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An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Start with what you know. When we started out we didn’t have many use cases on our own, but we did have background that was relevant thanks to prior work. The first thing we did was look up competitors of companies we had formerly worked with and mentioned them in outreach. It resulted in our first client and our longest.

As part of my series of interviews about “How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Strauss, Chief PR Strategist and Founder, Strauss Communications.

Joel has spent nearly a decade in strategic communications, leading strategy, and executing successful PR campaigns for startups and hypergrowth companies across continents. In addition to traditional PR, Joel produced research reports & content that has driven results ranging from web traffic to leads with enterprise clients.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

The short answer is a trip to Montreal. The slightly longer one is that I had quit my job running a political organization that facilitated fundraising, put on speakers series of political leaders, and a side hustle ghost writing for several American political figures. After I quit, I trekked through Patagonia, came back to the US and on a weekend trip to Montreal I met my brother’s friend who raved about a PR internship. When I got back to New York I applied, went through several interviews and was told I had the job and a week and a half to start it halfway across the world in Tel Aviv. Since then, I worked not only at an agency, but also in-house at a unicorn tech company where I oversaw both PR and social and ultimately Co-founded my own agency that both manages social media and leverages it for leads.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

When it comes to social media specifically it would probably be when we were working with a client that hired us solely for social and hitting our heads against the wall trying to figure out how to make their posts go viral. They had high expectations and we ended up — thanks to looking back at the material they already had and a bit of luck — posting a past interview between the founder and Anthony Scaramucci that garnered more views than any post in their long history and got a repost from the “mooch” himself.

In terms of broader PR, it would have to be promoting tourism for a client and then being charged by one of their main attractions — the world’s oldest, largest mountain gorilla the next day. Pro tip: if you’re ever being charged by a giant mountain gorilla don’t make eye contact, cower, and make gorilla noises (which is essentially letting them know you recognize them as the boss).

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

LinkedIn by far. There is no other platform, at least when it comes to B2B, that is so effective and powerful when it comes to getting in front of exactly the audience that you’re looking to sell to or partner with. One of our clients is a technology transfer, meaning they assist in bringing technology from the lab to the market. They always have plenty of cool technologies, but prior to funding and with no customer base or major partner journalists and other traditional channels often won’t give them a second look.

Our goal on social was simply to be active and post regularly in order to make it a “touchpoint” for those interested and to broaden the type of content we posted from dry academic announcements, to personal stories and news commentary even if not directly from them or one of their companies. That regularity, combined with more engaging posts that went beyond the boring announcements, are exactly what led to interest and ultimately deals for them.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn specifically, now. Can you share 5 ways to leverage LinkedIn to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

  1. Start with what you know. When we started out we didn’t have many use cases on our own, but we did have background that was relevant thanks to prior work. The first thing we did was look up competitors of companies we had formerly worked with and mentioned them in outreach. It resulted in our first client and our longest.
  2. Connect them to your business. Not every bit of outreach should be a hard pitch. One of the tactics we use is simply connecting with a message highlighting a commonality and then inviting them to follow our business page. If they don’t that’s fine, but if they do, then they can be in touch beyond the conversation and reach out after they see the results.
  3. Always go beyond LinkedIn prior to an approach. For our business, we want to know what coverage they received, how their social is doing, if they have an agency or worked with one in the past. That takes a few Google searches or a peak at Sales Navigator before approaching. Implementing that small extra step makes a big difference.
  4. Leverage those in your field. For a number of our B2B clients LinkedIn provides the opportunity to directly leverage leaders in the field as few other platforms do. We’ve increased follower counts and gained leads simply by tagging a thought leader mentioned in an article or getting them to share. Interviewing them or more directly highlighting their work tends to be even more effective in targeting their super relevant audience. However, you need to beware of tagging too many people, as your post is more likely to be labeled as spam.
  5. Video and images > words. The LinkedIn algorithm tends to favor video and images over written word [though some can get lucky with dwell time]. That means having a strategy to get high quality images during conferences is a must and publishing client, company, or product videos should be considered instead of just writing about it. An added advantage is that recorded interviews [think of the leverage those in your field tip above] can also be cut up into multiple video assets around singular themes, a growth hack that has produced more than a few viral posts — and leads — for our clients.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Tech for Good! Technology is already able to help with so many causes that affect us all such as climate change, food supply, more accessible medicine.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

Ian Bremmer. Few people have so effectively used LinkedIn to boost their visibility and provide value to the degree he has. He landed his own TV show, regularly has world leaders on as guests, and breaks down complex issues in no time.

You can contact us via our website and on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!


Joel Strauss of Strauss Communications: How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.