B2B Social Media Strategy Discussion

Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer.io are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought, and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI. And the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically, but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what Customer.io is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters, the craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now, not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all this idea about the craft of marketing. I want you to go and check out Customer.io. It's Customer.io slash exit5. Go and check them out, Customer.io slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by ConsenSys, the interactive demo platform. Look, most of your buyers have already decided whether they like you before your sales team ever gets on a call with them. They've asked ChatGPT and Claude about your product. They found reviews about you online. They've talked to peers who've used your product before. and by the time they hit request a demo on your site, they've often already come to a decision. So you're losing control of the narrative before the first touch point and now they have to wait three to five days for a demo. Consensus gives you that control back. They help you meet your buyer where they actually are with interactive personalized AI demos that live on your site. When a buyer shows up wanting to poke around on their own terms, you give them what they want. Plus, you get to see exactly who's watching, what they clicked on and who the decision makers are. So stop being a bystander while LLMs sell or even unsell your product. Category leaders like Atlassian and Autodesk use ConsenSys to turn invisible researchers into high intent leads. Go and check them out at goconsensus.com slash exit5. goconsensus.com slash exit5. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show. One, two, three, four, four, five. Hey, so I was on this webinar with Slate and Christina Lee at Slate, all about B2B Social for their Social Social Club webinar. And it was me, Brianna Doe, Jeff Meltz. He runs social media at Atlassian and the team at Slate. And it was such a good conversation about B2B Social, all things organic, creating content on social, on LinkedIn, personal page versus company page, how to ghostwrite and create content for your founders, thoughts on video and social, how to think about this, how to measure it, how to build the strategy internally. And after it, I sent Christina a note. I was like, that was an awesome discussion. Can I have the audio for that? Because I want to run it as an episode of my podcast because I know that people who listen to this show would get a ton of value from the conversation that I had with Jeff and Brianna. It was awesome. So we're going to run that here. Thanks to Christina and the team at Slate for giving us this recording. Enjoy this episode all about B2B social. I'm Carmen. I'm the social and content lead here at Slate. And I'm going to bring on our guests, I would say, all at the same time, just so we feel like we have a nice full room. And then I would love if everyone could introduce themselves. I feel like in the past we used to intro people, but I think that it's actually better to introduce yourself because you can tell me the things you think are relevant to share about what you're up to these days. So name, let's say your role or what you're working on these days. And then my one icebreaker, lame question for you is what's the most recent internet rabbit hole that you have traveled down? Let's start with you, Brianna. Oh, crap. Okay. So I'm Brianna, founder of Verbatim, an influencer marketing agency, and I host Soft to Scroll, which is a newsletter and podcast where I explore internet culture and decode virality. I would say the most recent rabbit hole, AI relationships. why people dive into them, what hooks them, and what that means for the future of human connection. Yeah. One of my favorite podcast hosts was recently talking about AI psychosis, and that was quite a juicy topic. All right. I love that. Jeff, why don't you go next? Cool. Hey, chat. I'm Jeff Meltz. I'm the head of Social Atlassian. Yeah, I had a newsletter that I don't really do anymore. So I can't talk about that. I don't have any kind of anything other than what I'm doing at Atlassian at this point. An internet rabbit hole. I mean, look, we just did a fly around on the moon. So I'm deeply obsessed with all the NASA stuff as usual. Also that the astronauts are also on TikTok doing dances with their kids. Just kind of obsessed with getting to know more about the folks who are hundreds of thousands of miles away from all of this. So stoked to be here. totally i think it's crazy to live at a time where social media and potentially landing on the moon again is coinciding the opportunities for content moon content through the roof out of this world even dave you're up yeah i'm just gonna there's no chance that we went to the moon in 1969 if you want to go there right now we could take it there like they spent 93 billion to just fly around it. But 60 years ago, we went there. No way. So I'm in on that. That's been my whole week. This week, the corner of the internet that I'm in, though, is actually the opposite of AI. My wife would kill me if she saw that I was Googling content about AI relationships. It would be a wrap for me. So I'm not messing around. I'm not playing to that, Brianna. I'm actually really in on real human content. I actually think that Instagram is kind of blowing up in my world. I'm a late 30s white male dad. So I'm like, it's all like guys like running on treadmills and working out at four in the morning. And like, it's that life. And that's my content. Those are my people. I'm hanging hard there. And a lot of creatine content. Oh my God. So much creatine. That aside creatine story. Creatine, then I'll shut up. When I was 18 years old, my mom found my creatine and thought I was like doing steroids and she threw it out. The culture has gone so far that my mom, now 68 years old, called me about a month ago and she's like, what do you know about creatine? I saw it on the Today Show that women my age should be taking it. So we've gone full circle. And I'm in the car right now, car seats behind me, because I had to unexpectedly take someone to an appointment. But I got good service and I'm happy to be here. Great. