B2B Social Media Strategy Discussion

Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode.

Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time, more recently, with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that.

So what happens?

Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com. Hey, it's Dave.

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Go and check them out.

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You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show.

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, uh, 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 the 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 influence marketing agency, and I host Stop the 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.

Mm. Yeah.

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. So. 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 at 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 flyaround on the moon, so like I'm deeply obsessed with all the NASA stuff. As usual. Also that like the astronauts are also on TikTok doing dances with their kids, like 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. Uh, 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 in that, Brianna. I'm actually really in on like real human content. I actually think that Instagram is kind of like 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 4 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. We've gone full circle and I'm in the car right now, car seats behind me, cuz 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 gonna dive into questions because I wanna make good use of our time. I'm gonna start with a kind of tricky one. It's for Dave. I wanna 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? Okay.

Is that true? Like, is that true? Is that actually true?

I mean, I did rough math. I'm not honest with you. I don't believe that.

You had more than me.

Let me fact check you.

I just wanted to know for sure.

Oh my God, she does. A quarter. You better change your headline, Brianna, to quarter mil. She has 249,000 followers.

Yeah.

I run 248,000 of them. It's just me commenting.

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?

So no, but look, she deserves it. She's put in a lot more effort than I, I just like kind of 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, uh, someone once said like jokingly, but I think it's actually serious. Like, oh, if you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, you're basically like a MrBeast 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 like when you work in B2B, I think the thing that people miss with B2B social, it's like, it's actually not about a ton of volume. It's not about crazy engagement. It's like you might get a handful of leads and those are 6-figure deals. Just the economics, it's so different. And so if you can crack B2B social, it's such a different opportunity than like if you were trying to like sell another, like, you know, CBD seltzer online.

100%. I mean, I'm sure someone has done a more realistic, like, linear equation, but I feel like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn is like 100,000 on Instagram, you know? Like, there's a comparison there. But okay, I want to talk a little bit, well, a lot a bit 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 6-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 it's, 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?

Mm-hmm.

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. Let her cook, she's doing her thing.

Ready camera 2, ready camera 2.

Exactly.

I think I've always been like, nobody owns my social media presence, I own my social media presence. And so like there's no justification for it. Like, 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 like, 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, oh, 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 gonna 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 wanna share that with other people. I actually couldn't believe how much engagement there was on LinkedIn when I first started posting. Like 2 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 like where the comment threads feel so hard to revive. Okay. I wanna play devil's advocate for a moment. Not because I don't understand why we like 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-promotional fluff and it's a distraction from the actual work. Pretend I'm the troll.

I would do this to you.

Yeah.

I don't know if I'd speak to you, but I do think like it's 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. You're Personal brand online should just be an extension of who you are in person. So what's the problem with me showing who I am online?

Right.

I think also, like, if you look at 99% of the way my wife and I communicate with each other is 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 go 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, like, say whatever they want. And I literally just think that is a tax for playing this game, and you just have to choose to, like, ignore it and not let it get to you. So I honestly, I've shifted over the years of this. I used to, like, 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 like 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 like social is the third space now. So like, what else are you gonna talk about? You're gonna talk about your work. You're gonna celebrate the things that you're working on. You're gonna share some of the behind the scenes pluses and minuses of all the things that are happening in, you know, 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 like what you really deeply care about is just kind of the nature of where we are.

Just like go to Amazon, find a book everyone agrees is like one of the best books of all time, sort by stars. I guarantee you that book has 1 or 2 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 I've built— I'm sorry. Well, I think I 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 I'm 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. Oh my God. That's so rude. I was like, wait, accent? What on earth? Those trolls, like, if you wanna 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 wanna ask your thoughts on marketers who don't wanna build a personal brand because I empathize with them and I'm somebody who works deeply in these spaces, in these algorithms, and I feel like sometimes there's nobody who deserves to log off more 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 quarter of a million followers on LinkedIn? Yes.

All right. Let's hear it. Plus.

