0:00
Jennifer Gutman
I want to take a moment and welcome, everybody to this panel that we are hosting, mastering LinkedIn for professional success. My name is Jennifer Gutman. Many of you know me. I am the director of customer marketing here at Oktopost. And I'm going to be moderating today. I have to say I'm a little nervous because I'm surrounded by some of the greats, so please forgive me. So, just to set the stage, or in clubhouse, as we used to say, right. Set the room. Set in an era where digital marketing has really become a cornerstone of a professional advancement. We're really excited to welcome you to this panel today, where we're going to be covering a lot of ground on a lot of different areas of thought leadership and executive thought leadership, but really focusing on. Right. How we can build compelling LinkedIn profiles that are going to reflect your executive brand. Right. What does it mean to maximize engagement and thought leadership as an executive on LinkedIn? And how are we measuring the ROI and setting KPIs and connecting and networking effectively? Right. That's what LinkedIn's all about. But then how do we take that and impact pipeline, which I think at the end of the day, as marketing leaders, we're worried about two things. People in math. Right. So without further ado, I would like to introduce you to our fantastic panelists, please. I'll have you introduce yourself. So we'll start left to right. So we have Alex, if you want to kick off.
1:21
Alex Rumble
Hi there. Hello, everybody. Thank you for having me. Alex Rumble. I'm the senior vice president for product marketing and corporate communication here at ifs.
1:32
Joerg Klueckmann
Hi, I'm Joerg Lukman. There's actually a typo. It starts with O, then comes to E. No, no worries. Nobody can say my name, right. Oh, good. Nobody else would have figured except me. So I needed to say it. I'm heading marketing at Finastra Fintech, based in London.
1:51
Barney O'Kelly
And I'm Barney o'. Kelly. I look after digital marketing here at the consulting firm Alex Partners.
1:57
Jennifer Gutman
Welcome, panelists, and are you ready to master LinkedIn for professional success?
2:04
Barney O'Kelly
I'm hoping to learn a few things.
2:07
Jennifer Gutman
All right, here we go. So our style today is panel. And so I've gone ahead and I put some slides up just for our audience to understand. There'll be a Q and A at the end, and. And we have questions on these slides to guide us. So I'm going to pitch this question to all of us here on the panel. Right. How do you define thought leadership in the context of LinkedIn today? And why do you feel it's so important for business?
2:36
Alex Rumble
I'll jump in if that's okay. Jen. I think thought leadership is about thinking ahead. It's not about talking about what's happening here today. It's really about, you know, what we can expect, what we can foresee. It's about what we believe might happen. And whether that's in a technology environment or in any other business is really about projecting ourselves forward. And I guess speculating to a certain extent why it's important is because it's outside in and business leaders have so little time. And if you think about the things that we've been through, the experiences that we've all had over the last few years, businesses have been so busy with just adapting to the change that's happening, happen, that they simply haven't had the time to sit themselves and have a think tank. The great thing about thought leadership, particularly on LinkedIn, it allows an on demand consumption, but it also really creates that outside in perspective that comes freely to anybody who wants to read it. And for me, it's a little bit of a think tank, if you will, that helps me to take that back to my organization and take it from there.
3:47
Joerg Klueckmann
If, if. It's very hard to follow Alex because like she's so brilliant, but I try no 2, two things from my side. One is LinkedIn as a channel and, and second is, is really content, right? So for us we are, I mean I said fintech, we are fintech, but we are a large organization, 2 billion in revenue, 8,000 clients. So it's, it's, it's a large organization and if we look at all the different social media channels that are out there for B2B organization fast, it's clearly LinkedIn, right? It's not X anymore a lot Facebook, it's not Instagram, maybe for like employer branding. But if we really want to meet our B2B audience, our buyers or prospects, it's clearly LinkedIn, right? So that's the focus. So it's clear that this is the channel. But if you want to feed the channel properly, the most important thing is relevant content. And relevant content cannot be you about yourself. It cannot be you telling everybody how great you are, because nobody cares. It needs to be, and that's what Alex said it needs to be. What's the next big thing? What's our take on AI in the financial services industry, for instance? It needs to be about stuff like how did we fix a problem that is relevant to others as well? Or how did the client from Us fix the problem that's relevant for his or her peers. Yeah. So I think that's the most important thing. The content needs to be relevant for those that you want the content to be consumed, if that makes sense.