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. I'm going to dive into questions because I want to make good use of our time. I'm going to start with a kind of tricky one. it's for Dave I want to know how you feel just with the knowledge that Brianna has at least 40% more LinkedIn followers than you and is that something that keeps you up at night is that true like is that true is that actually true I mean I did rough math I'm not I'm not more than me let me fact check you oh my god she does a quarter you better change your headline Brianna to quarter Mill. She has 249,000 followers. Yeah. I run 248,000 of them. It's just me. Comment back. Well, we're in the same chat. Get her to 250. Chat, get her to 250. No! Fuck that. Get me to 200. What are you talking about? No, but look, she deserves it. She's put in a lot more effort than I. I just promote my company and randomly post webinars and stuff. But I will say one of the coolest things that I think about with B2B social is that those 250,000 followers, whether you take my 190,000, no big deal, or Brianna's 250. Someone once said, jokingly, but I think it's actually serious, like, oh, if you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, you're basically like Mr. Beast in B2B. And that was kind of a joke, but it's also serious. I'm sure Brianna could speak to this running her agency in a business. But when you work in B2B, I think the thing that people miss with B2B social, it's actually not about a ton of volume. It's not about crazy engagements. You might get a handful of leads, and those are six-figure deals. Just the economics, it's so different. And so if you can crack B2B social, it's such a different opportunity than if you were trying to sell another CBD seltzer online. 100%. I mean, I'm sure someone has done a more realistic linear equation, but I feel like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn is like 100,000 on Instagram. There's a comparison there. But OK, I want to talk a little bit, well, a lot of it about personal brand building. And I have more than one question. So first of all, I think it's safe to say that you guys were building personal brands before that was a playbook and before that was seen as, you know, an obvious way to differentiate in a very competitive space. I'm curious how you went about justifying or let's say quantifying those efforts at a time where there might have been more pushback about its value. Thinking, thinking. I can go first. Yeah, go for it. So for context, when I started creating content on LinkedIn, I was working in-house. I didn't own my own agency. So I did get pushback from my managers around like, even though I was posting before I even got to work that day, I was getting pushback about how much time I was spending on LinkedIn. Was I looking for another job, stuff like that. But my goals were also different. Like I think Dave made a great point, right? Like you can drive six-figure leads with 10,000 followers. I wasn't looking for leads at that time. So the way I justified it was more on the conversations I was having. I was really looking to network, really looking to connect with more marketers in the space and trying to figure out if there was a way for me to also kind of build credibility in my space and not be so reliant on a resume. And then, you know, it's shifted, obviously, when I started verbatim. And now it's a lot more focused on leads, still on credibility and also just like connecting not just with marketers, but with, you know, C-suite and things like that. But that's how I justified it at the beginning was, am I having really valuable, impactful conversations? And how is that impacting my career trajectory? Yeah. I think just like I've always been frustrated because I own that profile. Did I lose you all? I only see myself. Christina Lee just backstage trying producer tricks or something. Yeah, she's just doing jump cuts. That's all. Leonard Cook, she's doing her thing. Ready camera two, ready camera two. Exactly. Exactly. I think I've always been like, nobody owns my social media presence. I own my social media presence. And so there's no justification for it. I can do what I want as a human. And you know what? I think people have told me this is a very American thing. I am American, so I can't apologize for that. But we put a lot of stock into what we do for work. I go to meet someone. I get seated next to Brianna at a dinner. Very first thing I'm going to say to Brianna is, nice to meet you. Where do you live? Oh, what do you do for work? And I think with LinkedIn and B2B social in particular, you kind of tapped into this whole world of people who, guess what? We spend a lot of damn time at work. A lot of us, we want to talk about what we do online because 99% of my friends at home in my little town in Vermont, my friend group, they don't care what I do for work. They don't want to talk about B2B marketing with me. But like Jeff does, Carmen does, Brianna does. These are people that we meet online. And so I've never thought of it as like, I am out here building my personal brand. I've like, you know what? I like marketing. I think I'm good at it. I like business. I like writing about this stuff online. And when you write about something online, whether you're a 40-year-old suburban dad running on the treadmill, like I said, or you're a B2B marketing professional, when you write about that stuff online, you attract like-minded people. And so for me, it was more like, as I did these things, I got followers and I was like, oh, wow, there's something here. It was never like I set out to build a personal brand. But now when I post about a webinar, people go to it, right? When I post about something, people sign up for that. I get a bunch of likes and comments and engagement, but I also get DMs from people that actually would never have commented on my post. And so it's kind of like the triangulation of all that. And then as a result today, you have a personal brand. But I wasn't like, mom, I'm going to go build myself a personal brand. Yeah. I mean, I think that it has become a playbook, but in the early days, it was just like you say, like you could be enthusiastic about something and then you want to share that with other people. I actually couldn't believe how much engagement there was on LinkedIn when I first started posting. Two years ago is when I found out there was a thing called LinkedIn. And I was like, gosh, people engage so much on here. This isn't like Instagram where you really have to... Where the comment threads feel so hard to revive. Okay, I want to play devil's advocate for a moment. Not because I don't understand why we quote unquote build in public, but because I think that people online love to skewer those who are caught trying, you know, those who are trying in public and clearly putting in in effort. So what would you say to the kind of archetype of a troll who claims that personal brands are just you know self fluff and it a distraction from the actual work Pretend I the troll I would do this to you Yeah I don know if I speak to you But I do think like it easy to say that from the sidelines I think