So yeah, my feeling generally, at least on, again, as internal at a company, like doing social with a team, my like 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 like 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. But I think that that's just the nature of advocating for the work generally. But like, 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 wanna 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 like funded. So I think it really depends on the internal versus externalizing of those stories.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And I think we need to broaden our definition of building in public. Like I would consider building in public to also include being active in a community like Exit5, even if you never post on LinkedIn. I think it's also 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 wanna 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 how I approach management and career building, because I want people to, I wanna 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. Like, I've been a VP of marketing, I'm hiring people today. I think if you're a social media manager at a company, like, I would kind of expect you to like have something to show and be creating content online. If you're the product marketing person at a company, a content person, like any other type of role, a marketer, like, no, I absolutely I don't think there's a prerequisite to create stuff. My only pushback on that would say like companies lay you off that, you know, we're all family, but they'll lay your ass off as soon as they hired you. And so my defense mechanism 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 ships 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 like posting, there's a whole level of like, you know, you see it now, right? LinkedIn has almost become Facebook in a way, or Instagram where like I could post anything. People are posting, you know, 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 could also take an approach like that. There are lots of things that I don't write about or share online. So I don't, I don't think you have to do that. I think you hear a lot of marketers talking to marketers in ExitFive 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 5 followers and if it's the right 5, I mean, go off, I guess. And so I think also just letting go of those standards. I think people look at like 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 like 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. Okay. 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 wanna 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. It 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'm like, 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 this shared interest 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 like from a brand perspective, it's kind of like a news ticker, like 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 like 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, 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've also been in a seat as a VP of marketing where I've 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. Like, 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 like what good marketing looks like and show them lots of examples. I think too often we just get too defensive and we're like, measure— no, measurement doesn't work here. We instantly go to defense first. 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 this is, 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, you know, TikTok videos or whatever, but it all gets killed because we don't ever give it enough time to actually reach that point. 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 gotta 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.

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Yeah. Christina Lee in our backstage, I'm curious if you wanna pull up maybe or queue up a question from the audience, cuz I feel like there's tons and I haven't addressed any of these and I wanna do some in real time. Woo-hoo. Okay, 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 while staying 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. And that not necessarily being 100% true, depending on what you're in B2B 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, no, but they're saying, how does a Gen Z social media manager appeal to the old?

Oh yeah. This assumes that the people that work in B2B are the olds. Which I don't think is true. Yeah.

Well, also, no, you go.

I would 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 to millennials and 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, have you talked 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 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 gonna make a meme, we're gonna make a joke, we're gonna 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? Where are they? What do they care about most?

You know, whoever they are.

Yeah. Okay. Any tips or advice for guiding leadership or executives who may be reluctant to post or who need a bit more handholding to get started?

If they're reluctant, maybe 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, uh, 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. Mm-hmm.

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 I like, 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 then, like this idea that like a social media manager is like knocking on the CEO's door and it's 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's going on? But it's like, yeah, like I think that's when you have to kind of lean on the system a little bit and say like, hey manager, here's what I need from you, knowing that, you know, you have buy-in to my skills and, and.

Value. I think it's also a different game now. I think that play of like, I'm just gonna ghostwrite for you 15 minutes a week and we're gonna 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. Yeah. 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. Well, 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 like, I use it all the time to test messages. I know I've always used it as a product marketing sample. I know what message is going to land in our product launch because like I've kind of 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 7 days a week, this is going to happen. Because it's like, no, no, let's really present to them. Like, 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? Like really elevating to that level. And then also, I hate the comment about like, this is hard and it takes time. Well, no kidding, right? It's like back to Brianna, like 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 6-minute abs, we want the GLP-1, 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 was 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, and 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, I thought it was interesting, like a lot of CEOs and C-suite do wanna stay offline and they wanna 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. So, 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, et cetera?

I'm the worst at these questions 'cause I always have like 15 follow-up. Like I just, I could love your context. Like is it the focus? Are they struggling to break out of the focus? Is their team that's 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 their goal? I think a lot of B2B founders, I think it's maybe instead of like trying to go viral or impressions or whatever the you know, consumer folks care about, it might just be as simple as like, what's a simple goal? Do we need to, we need more people to know that we exist, right? Like we want to grow to 10,000 followers on this person's account. Like I think it needs to start with some type of North Star. Yeah.

I mean, maybe it's, sorry, Carmen, maybe it's also just, I mean, Brianna'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, like, 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 too, 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, right? Like we didn't see 200 conversions from this one post, for example, but like this percentage of the viewer demographics matched our ICP.