5:27
Jennifer Gutman
Perfect sense. Perfect sense. I got a question from the audience and I'm just going to throw this one out because it's right as we're here. But an audience member is wondering, why do you think why not X?
5:40
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, I mean, with the reason. What means reason? Yeah, with all the changes with Twitter to X, there was a lot of noise around that channel and we saw that our B2B audience, the bias we address, they were on LinkedIn. The engagement we saw on LinkedIn, even if we would post kind of similar content, we would get way more engagements on LinkedIn and also better conversations, better follow up, better comments. So for me, at least, that's not my personal opinion. I think LinkedIn is more a B2B marketing channel than access these days.
6:19
Jennifer Gutman
Barney, anything to add before we jump in?
6:23
Barney O'Kelly
A few things, if I may. I think both Alex and Joerg have made some awesome points. I think there are some other things going on around thought leadership and around LinkedIn as well that are important to me about. So you're not just writing content for your audience, you're also writing content that feeds an algorithm. So you have to think about how that's going to play as well. And that's quite a. Quite a difficult thought process for people outside of marketing. A lot of time, and I work in a professional services organization, so a lot of what we're trying to do is market the individuals and help the individuals market themselves. And oftentimes they want to write that authoritative piece that look ahead that Alex mentioned, that distinct take on a topic. And that's fine. But there's also an ASAP advertising role in content. Sometimes just being seen to have had an opinion about the thing can be really, really important. And then you're often trying to drive a level of engagement that's going to tell the algorithm behind it, that you're an interesting person who these people find fascinating, and as a result, the content will be served up to them more prominently next time you post. So one of the things we constantly try to do is not only make sure that people are sharing stuff that's. That's interesting and insightful. Yes. But also that they're doing it habitually and intentionally and frequently because all of those things come into play. You know, it's a database of 950 million people, but it's a database of 950 million people, which last time I checked is a hell of a lot of people. Right. So you are, you are involved in a kind of competition for eyeballs on a number of different levels. I think just to add on the X point, the audience on X has never cared what corporates have to say about anything. Only corporates have cared about what they put on Twitter. Now exit, you have to, I think, have a pretty prominent, strong personal brand to be successful on that platform in the first place. Or you need to find conversations to join. And there are some very strange conversations on that platform that are going to bring you to the attention of people. And I just think corporately, most individuals are not prepared to be as provocative or as outrageous as that platform tends to demand for you to get the interest that you think you deserve.
8:30
Jennifer Gutman
Very, very well done. So opening up, I'm gonna hop in. As my slides get stuck, I'm gonna. Barney, I'm gonna stay on you for a second because again, I think what's interesting, you said something very interesting regarding, you know, propelling your teams and your consultants to be able to advocate better for themselves and become those thought leaders. What strategies have you found most effective for building and maintaining, you know, whether for yourself or for your team that you're, you know, advocating for in maintaining a strong executive presence, there's a few things going on.