people that have that perspective have never tried or put themselves out there online or otherwise And I think that mindset also stems from kind of what Dave was mentioning around personal brand. Like, I also never set out to build a personal brand. Your personal brand online should just be an extension of who you are in person. So what's the problem with me showing point I'm online? Right. Right. I think also like if you look at 99% of the way my wife and I communicate with each other by sending each other someone's Instagram story strictly to go look at the comments, you know, like that's what you do now. You send something, you'll look at the instant right to the comments. This isn't just a personal brand. This is just a human. Look at from Taylor Swift to Bad Bunny to Amanda Batula and West on Bravo right now. Like pick anything. People have an opinion. It's like you posting online gives someone else a right to say whatever they want. And I literally just think that is a tax for playing this game. And you just have to choose to ignore it and not let it get to you. So I honestly, I've shifted over the years of this. I used to reply back to everyone and just get in fights with people online. But I'm like, dude. And then what happened to me is I met a guy, my number one troll. I met him at a conference. This guy walked up to me like, oh, Dave, hey, man, good to see you. Didn't say anything in the nonsense that he would say online. And I'm like, dude, that's just how people are. And so if you want the life and benefits and funnel benefits, like Brianna has 250,000 followers, that is a massive advantage for her and her business. There's going to be some pain in that. There are going to be people who don't like what she's doing. There are going to be people who are haters. But I just think it's just a small, a very tiny, small percentage of the overall thing. And so I really, my advice would be like, that's not the whole game. Please don't spend much time on that. Yeah, fair. I would say also that social is the third space now. So what else are you going to talk about? You're going to talk about your work. You're going to celebrate the things that you're working on. You're going to share some of the behind the scenes pluses and minuses of all the things that are happening for your team, for your life, for your company, whatever it is. So it's perfectly natural that you have to find the venue to have those stories get told. And I feel like that's just the nature of what we're doing broadly across every category, right? Whether it's B2B social, whether it's B2C social, whether it's social or something else, giving people kind of a behind the scenes look at what you really deeply care about is just kind of the nature of where we are. Just go to Amazon, find a book. Everyone agrees is one of the best books of all time. Sort by stars. I guarantee you that book has one or two star reviews and people just hating on what they wrote. totally and i think that just like what you're saying jeff like social is this third space where you share what you care about and anytime you share what you care about people can be like oh i don't care about that so it's like you know when you say i care about something it's also an invitation for somebody to tell you how much they don't care about what you care about okay i think it built i'm sorry i think it also built like my mental fortitude when i first started posting like i i also used to engage with everybody and i used to get really offended or hurt but candidly the people that are leaving feedback that isn't constructive aren't really people whose lives and trying to emulate anyway so i think if the person that's trolling you isn't living the life that you want or building the career that you're interested in or paying your bills i'd strongly recommend just ignoring them yeah totally i made a video about taste and being chronically online and the other day somebody said oh really rich somebody with your hair and your accent talking about taste those trolls like if you want to meet some nice trolls go to tiktok i can point you in their direction okay final question that's sort of around this like personal branding moat i want to ask your thoughts on marketers who don't want to build a personal brand because i empathize with them. And I'm somebody who works deeply in these spaces and these algorithms. And I feel like sometimes there's nobody who deserves to log off more than marketers and people who work in social. But I think there's this unspoken rule now that to be good at your job, you have to be visibly good at your job. Like it's not enough to just to do the work. You have to like talk or show the work. And I'm just kind of curious what you think. Like, is this something that everyone needs to overcome? Do we all need to work visibly? Or is this kind of trepidation like warranted? Can I jump in as somebody who doesn't have a quarter of a million followers on LinkedIn? Yes, let's hear it. So, yeah, my feeling generally, at least on, again, as internal at a company, like doing social with a team, my build in public perspective is like the internal resonance of the work that we're doing. So how that's coming about with leadership, with folks that we're cross-functionally collaborating with. I talk about making the invisible work more visible all the time, less so trying to figure out how to tell that story on LinkedIn or Instagram, for example. I think that that's just the nature of advocating for the work generally. But I don't build in public to the degree that I think some folks on the call who are speakers or in the chat are doing. there's no plus or minus to that approach. It depends on what your goals are and how you want to show up in the right ways. So I look at it from the perspective of advocating for the work that you're doing internally to get more of that work seen, loved, and funded. So I think it really depends on the internal versus externalizing of those stories. Yeah, and I think we need to broaden our definition of building in public. I would consider building in public to also include being active in a community like Exit 5, even if you never post on LinkedIn. I think it's a lot of important to just network and connect with people. And social is a great way to do that. And I also think building in public can look differently. For example, I don't really talk about my agency online. I mean, if you want to look at case studies, you can go to the website. But I spend most of my time on LinkedIn talking about my values, the way I work, like high approach management and career building, because I want people to... I want to connect with folks who feel the same way and also give people an opportunity to understand me and how I choose to show up offline. And so I don't think this