, think think of the marketing side of things. I mean, for a while, in the good old days, right? Marketing didn’t really have to show much of anything, right? They would produce some fancy PowerPoints or some presentations, and everyone thought life was great. You know, now, there’s such a focus, as it relates to the marketing organisation and companies on actually contributing to the bottom line, right, and actually providing and sourcing or even influencing right revenue and bookings. And there was a period of time where people wanted to see how many MQLs marketing qualified leads marketing was was producing. Now you’re sort of sort of seeing a move down funnel to see what pipeline is being generated by marketing, right, what revenue is actually being generated or influenced by marketing. So just like that, I think you’re seeing that sort of translate across the PRPs, you’re also starting to see it come across all areas of the business, right? There’s probably a lot of departments within an organisation that never knew anything about where a company stood as it relates to sales and revenue, and now are all being asked to sort of pitch in and contribute towards all of that stuff.

Mike: No, I think that’s very true. It’s definitely a trend that everyone now is much more bolting on company results rather than focusing on their department and potentially meaningless internal metrics. I’d like to jump back to something you you talked about earlier, though, you were talking about the focus on publications and kind of implied that the big publications will become more and more important as people focus on a smaller number of high quality results. What’s going to be the impact on the trade media? I mean, we’ve seen some trade publications struggle financially, is that going to get worse? Are we going to see fewer trade publications?

Jeffrey: It’s an interesting question. And it would be easy for me to say, yeah, they’re doomed. Right? But but I actually don’t don’t think that they are. Because there are several businesses that spend most of their marketing budgets with trade pubs, right? That’s just the reality. And it’s almost like, it’s almost like a government subsidy, right? These these businesses that have sort of been around for a while, have always worked with these trade pubs, even with sort of maybe declining ROI. I think it’s just a little bit of nostalgia, and just a little bit of doing business as usual. So I do believe that in certain industries, they’ll continue to exist. I don’t want to say though, they’ll continue to thrive because I don’t think I don’t think that’s going to happen, right? These small trade clubs, I don’t think they’ll thrive, but I think they’ll exist. I mean, I worked for a technology company called Crestron electronics years ago. And a lot of our marketing budget was with the trade pubs, right? I mean, yes, we sort of understood that we were propping them up. But in that industry, which was, you know, high end audio video, the trade pubs did have a decent audience, you know, our core base, was there, maybe reading these trade pubs maybe going to their website, but it was just something that, you know, we’ve built those relationships over time, we felt pretty confident that our audience was there. And we continue to do business with them. I’m sure there are several other industries and companies that are in the same boat. So, you know, I think there’s a place for them, I think, in some regards, they can probably tell our stories better than a giant publication, right? Because this is what they do they live they die with that specific industry. So I would say I, I personally think they’ll they’ll survive. I don’t think they’ll they’ll be thriving anytime soon.

Mike: I think that’s probably as good as it’s gonna get for trade pups. I don’t think they any of them believe that. The next few years are going to be boom times. I’m interested as well, you know, you’re obviously a VP of marketing. So when you’re promoting Agility, you know, what works for you. What are your best channels or what are your best campaigns that you’ve run?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, a lot of different things work right. I think for me, the way that I think about marketing is always sort of with that business mentality of we need to deliver something to the bottom lime. So to that end, there’s sort of demand generation, which is the hot topic and, and a core focus for a lot of companies when they talk about marketing. But when I think of demand generation, there’s really a few things that sort of go into, into that sort of theme, right. And one, I think is, you know, demand capture is pretty critical. So if you think about your target market, at any moment in time, a very small percentage of that market is in market, right looking to buy something. So you need to be really good at getting in front of those people and understanding who they are where they are. So we do a lot of marketing as relates to intent. So the people that are showing intent to buy or showing sell signals, we want to make sure that we have some maximum effort to get in front of them. And we do so across, believe it or not display advertising. So we have some partners there. We do a lot with LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn is a great, great channel for B2B. It is maybe a little expensive, but hey, you know, you feel pretty confident that you’re getting in front of the right audience. And then we’ll look at other social channels as well. But we tried to do it in an intelligent way where we’re really just retargeting an audience that we feel confident, you’re not going to really find a great B2B Audience, specifically on Facebook or Instagram. But there is there’s there are modes there to do things. We run and produce lots of great content, whether webinars or guides, or white papers, we also have virtual summits that we do that are tremendous drivers of not only leads for us, but also value for our audience, right? I think at the end of the day, if you can provide value for the audience, when they are ready to be in marker when they are ready to buy, you know, they’re going to think about you and at least give you an app, that doesn’t mean that they’re gonna they’re gonna pick you, but you want to just have an app that you have, you want to have an opportunity to put your best foot forward. And I think that all relates to sort of demand generation, right, which is different than demand capture to two very different things. And then the last thing that I typically think about where I think we have success is building a strong brand. I think if you have a strong brand, those first two things I talked about become a lot easier. So how do you build that brand? How do you build a brand where people sort of understand what you stand for? You know, in our case, we want to be thought leaders in the in the PR space, we produce a lot of great content as relates to measurement, we produce a lot of great content as it relates to crisis, communications and things of that sort. So we’re really trying to provide value to our audience, so that when they’re ready to buy, you know, we’re top of mind and part of that consideration set.

Mike: So there’s quite a lot going on. That’s, that’s great. And you’re obviously, you know, really enthusiastic about marketing. I’m interested to know, did you have any, like pet peeves, or things about marketing that you don’t enjoy?