9:07
Barney O'Kelly
So first of all, we needed to get on as many of these people as possible off our corporate channel because it's largely the wrong audience, right. That that tends to be driven by a different type of content. And there's a very strong internal comms component to your corporate chat layer, corporate page, company page. On LinkedIn. We have a very simple construct that we work to work around with our consultants, which is who are you, what do you do and how do you help your clients? And that's the basis for building their personal brand. And I work with a lot of very incredible but also very humble people for whom personal brand normally has them recoiling in horror as a concept. But once they've established that what we want them to do is only really share two types of content. One, evidence and opinion of who they are, what they do and how they help their clients and stuff that shows what a great place to work Alex Partners is. And those two things work in terms of commercial outcomes for the firm and also broader longer term commercial outcomes for the firm by attracting the right talent. I want to work with interesting and fascinating people and look at all these interesting and fascinating people at Alex Partners. The other bit, and I use a word that I've come to hate quite strongly, is authenticity. Right. Like, that word's been appropriated and doesn't really do the job that it actually should be doing, which is conveying yourself as a complete human being on the platform. And we've seen really good returns on content that adds a little bit more of the personal touch, or quite a lot of the personal touch. We've had people share tales of brushes with serious illness or, you know, anything in the DNI space where you've got a very strong personal account or even a recollection or a memory that's informed your worldview, accompanied by the right assets. Because LinkedIn's algorithm likes certain types of things over other types of things that can be really compelling and starts to mix me as a professional, me as a person, and where those two things intersect. And for us as a consulting firm, that combination can be really, really powerful because we do employ incredible people with fascinating stories to tell here, and we want to help them tell those as a huge comfort factor for people to get over doing that. But that, for me, is really where the majority of our success has been found, in that intersection between the human being and the professional and the content that brings that to life.
11:21
Jennifer Gutman
We'll get back to the authenticity. Jorg, do you have something to add?
11:25
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, I think Vani, good points here. If I look at my organization, Finastra, we do obviously have executives, and what we do is we spend quite some time with them to understand their point of view. So really, what's their point of view on certain topic that is of interest for the market? I mean, then we. We have people that help them with developing content. But the important thing is it needs to be authentic. Yeah. Bonnie, you're absolutely right. Yeah. So it will never work that the person just writes content, you upload it under somebody else's name, because then it's not authentic. So we create some content and goes back to the executive. It will always align to the interviews we do around the point of view, and then that person will rework it to reflect this personal style. The most important thing I have seen in the past is attention span. Yeah. Because very often you start an initiative like that and it's very hot for a quarter or two. A similar clubhouse. Yeah. And. And then I was like, oh, yeah, it's that LinkedIn stuff. You know, we have done it. Let's. Let's do something completely different. But to build a brand, you need, like, a long. You need to do it on A long haul. Right. You need to have, you need to plan for a year or longer. You need to have your cadence right, your topics right. And I found that most challenging a larger organizations because after some time that stuff is seen as commodity and people want to move to the next thing.
12:52
Jennifer Gutman
Well said. We're going to, again, we're going to come back to authenticity. And I think you definitely, when it comes to cadence as well, bring up some very valid points that we're, we're going to hit. So I want to, it's like you guys know the slides. So Jorg, you know, you mentioned in terms of what you're doing in your audience and in your organization, some of the challenges. How have you been able to increase employee advocacy advocacy while also integrating it with an executive thought leadership? So you mentioned, you know, cadence and getting the topics right. But can you walk us through that a little bit deeper?
13:26
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, so I mean, of course I need to mention Oktopost. Yeah, the platform helped us a lot because before that we had different tools for publishing, for advocacy, for social listening. That wasn't super helpful also for the analytics. So we consolidated everything on Oktopost, which was a huge help. I believe the biggest lever to increase advocacy was that we added advocacy reach to our CMO dashboard. So we have CMO metrics, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. I mean obviously middle and bottom is more opportunities, marketing, qualified leads, et cetera. But top of funnel, one of the key top six metrics is advocacy reach. And there you see advocacy reach year over year, quarter by quarter. How did it develop? And then we break it down by business units. So we are structured in four different business units. Payment, treasury, lending, universal banking. And then we benchmark and obviously benchmarking competition, Healthy competition will lead to the fact that people say, oh, why is advocacy reach in business unit a significantly better? Maybe they did a little program to build up advocates. So putting it on the CMO dashboard, having some competition, that's super helpful. Also, one thing that I saw helped a lot as well was that we make social media training mandatory when you join organization. So people have to understand how you use Oktopost, how you share, how you're supposed to take pre configured content, but make it yours with your words. Right. AI now helps with the integration a lot. So I think those are a few magic tricks we did.