pressure around posting everything that you're doing on LinkedIn is really warranted. I think it can look different and it can just look like networking and connection. And I think it depends on the role. I've been a VP of marketing. I'm hiring people today. I think if you're a social media manager at a company, I would expect you to have something to show and be creating content online. If you're the product marketing person at a company, a content person, any other type of role of marketer, no, I absolutely don't think there's a prerequisite to create stuff. My only pushback on that would say companies let you off. We're all family, but they'll let your ass off as soon as they hired you. And so my defense mechanism and would be like, I want to share all the things that I'm doing at work online, not even to build my personal brand, but like there is no better resume available to you today than sharing your work online. And so that doesn't have to mean Jeff is posting a picture of him eating a sandwich, but if his company like shipped something that he's proud of and he's posting that video and he's like, I want to shout out my team, like look at the video we made. I'm going to hire Jeff one day and I'm looking at that and he's getting credit for that work. So there's a difference between posting, there's a whole level of like, you see it now, right? LinkedIn has almost become Facebook in a way or Instagram where I could post anything. People are posting engagement announcements, birth announcements, deaths on LinkedIn. You don't have to choose to do that. And in fact, if you actually know anything about Dave in my personal life, I think that I play a character online that has helped me build my business where I'm like, I'm Dave who only cares about B2B marketing online because that is the persona because it helps me with my business. and that's the character that I'm choosing to play. So you can also take an approach like that. There are lots of things that I don't write about or share online. So I don't think you have to do that. I think you hear a lot of marketers talking to marketers in Exit 5 and in other places where everyone feels like, oh my God, everyone has LinkedIn followers, but I don't think that's the reality or necessary. Well, and you also don't need a quarter million followers to be building in public successfully. That is not the definition of success. You can have 500 followers and be doing just fine. You can have five followers. And if it's the right five, I mean, go off, I guess. And so I think also just letting go of those standards, I think people look at how many followers I have and think that that means that I'm doing it better than somebody else. And it really doesn't mean that. Yeah, I like your point, too, about how like, I think there's this miscalculation or something where a lot of people think that being active online means self-promotion. And it's like you're saying it doesn't have to be self-promotion. It might just be talking about your values or it might be like, yeah, like, I don't think it has to be like, oh, look, I did such a good job. I think anyone who actually posts knows that. And I think that people who don't post don't always recognize that. OK, so I have a theory that people who are good at building brands, be it personal or for a company, you know, they also have a knack for building community. And, you know, there's a relationship between these things, brands and communities, even though I think we toss around the word community and don't always mean it in the true sense of the word. So I want to know something concrete you would do differently if you were trying to build like a capital C community as opposed to just grow an account. I'll jump in on the brand side, I guess, like capital C community to me is kind of self run. Like it's not at the direction of a brand or company is a space for that community. Again, not audience, because I agree, Carmen, it's like audience or community. it's its own entity entirely and it's self-managed i would say from a brand perspective like you have business goals you have objectives for your year i think if you can think about community as a place where your buyers your customers are learning from one another they have a safe space to share like what they're building in public for example that's community and it's self-governed by the best case scenario. Any more thoughts from you? Dave, what do you think? Brianna? I see faces on this chat. I mean, I think a community, like I get this question a lot because I run a community that is a paid, that is a community. And it's like, should we build a community? And that is not what I think the definition of community is. You know, like CrossFit is a community. People who work out, people who like Drake is a community, right? And you share that stuff online. So I think it's like, what job are you trying to do as a brand? Like does Slate, I think it would be in Slate's best interest as a company who wants to sell to social media managers and leaders to have a voice about the future of social media and people follow them as a brand to learn what's going on in social. That is also community because you're like connecting people who have the shared interests of social media. But Slate doesn't have to have a private community of social media managers. You know what I mean? I also think the other big thing that's changed though is like I probably wouldn't spend a lot of my time focusing on the brand page I would focus it on people within the company I think you need to have the brand and you know Jeff's probably the most relevant person on here but I mean he's this guy's been at Sony at Square like you've done it at really legit companies so don't take what I'm saying from it even though I have more followers than you that's because you're doing the real work behind the scenes but like I think it's like a couple of voices I think that what we want as consumers today is we want to hear from the subject matter experts directly. And so my play would be inside of a company like in Slate's example, who are the people that have interesting things to say about the state of social and what's happening? And let's elevate those voices. And then from a brand perspective, it's kind of like a news ticker. The Slate page should exist. It should have recent updates. It should have information about the company. But I think either you need to give it a quirky personality, like everyone wants to try to be like the Wendy's Twitter account, but that's just harder to do in B2B. And so I like people first and the people are kind of all around rallying around a cause. It's more of a cause than a community, right? It's like the cause is people who work in social media and elevating that as a discussion. Yeah. I mean, I've chatted