Yeah. So we can like, here's a good one from that. Yeah. It's like not about that one instant metric. It's more like, are the right people seeing our stuff over time? You know, 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 wanna 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 5 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 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. This is a spicy take.

I think the hook matters a little less now. Mm-hmm. Like I used to spend a lot of time on that first sentence, like making sure it was just the coolest hook, like everyone would wanna read the rest. Now I can just kind of get into what I wanna 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 gonna 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's 'cause you have a quarter million followers now, dude.

You, as I said it, I was like, I don't know if this is, it needs to be a, there's a gotta There's gotta be a swear jar for how many times we've mentioned Brianna's followers.

There's gotta be. I'm doing it on purpose. It's a bit. This is a bit. I'm trying to play. I know. No, I love it. I love it.

I mean, I, Carmen, I think like I look at LinkedIn, obviously, like I think we all do as an ecosystem, right? Like, I mean, Slate, I'll give you guys, you know, your shine too. Like right now, like you have to kind of 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, is telling the same story from a contextual perspective, from their context, the founder's 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 they, do we need to teach them?

Like, 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? Like 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? Like 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, hmm, I don't know. Am I going to sign up for Slate? Like the Slate pitch was good, even though none of you voted on the poll, like the Slate pitch, that's cool. It doesn't translate into like, people might not necessarily buy Slate tomorrow. But they might 6 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 like the way you get from point A to B is different. And I think just knowing that kind of changes then like the roadmap that you might take to go there. This shameless. I have some feedback, by the way, on that whole, well, 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 putting—

you're putting on this webinar, right? Having— I'll have ownership. It's 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. You're going to—

I think we're going to remove Dave from this stream right now.

I'm— I'm done. 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 that.

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. Pew pew pew. Okay. Favorite follow on LinkedIn this week. Like you followed them this week? No, just like right now in your LinkedIn land, who's your favorite follow?

Brianna Doe.

Yeah. Smeltz. Brianna.

Dave's like, please somebody say me. How would someone remember that?

You know who you follow on LinkedIn. I'll say, I'll actually say, but no, I think even who's your favorite person?

Who's your favorite person on LinkedIn? I'd say Morgan Ingram.

He's been talking a lot 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. Adam Mola. Okay.

I'll say Dave just for Christina. I will say Dave just for Christina.

Rihanna, whatever. She doesn't need more followers, guys.

Okay. Don't, yeah. Help Dave out 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 get fashion.

I think Discover. Look, I talked to this guy yesterday. And he does marketing at ClickUp and they've hired like funny actors and stuff to do all their social at ClickUp. And he was like, you know how we found them? There's no agency that helped us find them. He's like, we found them because this is my job and I obsess 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, if 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, it's not necessarily— 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, be 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? I'm never, it's never like person first. I like work humor though. So like Corporate Bro, Corporate Natalie gets me in a way. I like that. I love that.

Okay. Best book you read recently?

I read the first Harry Potter. It was great.

Can I say ACOTAR? Can we talk about that here? Who? I just read that. ACOTAR? A Court of Thorns and Roses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that. I haven't read it, but it's, 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.

Uh, Hmm. Which one? The Walter Isaacson book?

No, the other one. The one written by the two journalists. I forgot the title.

Oh, the Bill one?

Yeah. Nah, I'll have to—

it's literally on my Kindle. I'm well read. My bad.

Yeah. No, 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, there'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 like what your point of view is or how you wanna show up, take a look at what posts are interesting you, interesting to you. Like what do you wanna engage with? What's it sparking for you? Don't put pressure on yourself to start posting immediately. Just start engaging in the comment sections and like 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, but I hijacked her post because I wrote about how I farted in a meeting. I saw that. Most viral. The most mortifying thing. To give you a serious answer though, like, don't try to build a personal brand. I think the best thing you can do is like, do good work. Whatever type of creator, like, 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 where 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. Hi, 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 there you go. There's your spotlight.

Thank you. Thank you.

We will talk about the next webinar, um, before we hop off. I'll post the link here. So our next webinar is going to be in 2 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 gonna put up that little, I forget what it's called. Yes, the little CTA. I don't, he, the little linky dink stage, like what the heck? 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 Gerhardt, Brianna. Thank you so much for your answers and your— oh, 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 have 1 follower.

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.

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