15:16
Jennifer Gutman
Thank you for sharing. So I'm going to jump up to you, Alex. Right. Shifting into kind of. We're all living in this rapidly changing digital landscape. Mentioning clubhouse again. Right. It was Here now it's not how can executives stay relevant across their social channels?
15:37
Alex Rumble
I think. I think there's two things to look at. I think Barney touched on it a little bit earlier as well, which is we need to ask ourselves what role we want the executives to play. I think that that's the first thing, because they are, you know, they tend to have bigger networks than we have, they have more connections than we have. And therefore, you know, that role that we want them to play may very well depend on what kind of organization I, to begin with, whether I am a smaller organization versus a larger organization, in which case a smaller organization, they obviously have an impact on the brand side of it as well and the visibility, whereas in a bigger organization, it may be some key topics. So I think we've talked about the relevance and represent the organization and the value that that organization is looking to deliver in context with that relevance. So it's not just about having an opinion. It's about being true to what your organization is trying to do and the value that it's trying to deliver. Now, it doesn't mean that we're going to have executives, you know, reciting or posting, you know, product brochure. That's not what this is about at all. But it's about, you know, understanding and feeling that and sharing that there are some particular elements that are really meaningful to our audience. I've recently interviewed a bunch of CFOs, and interestingly enough, you know, something that they have all said to me is they really value learning from each other. And for a CFO and other executive to stay relevant, it's about making sure they think about what they post in the context of their peers and that they talk about their own, you know, experiences, for example. And then the other piece is also the cultural one. So it's really remaining at the front of what do we want that culture to be? Because, you know, talent is in short supply and companies will look at what the executives are doing from a social standpoint to really feel that that organization is something for them. So there's a dual aspect to what they need to do, but there is a particular way in which they need to reach that.
17:36
Jennifer Gutman
Thank you. I think. Spot on. Moving forward, I'm opening this to the group. Few questions here. Feel free to jump in on whichever aspect of the question you'd like to share. But when it comes to successfully leveraging social media, can you share examples from your own presence or maybe like, dive in a little bit more? Because I think one of the most challenging Thing that I come across when I speak to our customers but also peers in the industry is how the heck do you measure this stuff? How do you measure the impact? Can you tie it back to like you know, follower growth? Can you tie it back to revenue? What KPIs are you focusing on? Right. And how do you prove the ROI of, of advocacy and thought leadership across the board to the seats that need, you know, to hear that most?
18:21
Barney O'Kelly
I'm happy to take a punt on this because I don't think you should have to. I genuinely think an expression I draw on is a quote from David Packard. Marketing is too important to be left in the marketing department, which I take even further is either everything's marketing or nothing is right. I work in a business where relationships are critical to the commercial success of this enterprise. If we don't have them, we don't win any work. So therefore the objective truth that it is a good idea to share things with your network of people to remind them that you are, you exist and to try and create the opportunities that Yerg mentioned further down the funnel. You shouldn't have to explain the ROI on that. It's just common sense, objectively a good thing to do to build your organization. And I think oftentimes in marketing we're compelled to justify the cost of a platform to people who are interested in the cost of things without really defending the innate value of doing things that forge human connections, create opportunities for commercial success. So I, I am increasingly profoundly grumpy on this topic of having to justify things that seem self evidently valuable to an organization.
19:33
Joerg Klueckmann
I, funny, I love that really. It's, it's, it's, it's such a great take on that. I mean I have to, I have
19:41
Barney O'Kelly
to, I work in Fintech is where you go with this.
19:46
Joerg Klueckmann
I mean if I, I have to prove some data right what comes out of that? Although I think it's very obvious why you should do it or if you turn it around, what would happen if you would not do it? Nobody would see you, nobody would understand your point of view. You wouldn't engage with your existing client base or with your prospects. But one thing we are doing right now is looking more deeply into multi touch attribution.