with lots of people about community. Sophie Miller was on in January and she was saying that she felt like what a community was is when it stops just being like you are speaking to a group, but then the group is speaking to each other. And I think that that was like an interesting way to define it. I feel like there's like a sort of hot topic on lots of social platforms right now, which is that everyone, what is it? It's like everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. And it's this idea that like, to make a real community, you don't just get to access resources, like you also have to devote resources. And you know, those resources are often your time, and they might involve being kind of like, quote unquote, inconvenience sort of thing, like, you have to kind of be there. And I feel like a lot of brands want to build a community, but they just want to abstract data. Well, they want to build it so you can tell the management team that we have a community so eventually we can find out how to nurture those people because it's always the same thing. It's like, cool, Brianna's got a big ass audience now. Okay, great. Well, how many MQLs has that generated for us? Yeah. My angle with marketing is like content, social media, brand building but I also been in a seat as a VP of marketing where I had to like justify So I see both sides of this I think the best thing I see a bunch of this in the chat I think the best thing you can do as a person in social media is to just assume that nobody knows how social media and the internet works and take it as your job to explain to them what good marketing looks like and show them lots of examples. I think too often we just get too defensive and we're like, no, measurement doesn't work here. We instantly go to defense versus like, okay, hold on. Let me tell you why we have a strong point of view on social for our company. And here's how this is going to work. And here's why we're going to do this. And here's how we're going to think about things. And here's some examples of other people in other industries. And the result is because every time it works, all the measurement questions actually go out of the door. Because when it works, when social works, it's essentially just a brand channel. It becomes so obvious. People are showing up at your events. You're getting more inbound than you ever did before. You're getting more engagement. People are messaging your CEOs, coming up on sales calls. Oh, I saw one of Slate's TikTok videos or whatever. But it all gets killed because we don't ever give it enough time to actually reach that point. And so like it starts with having a discussion around like, and this is a hiring thing too. Let's have a strong point of view. Let's not just, we can't just post shit on social media anymore. That doesn't work. This is not when I first started when I, you know, my first job was essentially that if you posted at all on social media, you got engagement. Now it's like, no, we got to have a real like unique point of view and a unique play here. And that is the role of social media. And that is why social media managers command high salaries. but you have to earn the right to then like explain that to the rest of the company. Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack. Knack is a no-code email and landing page creation platform focused on a problem every marketing team runs into. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea, but then it takes forever to actually ship it out the door? It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, more briefs, approvals, reviews, tiny fixes that somehow turn into weeks. And by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship. Yep. That right there, that is the gap that NAC exists to close. NAC is a no-code email platform built for modern marketing teams. They have AI built into the platform that lets you prompt ideas and instantly generate on-brand email assets so you can create, review, QA, and launch your email all in the same place. No jumping between tools or messy handoffs halfway through. After the email goes live, Knack also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipped to learning to improving, you should check out Knack. Go to knack.com slash exit five. That's K-N-A-K dot com slash exit five. Yeah. Christina Lee in our backstage. I'm curious if you want to pull up maybe or cue up a question from the audience, because I feel like there's tons and I haven't addressed any of these and I want to do some in real time. Woo. OK, I'll read it out. I feel like there's a lot of talk of appealing to Gen Z and social media marketing, especially in B2C. How would you approach the opposite in B2B? A Gen Z marketer trying to appeal to millennials and Gen X will stay creative. I like this a lot. How do you appeal to people like me? I mean, should we talk about how I think the stat I saw a few months ago is like 40 ish percent of like B2B buyers are actually Gen Z. so like there's a weird bifurcation happening between like i guess thinking of a gen z audience as like not a decision maker yeah and that not necessarily being 100 true depending on what you're going to be to be for i think appealing to gen z maybe is just like being funny and quirky and is it about tone of voice because i feel like that's also kind of a softball way of thinking about talking to gen z so but no but they're saying how does a Gen Z social media manager appeals to the old. Oh, yeah. It assumes that the people that work in B2B are the olds, which I don't think is true. Yeah. Well, also, I'll just be curious if they've... Do they know this for sure? Like, I just, I can't tell from this question if they know for sure they should be marketing colonials in Gen X, or is it Gen Z, or is it a mix? Because my answer is kind of boring. It's the same way you would appeal to Gen Z. It's like, I mean, talk to the customers are you doing research on social i know it's not like the fun answer no but you're right you're right like appealing to gen z is not just like making online content there's a certain type of oh this is a meme that gen z folks would find funny this is a style of video right but like some of the most addicted people to their phones in my life that i've observed are people that are my parents age like late 60s 70s so i think that like that is not true anymore that it's only like, no, my customers are not. Look around. Everyone I see, I was just sitting in the doctor's office. Everyone in the waiting room from young to old is glued to their phone like this. So the issue is not that your audience is not online. It's like, how do we speak to them in a way that appeals to them? And so if you have a hypothesis, to Brianna's point, like if you think your audience skews older, then this is like, let's