Wayne’s Food Hacks: How to Use LinkedIn to Establish Food Thought Leadership

If so, this issue of my newsletter will try to overcome that skill barrier.

In case you’ve been MIA for a decade, LinkedIn is no longer a site where people post their bio in hopes someone will hire them.

LinkedIn is a network of over 260 million active users, some 60 million of whom are senior influencers. Professionals  and campaigners of all stripes hang out here to share information and points of view. They post their own reflections, and like or comment on other posts.  

On many topics, but about food, not so much.

The delicious and convivial pleasures of celebrating with food, the tragic realities of food insecurity, waste and environmental degradation, and the proven power of food to leverage solutions to countless otherwise-intractable problems –  all of this and more needs a higher profile on a medium as important as LinkedIn.

I used to call the Toronto Food Policy I managed a “link tank,” not a thinktank. Connecting is what food is really about. Food connects to all issues, and all issues connect to food.

 I want to see hundreds of food campaigners developing thousands of connections, and joining hundreds of user groups to engage with millions of interested people.  

So let’s find the missing link!  

EATATORIAL:

THE INNER GAME
OF THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

In my misspent youth, I was much moved by the 1972 bestseller and phenomenon called The Inner Game of Tennis.  

The book pretended to be about tennis, and many people thought it was a great book about tennis. But I thought it was really about the inner game of learning and thinking, a game that is well-played on LinkedIn.

The book was really a tirade against professionals, like tennis pro’s, who conspire to make us feel inadequate unless we take lessons to learn the minuscule details they alone can teach us. 

The author of the Inner Game wanted people to learn tennis by getting out there and whacking the ball and letting their body feel comfortable responding to its bounce. That was the inner game. Real learning came from the same place as the inner eye and the inner sense and the inner voice and the inner moral compass.

I worry that there’s so much hoopla now about thought leadership that we will lose our inner eye and compass and forget it’s about whacking ideas around and responding to the bounce.

I like social media, despite the fact that I can barely manage its technology,  because it’s a communication process that enables and empowers the inner game of thought leadership.

People engaged in food by and large aren’t at ease in the world of the social media. I think that’s because food has an image problem that keeps it at arm’s length from what we imagine refined thought and conversation to be.

How else would we have got hoodwinked into using language that presented refined food as a good thing, much better than coarse food for coarse people?

As a result of food’s image being connected to our “lower” and “animal” needs, it was seen as a world apart from our brains, which whacked ideas around about the higher needs of life. Food was at the bottom of the hierarchy of human needs. Complex thought was much more elevated. 

So we needed guidance from experts so we could be taught about food. We looked to dieticians, doctors, gourmands, and other experts to tell us what’s good and right – even though humans developed sustainable, healthy and tasty cuisines long before there were dieticians, doctors, gourmands and cooking shows.

I think this bias against the world of food unconsciously holds back people who deal with food from dealing with the realm of ideas, and unconsciously prejudices people who are “higher up” from thinking of food as a worthy topic of thought leadership. 

It reminds me of the great comic Moliere’s spoof about language pro’s of the 1700s who conned a pathetic Bourgeois Gentilhomme into paying them to teach him prose, and made him feel so grateful that “for more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it, and I am the most obliged person in the world to you for telling me so.”

I expressed my debt to The Inner Game of Tennis in my first book about food, Real Food for a Change, written in 1999. The chapter on breastfeeding was called The Inner Game of Breastfeeding, reclaiming a gift of life from what had been taught by the feeding pro’s at Nestle.

So, the beginning of skilling up for LinkedIn and the LinkedIn standard of thought leadership is to gain confidence that the thought worlds of food are worthy of thought leadership and need to be integrated with thought leadership.

After that, the rest is easy. LinkedIn is a showplace for content marketing. People engaged and intrigued by ideas —  more than by events (news junkies are on Twitter) or more than by people (best viewed on Facebook) or more than by scenes (best shown on Instagram) – hang around the listening post at LinkedIn. If you don’t lead with strong content, you won’t do well. Where content is king, thoughts are leadership.   