Jeffrey: Oh, several. I mean, I do like a lot of marketing. And I think the reason that I like it is because throughout my career, I’ve been able to do a little bit of a little bit of all of it, right? And that’s just I’m a very curious person. I love learning. I love teaching, I always joke if I didn’t need to pay my mortgage, I’d be a high school history teacher. But I do need to make money. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when I interview people to join my team, typically I look for really curious, smart people. And I always tend to ask them the same question, which is, imagine that you’re standing on top of the marketing fence, right on one side of the fence is the data and the analytics side. And then the other side of the fence is the creativity side and the art side, What side do you fall on? myself, personally, I would probably fall on that artistic creative side, nine times out of 10. So I do love the parts of marketing that are around creativity around just coming up with some wacky ideas and seeing if they actually drive driving engagement. That being said, it’s interesting. When I talk to people, and I asked them that question, more and more, I see people saying they want to fall on the data side of things. And I don’t know what that means, whether it’s marketing since becoming a data driven scientific function of an organisation, if there’s creativity dying, or maybe, you know, B2B companies, not facilitating the creativity that they should be. I think in this day, and age marketing is becoming a little bit commoditized. And by that, I mean, everyone has access to the same tools, everyone has access to the same data. So at the end of the day, your competitive advantage is going to be creativity. And that’s sort of the way that I look at things. So if I had to choose between writing a brief for a really creative campaign versus creating dashboards and Excel files, I’m going to lean towards the creativity part, but I’ve firmly understand that to be a marketing leader. I need to be good on both areas.

Mike: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think it’s it’s now something you can’t say you’re all creativity or all data. I think everyone’s got a span both for sure. I love the idea of you being a history teacher as well. And I, one of the things we’d like to ask people is, you know, if you had a young person come to you interested in the marketing career, what advice would you give them?

Jeffrey: I would go tell them to work in finance. Because they’ll make a lot more money. No, I think I mean, I think it’s, it’s great, right. And again, I interview a lot of people for the teams that I’ve sort of led, and people are maybe fresh out of school. So I always, you know, ask them, Is this what they think that they want to do? I don’t ask them. Is this what you want to do? Because when you’re young, especially you don’t you don’t really know. But that’s, that’s probably one of the big questions. But overall, I mean, I like to just let people know that, at the end of the day, the job of marketing is to make sales easier. In reality, that’s what it is. I mean, a lot of times what you see on TV is not necessarily what you see in real life, all day, every day, we’d love to be Don Draper, madmen was like probably one of my favourite television shows of all time. You know, what, there’s not a lot of opportunity to be Don Draper, in the marketing world. So I tried to set realistic expectations, I tried to let people on my teams anyhow, dip their toes in a lot of different areas of marketing. It’s what I had the benefit of doing for myself. And then you find the areas that you like, and the areas that you don’t like, and try to put people in a position where they can work on more of the things that they enjoy working on, and less of the things that they don’t, because at the end of the day, that’s going to dictate the quality of the work that you get. So yeah, I mean, if young person came to me, I would say, try it out, see, if you like it. I mean, at the end of the day, you’ll have to enjoy Storytelling, you’ll have to enjoy business, because there’s no free rides and marketing anymore. You ultimately need to deliver to the business. But I think, you know, if nothing else, if you’re curious, and you enjoy creativity, and storytelling, and if you enjoy data, there is an opportunity for people in marketing.

Mike: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s, that’s very positive. I’m, you know, I’m mindful of time. So I guess, is there something you’d like to leave the listeners with as a last thought? Maybe some, you know, marketing advice you’ve got or something around the product?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, I think just overall as as a marketer, right? Don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t be afraid to step outside of of your lines. I mean, it’s done me Well, I mean, I remember, I was a product marketing working on educational products at a company and I, this is a long time ago. So I’m dating myself. But there was a new a new invention that had come out called an iPhone, and people were starting to buy it. And this is pretty early on. And I remember going to my boss at the time and saying, Hey, I think that people are going to want to trade currencies on their phone, like, I think that’s going to be a thing. And they they sort of said, maybe, but we were given permission. And I was able to work on sort of launching an app and wasn’t within my job description, right? I mean, so you know, I would say, do the work that you’re supposed to be doing. But if you have any free time, I mean, don’t be afraid to jump into another area, where you have a specific interest, I mean, that’s ultimately going to get you to where you want to be professionally anyhow. So don’t be afraid to explore, don’t be afraid to take chances. Don’t be afraid to work at night, on work, right. And maybe it’s a facet, that’s, again, not part of your job description. But if you have an idea, and you have something that you want to explore more, it’s not going to kill you to jump on after dinner or jump on the weekend. A lot of the times, those are the projects that you enjoy the most, and you won’t mind doing it. And in the long run, it will definitely be a tremendous value for you as you progress in your career.

Mike: That’s awesome. That’s I think that’s a really great place to leave it. If anyone’s got any questions they’d like to, you know, ask you anything, or maybe just find out more about Agility. Where’s the best place to go to get hold of you?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty active on Twitter. So I’m at Jeffery Mac on Twitter. Hopefully, Twitter’s sticks around for a little bit of time, I think it’ll be fine. It’ll be in place in the next 90 or so days. So you can find me on Twitter. You can also find me on LinkedIn. If you searched Jeffery Mac, I believe I’m the first person to pop up there. But I do accept most connections and I love chatting with people. So try me on Twitter First, connect with me on LinkedIn and we’ll have some some chats back and forth.

Mike: That’s awesome. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Jeffrey’s been a great conversation.

Jeffrey: Thanks for having me really had fun.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.