do the demographic on them. And we're going to make a meme. We're going to make a joke. We're going to use comedy or music or whatever that relates to them, not to someone who's relevant now to Gen Z. It's like, this is what I love about marketing. It's like, if you peel it all the way back, it's the same question. How do I understand my customer and how do I reach them? What do they care about most? Whoever they are. Any tips or advice regarding leadership or executives who may be reluctant to post or who need a bit more hand-holding to get started? If they're reluctant, I would say show them their competitors that are already doing it. That's my first go-to. Yeah, that's what I would add. I like that. I feel like C-suite always has like an arch nemesis. Well, but it's also like investment of time versus return on that. It's a return on investment, like start with 15 minutes a week of like investing your time in whatever part of the process is right. Like reading news in the industry and being able to respond to them or how to find your opinion on where the business is going. It's carving out time, but proving that it's a valuable use of that time. Yeah. I mean, I've worked in B2B for a few years now, and certainly this is like a kind of hot topic that comes up because I think social media managers see the value and it can be hard to get that value communicated higher up. But I feel like that's also a structural thing too. It's like part of who's supposed to advocate for you is your manager or their manager. And again, maybe that's a boring answer, but it's like that's their job, you know? So I think that if you report to like a head of content or even like head of marketing, I think like you make the case to them, they get how marketing works. And then it's their job to them. Like this idea that like a social media manager is like knocking on the CEO's door and is like, please, ma'am, would you do 15 minutes of, you know, it's like they're going to obviously be like, what the hell is going on? But it's like, yeah, like I think that's when you have to kind of lean on this a little bit and say like, hey, manager, here's what I need from you, knowing that, you know, you have buy into my skills and value. I think it's also a different game now. I think that play of like, I'm just going to ghostwrite for you 15 minutes a week, and we're going to post for you. I don't think that works anymore. That's just so easy, especially now with like, man, I could just create a project in Claude, and I can create a voice, and I could just ghostwrite and post a bunch of crap for any CEO right now. I think the way to actually stand out is to really understand. I think the great people that do this is they have a platform first approach. And so they're not just like, I want to get my CEO to post. It's like, nope, I have a strong point of view that like, just as an example, we're in B2B, our customers are on LinkedIn. We're not going to be on TikTok right now. We're not going to be on YouTube right now. We're not going to be having a podcast right now. The only thing we're going to do is we're going to focus on text content from our CEO on LinkedIn. Like, hell yeah, that sounds like a better place to start for me. And then you actually have to be there. You have to have to like read the comments and engage and reply. And so much of the magic of social media is because of what's happening in the comments. And so much of the success of social media is not just how many leads and clicks and comments, but I use it all the time to test messages. I've always used it as a product marketing stamp. I know what message is going to land in our product launch because I've already said that bit on LinkedIn and I got a bunch of comments on there. And so I would start by first showing the like, here's why we want to do this. And here's what success looks like. I never want to get in the treadmill of just like, We're just going to get you to post. We're going to get you to post. And if we get you to post seven days a week, this is going to happen because it's like, no, no, let's really present to them. What are we going to get from this? If we're successful here, what does this mean? How are we going to measure it? What types of content is going to work? Really elevating to that level. And then also, I hate the comment about this is hard and it takes time. Well, no kidding. Back to Brianna, her having 250,000 followers is an absolute incredible advantage for her company, for her brand, for whatever she wants to do in her future. It's like, if you want to get this secret advantage, this like level up, then you got to put in the work. It's like, we always want the six minute abs. We want the GLP one, whatever it is. There isn't that for this. And so you can get these outsized rewards from it. But are you going to be willing to like, yeah, it actually does take work. I just hate that we never, for some reason, it's always marketing across the company in any other area. It's like, well, yeah, it's work. But in marketing, it's like, I don't have time to spend on posting on social media. It's like, wait, hold on, but look what you can get from it. Yeah. Interesting to see that it's like, or your point about it being like a marketing specific problem. Well, I think Jeff made a good point too. Like you can just pull your CEO's perspective and use that for content. Somebody posted in the chat that was interesting. Like a lot of CEOs in C-suite do want to stay offline and they want to stay private. You can decrease that fear by letting them know they don't have to post about their families all the time or what they're doing for vacation, like centered around their expertise and remove that blocker too. Yeah, totally. Okay. Christina queued up another one here. for us. What's your advice to social folks who shift from B2C to B2B, particularly in an industry with multi-years long sales cycle? Okay, so long sales cycles. How do you break out of the focus on traditional B2C goals, metrics, etc.? I'm the worst at these questions because I always have like 15 follow-ups. I just love your context. Is it the focus? Are they struggling to break out of the focus? Is it teams that struggling to break out of the focus? Because I mean, with longer sales cycles. I mean, in B2B, you should be defining success and your KPIs internally with your team before you launch any sort of campaign on social and influence marketing, etc. I feel like fundamentally, that's how you break out of the focus. Yeah, it's like, what's the goal? I think a lot of B2B founders, I think it's maybe instead of trying to go viral or impressions or whatever the consumer folks care about, it might just be as simple as like, what's the simple goal? we need more people to know that we exist, right? We want to grow to 