20:14
Barney O'Kelly
And
20:16
Joerg Klueckmann
I'm running a pilot right now. I don't name the vendor but they really re engineer journeys across all channels, social events, everything. And I tried to do that really simple. So we say there is an account and we want to see all the engagements we had with people in that account. No matter if it's on LinkedIn or an email that was sent or whatever, it might be an event, an sdr. And then it really creates a visual journey. You see all that? And the idea is when the deal closes, you generate a screenshot and you can actually even import it in Salesforce and show it to the sellers and say, hey, before somebody clicked on a Contact Us or before an opportunity got created or before an opportunity got closed, those were all the different marketing touch points that engaged with all the contacts that were part of the buying group. Imagine they would not be there. Yeah. So this is for me right now, kind of the secret sauce that hopefully we can open very soon to make that very, very transparent. Right. That everybody, even on the sales side, understands what work marketing was doing.
21:30
Alex Rumble
I just want to add one thing, Jen, if that's okay, from a KPI, from a measuring standpoint, the way we have set up and what I'm responsible for within my organization is actually awareness and engagement. So what I mean by that is the sort of the lead generation aspect of social, which we refer to as paid. Although all social inevitably, you know, can provide a point to delivering leads, is sitting very much and very firmly within the campaign and demand gen organization. And I think I love what you've said, Barney, about we shouldn't have to explain. I'm going to record that and I'm going to give it to my boss. We're in the middle of budget planning for next year, so he's going to love that. But ultimately what's important is that, you know, you take people on a journey when it comes to social. And there is still such a level of. What's the word? Lack of confidence within, you know, executives, people at large in terms of going on social. So When I joined IFS, I think we had about 70,000 followers at the time and the approach tended to be to share the marketing materials. Okay. And we've changed all of that. And what we've done is we now create content which costs specifically to engage people on social media. So I don't measure reach, I measure engagement. I'm targeted with an X percentage increase engagement year on year, as well as impressions. But we create content specifically for that, which means there is a cost associated with that, which, you know, touch wood. So far, three years in, we've done very well with that. But it really depends where you are in a maturity journey with regards to using social in a, to what extent you need to educate the organization to what you need to do and the potential that social can bring you Alex,
23:15
Joerg Klueckmann
I think this is exactly the way to do it. Because if you don't create content just, just for that channel. Yeah. It will not work. Right. You can spend all the money you have. If content is rubbish, nobody will care if it's, you know about a white paper that somebody wrote, oh, look, here's a new white paper. Who, who cares who reads that stuff? You know, when I joined Finastra two and a half years ago, I'm not sure if I can say it. I still say it. You know, I don't know the bunch of white papers and I need to read all the documentation before I'm still not through with it because I fell asleep after three pages. I couldn't. Like, my attention span got so small, really like goldfish. There's no way I can digest the 20 pages white paper without a single graphic in it. So if you upload that as a good piece of content on LinkedIn, it's going to fail. So absolutely, you're spot on. It needs to be the right digestible content.
24:08
Barney O'Kelly
I agree. Again, I am an avowed hater of white papers and often say the only good outcome is everyone's still speaking to each other at the end. Right. And then by that point, there's no energy left in the tank to actually distribute it for the people it was supposedly written for in the first place. I also think when you measure the impact of these things. So I talk a lot about the personal brand building piece and that doesn't happen overnight. That is the result of a sustained level of activity for quite a long period of time. And after a while it starts to cultivate itself. Like, you post a lot of material, it feels like you're shouting into a bit of a void. You start to get some engagement. Engagement metrics are fine, but there's also a whole load of people who look at your stuff who never engage with it, never interact with it, but they're looking at it. Then suddenly you start to be known for things. You pepper that with a little bit of individualism. I mean, speaking personally, I did a post last year on September 12th. I remember the date fakely because it's my wedding anniversary and I'd forgotten. And I posted about forgetting my wedding anniversary and I got, I got comments for about the next three months about, I'm surprised you're still alive. Interestingly, I also forgot my wedding anniversary this year, but thought social clout was
25:16
Joerg Klueckmann
probably not a post. Not a post.
25:18
Barney O'Kelly
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I've done it again. It's not cool, but I think this sort of knowing when to measure the impact of these things is really because we live in an age of instant gratification and these things take some time to gather pace of building mentum.