I believe it is high time for people involved in food movements, causes, organizations and companies to claim thought leadership for what they are doing, being and thinking.  LinkedIn is just one place to try on this new outfit.
 

“The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.”

— Fritjof Capra

Five Ways to Foodify LinkedIn

1. NETWORKING: When you go to a social gathering and meet someone interested in food, ask if you can connect with them on LinkedIn, so you can keep in touch. On LinkedIn, your access to them is almost as good as by direct email. Let your memory of these people influence your posts. Will your post be relevant to them? Can you tag them in a post?

2. LEAD GENERATION: Like all social media companies, LinkedIn sends you names of people with close or identical interests, and mention how similar we are and how we could both benefit from exchanging ideas. (LinkedIn seems to have a better sense of who will be of interest to you than Facebook or Twitter.)  Find suggested names in the “My Network” file on your profile page. I drop an invitation to people with closely identical interests and mention how similar we are. If they accept, I invite them along the first two of “seven touchpoints” in the customer journey from “never heard of him” to “he seems pretty knowledgeable and helpful about food.”  I usually start by inviting the person to join a LinkedIn group I curate. My biggest success came when over 350 people accepted my invitation to join a Dutch-speaking user group on local food, even though I live across the ocean and don’t speak Dutch. (Not that I take any credit: they are the most open and engaging people in the world.)

3. INFORMATION COMMONS: When I finished my book, Food for City Building, Barry Martin of Hypenotic (my publisher and media guru then and now) suggested I start a LinkedIn user group with the same name. What for, I asked.  “You have to contribute to the community,” he said. “Create an information commons.” Several years later, the site has some 1600 members, Another group I curate, Food Security, has over 14,000 members; about ten people apply to join it every week. I use the word “curate” deliberately. You are creating a communications commons, and must serve as its host, not its director. (By the way, I am severely challenged in my high-tech abilities and only discovered last week that a group manager can invite any connections to join the group. I started to invite a few people every day, and a week later, we have 14 new members. Watch us grow now!!)

4. ANIMATE CONVERSATION: I post the most interesting food article I can find each day on the LinkedIn feed. I give the post a headline which identifies the topic in a few words, before going on to make a suggestive comment that both praises the article and stirs the pot by taking it a thought further—as befits a thought leader. Here’s an example of a lead-in I provided yesterday to an article on the importance of small farms: “Small farmers are highly efficient in their use of land and other resources — a very important feature in this age of limited resources. They also can make optimal use of new solar greenhouses and other tools that make it possible to increase stability of income through year-round production. In and near cities, having a small acreage is ideal as a side hustle and money-making hobby doing work that people truly enjoy and grow in.” If I may say so myself, that raises the relevance of small farms in today’s urban world. (Please note that there is no premium to being brief on LinkedIn; the point is to add value and nuance.)
    

5. COMMENT: An easy way to support others while presenting yourself as a thought leader is to comment on posts by people whose work you support. (This is social media, and the social thing to do is to say things that are conversational and constructive, not polemical.) Here’s an example of a comment I made recently on the subject of gentrification, which recently led to the closure of an ethnic-cultural food business in Toronto: “When gentrification excludes any grouping, especially longtime residents, it becomes an issue that requires proactive government measures. Main streets need to become and remain inclusive, supporting mixed neighbourhoods and the city’s multicultural being. This should be an explicit directive in community and health plans.” I think such comments are welcomed on LinkedIn, because people are looking for challenging thoughts there. The work on LinkedIn is to add value, and not to worry about brevity. 

“Even before the agricultural revolution began in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago, humans had learned how to work with new technology. Those who could not or would not eventually became priests, politicians, and bureaucrats.”

— G. Harry Stine

 All in the Family

Speaking of links, my wife, Lori Stahlbrand was on a stellar panel on TVO last week discussing food on a hot planet. It’s 45 minutes of great information and exchange, with a great host and terrific guests.

 Coming Soon

This is the last issue of this version of my newsletter to focus on food skills, a theme I have maintained since September 2019. Stay tuned to learn more about Real Food for a Change!

Call to Actionism