10,000 followers on this person's account. I think it needs to start with some type of North Star. Yeah. Sorry, Carmen. Maybe it's also just, I mean, Brenna's question also like follow-ups. I mean, it's also like the separation of purpose for social between B2B and B2C, right? Like B2B, yes, it's a longer game, which means trust is involved more than anything else. But in B2C and B2B, you still need that attention to then build the trust. So it's not too dissimilar, but it is based on, I would think about it from the perspective of really having clarity on the purpose of what you're trying to do in social for the differentiated audience. Like, start there. You know, you'll have a goal, you'll have metrics attached to them. But like the purpose for why you're there is what's defining it. And I always tell our clients, you know, this is very influencer specific, but I'm sure there's overlap in other facets too. have your primary KPIs and your secondary. And the secondary KPIs are what are telling the story in the short term. We didn't see 200 conversions from this one post, for example. But this percentage of the viewer demographics smashed our ICP. That's a good one. It's not about that one instant metric. It's more like, are the right people seeing our stuff over time? That's a good one. Totally. And I think there's a lot of like redefining of metrics that you have to do in marketing, regardless of whether or not you're in B2C or B2B. I want to get LinkedIn specific for a second here. And you can answer this from the perspective of like a company account or a personal account. But I think like clearly a lot has changed in the last five years on this platform. Like it's a totally different place than it was right after the pandemic. I'd love to know from each of you what's something that worked say like back then and again this can be like company or a personal account maybe something that used to work that you sort of had to let go of and then something you're doing now that just like you never could have gotten away with in the early days of LinkedIn. So the spicy take I think the hook matters a little less now like I used to spend a lot of time on that first sentence like making sure it was just the coolest hook. Everybody would want to read the rest. Now I can just get into what I want to talk about or what I'm thinking about. It doesn't have to be this roll stopper necessarily. I think it's a matter of the post as a whole. Is it going to continue to engage people throughout it? What story are you telling? And what value are they leaving? Or what value are they gaining after they leave that post Maybe that because you have a quarter million followers now dude As I said it I was like I don know if this is There got to be a swear jar for how many times we've mentioned Brianna's followers. There's got to be... I'm doing it on purpose. It's a bit. This is a bit. I'm trying to... I love it. I love it. I look at LinkedIn, obviously, I think we all do as an ecosystem. Slate, I'll give you guys your shine too. Right now, you have to flood the feed and flood the zone to be unmissable. That hasn't changed necessarily over the years. But the intention to do that from an employee, from a founder, from a brand page, it's increasingly more important to just have everything in any kind of context to meet all those different buyers, decision makers, people who can consume that story and have those ways to do that. So somebody in product is telling the same story from a contextual perspective, from their context, the founders doing the same thing, brand is doing it a different way. It's the same end goal or whatever the sort of topic is. But the story is the most important thing to sort of build sort of that ecosystem approach. yeah okay i have one sort of final question on my list and then i've got a couple rapid fires this one i wanted to touch on and like truthfully the more we talk the more i feel like maybe it's kind of an irrelevant question i used to work in b2c i work in b2b now and if i had to ask myself honestly what the big differences are between these two zones like i don't feel them so acutely like the work that i do in social is largely just about thinking like what's the message that resonates with the right audience and like how can we get in front of the most amount of eyeballs that are the relevant eyeballs so in my mind there isn't like this binary system where there's like b2c over here and b2b over here but i do think that there are misconceptions about b2b that it's like stuffy and boring and whatever and all these things that i just don't think are true in 2026 and haven't been true for a long time but if we're kind of like relying on these or if we're acknowledging these misconceptions, what do you think that the B2B world in 2026 can teach B2C? What are the big lessons that we could kind of lay down? Do we need to teach them? I don't know. Perhaps no. Perhaps no. I think that, look, I've spent a lot of time, my kids now say, blah, blah, blah, B2B marketing, what the heck do you do? They have no idea. And I've been on this story for a bit. I think that it's not worth obsessing too much over the difference between B2B and B2C. I think it's more like the thing you sell might be different, right? I might be sitting on my couch on my phone watching a show. I see this hoodie and I buy it. That's the difference between like, I don't know, am I going to sign up for Slate? The Slate pitch was good, even though none of you voted on the poll. The Slate pitch, that's cool. It doesn't translate into people might not necessarily buy Slate tomorrow, but they might six months from now after hearing, wow, I first went to the webinar. Then I saw Christina Lee speak at this event. Then I met the founder. I started following him on LinkedIn. So I think just the way you get from point A to B is different. I think just knowing that changes then the roadmap that you might take to go there. It's shameless. I have some feedback, by the way, on that whole... I do this for a living. I'm happy to give you advice and feedback on how to do the pitch in the beginning. I'll send you my notes after, Christina Lee. I've been waiting for an opportunity to professionally give you some fucking tight feedback after. So I got you. Sorry. Why me? I mean, you're putting on this webinar, right? Having ownership. Either you or the founder guy. We got to, we'll get it. We'll fix it. We got to tighten up the ad. It was like, is it an ad or not? Like own it. Like make it a thing. I think we're going to remove it from the stream right now. I've done more for Slate using Slate in the examples in the last 30 minutes of this webinar than your ad did. That's a fact. that's actually pretty good yeah i'll take 360 feedback coming in hot yeah yeah yeah no i love this okay i have a rapid fire final round let's get into it okay favorite follow on linkedin this week lately like you followed them this week no just like the right now in your linkedin land who's your favorite follow brianna doe yeah brionna Dave's like please somebody say me how would someone remember that you know you follow them who's your favorite person who's your favorite person on LinkedIn I'd say Morgan Ingram he's been talking about like bringing the human back into AI and I really like it I like Louise from Tela she's been doing really good videos that are she's putting up on YouTube and I'm into it okay I'll say Dave just for Christina I will say Dave just for Christina yeah brianna whatever she doesn't need more followers guys okay don't yeah help deva with the followers the next one is good source of creative inspo media inspo but not news what's something you're checking every day or like an account you like not news i don't even i think discovery look i talked to this guy yesterday and he does marketing at click up and they've hired like funny actors and stuff to do all their social at click up and he was like, you know how we found them? There's no agency that helped us find them. We found them because this is my job and I obsessed over this. And so this was really genius. He's like, I like to find people that have like 3,000 to 7,000 followers on Instagram and they use you sort by reels and they maybe have like one video that popped off, but they're not like famous. And so you could hire them to create for you for, you know, a couple hundred bucks, like, or whatever the hourly rate is. I was like, that's genius. And so for me, my way of saying this is like, it's not necessarily a person. I think it's just the same thing that I like about marketing. It's just about like, I take examples from everywhere. Looking at the For You feed me like, huh, interesting. This type of video is kind of popping off right now. Like people doing this. Yeah, I'm in a boring B2B industry, but like what's our version of that and how can we apply that? It's never like person first. I like work humor though. So like corporate Natalie gets me in a way I like that. okay best book you read recently i read the first harry potter it was great can i say akatar can we talk about that here who i just read that akatar a court of thorns yeah yeah yeah i know that i haven't read it but it shows up on my tiktok a lot it was really cool okay jeff i'm reading the elon taking over twitter behind the scenes story i forget what the title is which one the Walter Isaacson book no the other one the one written by the two journalists I forgot the title no I'll have to I'm well read yeah it's an interesting story Eric's backstage but he'll probably want me to say that he read Sapiens recently so founder guy Eric loves Sapiens I'll just put that little plug in there for him founder guy Eric where's your next character in content okay and then last one Top tip for people looking to break into the wild world of personal brand building, being a person who shows up online. Start with the comments. If you're struggling to figure out what your point of view is or how you want to show up, take a look at what posts are interesting to you. What do you want to engage with? What's it sparking for you? Don't have the pressure on yourself to start posting immediately. Just start engaging in the comment sections and shaping your voice there. Nice. Yeah, I think having an opinion, being opinionated about what good is, what good isn't, what your sort of place in it should be is the most important thing. Commenting is a great one to tie it all back together like to the founder or CEO who doesn't want to do the work. I get some of my best post ideas from commenting on other people's stuff because it's essentially a prompt. Like I don't have anything to post today. I'm just going to sip my coffee and go through the feed and just like write kind of like ratchet stuff on Christina Lee's content or whatever. But I actually did. I hijacked her post because I wrote about how I farted in a meeting. I saw that. Most viral. The most horrifying thing. To give you a serious answer, though, don't try to build a personal brand. I think the best thing you can do is do good work. Whatever type of creator, it should come from the work and it should come from your results and the cool shit that you've done at work and then talk about those things online. That will lead you to that place as opposed to like, I'm going to set out to build a personal brand and here's my hot takes you know yeah totally i mean i think if you're starting with hot takes you got some hot problems hey eric did you want to talk about sapiens whoa christina you can't just put me on camera without a heads up my resting bitch face like that's the venti quad at work right there i just felt like you needed that moment you know of sunshine so you know It's your spotlight. Thank you. We will talk about the next webinar before we hop off. I'll post the link here. So our next webinar is going to be in two weeks. It's going to be our content power hour where we bring on a Slate customer and they're going to walk us through basically their workflows within Slate, but also just in general of how they create content as a team. The last one we did was with Sierra Nevada social team. And the time before that, we had the Detroit Pistons. this next upcoming one is a special guest that I can't tell you yet because it actually hasn't confirmed yet so we don't have a guest yet but we will we will have a guest by the time this webinar happens talking to some MLB teams maybe a big entertainment company so it will be a brand you've heard of and yeah sign up now for our next webinar and I'm going off stage amazing Christina are you going to put up that little I forget what it's called yes the little cta i don't he little linky dink stage like what's that okay well nice well thank you so much everybody for chatting with me about b2b b2c what is bees you know all the bees we appreciate it okay christina and eric i think are just waging warfare on each other in the backstage but appreciate everyone coming out taking a little bit of time out of your day appreciate Dave, Jeff, Brianna thank you so much for your answers and your not hot takes just like completely genuine takes I appreciate it it's nice to talk about this sort of stuff this was great this was my favorite webinar of all time mostly because of Dave's admiration of your followers I'm going to follow me I let the record say that you both you not both Brianna's not responsible you ended on that note not me yeah that was my making I'll take full responsibility. All right. Bye for now. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. 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