25:32
Jennifer Gutman
Well said. Just for the crowd. Barney, I'm going to move to the next slide to keep time. But when is your wedding anniversary? So we all remember.
25:38
Barney O'Kelly
I can remember every day apart from the day actually is it's September 12th, but on September 12th my mind goes blank.
25:45
Jennifer Gutman
I don't know what it is just happened. Alex, I see you have your hand up. Sorry Jorg, I see you have your hand up. You want to finish it?
25:51
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, just, just one more comment on that. What I found very useful as well is to kind of like look what personalities you have in your C suite or like your executives you want to promote more because very often you have some people that don't feel comfortable with it and it's very hard to do like live videos with them because they don't feel comfortable. On the other side you have people that just have a natural talent, you know, to shadow opinion, do short videos or outspoken.
26:24
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah.
26:25
Joerg Klueckmann
And, and want to share their opinion. I'm, I'm very fortunate. We have a CEO Sam in Paris who's brilliant communicator, a very smart guy, very proactive on, on LinkedIn so we don't have to nudge him. If somebody likes or comments one of his posts or other posts he'll see is it he replies to it. If you have people like that, obviously it makes your work way more easier.
26:49
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, I think that's a valid, a very valid point. I think we have, we are going to touch on, you know, the content and also how you're coaching teams to go about doing that just to move forward again to the whole group. We did talk about, you know, establishing your peers on social media. This kind of hits on what Jorg was saying. You know, what role does content creation play? I think we're going to pass over this slide for a moment just to move on because Barney, you know, again, September 12th wedding anniversary. But how do you ensure your thought leadership content really stays out?
27:19
Barney O'Kelly
So this is an interesting one and this is where determinants of quality become quite intriguing. So working professional services, we're often trying to write the definitive, distinctive point of view on a topic. And I understand that because we employ smart intellectual people who want to find that that point, the mere existence of it is often enough. It's how you distribute it. It's how you draw attention to the fact that your organization has created this point of view. Let, let your brand give you some permission to be an authority on that topic. Let your personal brand give you some permission to be an authority on the topic. So I think the main way I want our thought leadership content to stand out is being very visible in very many places. Very often I'm less concerned, much like you. Plowing through a 30 page white paper is not what many people want to do. We've just got to show people that it's out there and recognize that you're going to get different levels of engagement as a result of that. And actually the lowest level of engagement will be the person who's read that from beginning to end. What you're trying to fashion out of all of this is some visibility and an opportunity. Opportunity could be, I want to connect with you, or it could be, hey, let's meet. But those are the things that are really, really important. So if it. As long as it's in as many places as it can possibly be, I call it spraying green and black around the place because green and black are our corporate colors. It's. That's what matters. And it's a massive mindset shift for executives who've been used to a much more controlled cadence of communication. This notion of just splurging stuff all over the place feels so unscientific, so untargeted, so reckless that it just, it frazzles their dials. But, but there is a big part of that just to be seen and be present, particularly on a platform like LinkedIn.
29:07
Jennifer Gutman
Agree, disagree. Anyone want to chime in before we move over?
29:11
Alex Rumble
Just add that the, the. It's, it's interesting, the point that you're making about some people being very uncomfortable. I'm not going to name anybody. He's one of our executives. But. And I think he was really uncomfortable with regards to, with regards to what to share on on LinkedIn. So he kind of handed over the reins to us to kind of. So we started doing it. And the reason I love that story is because not only is he really seeing the value now, but, you know, thankfully he had the trust. And you have to trust the team that is running that, okay? They are experts in what they're doing for a reason. And therefore he trusted us and said, okay, you show me. So it was literally a show and tell. Now the downside is he now goes on Instagram and says, oh, should we posting this on Instagram or should we not? And we're just like, no, no, no, that's not your job. Just Keep posting, keep doing. But it's, you know, you can go too much is what I'm trying to say. Okay, so there is a. It's going well, so let's post lots. But that's not the answer either.
30:09
Jennifer Gutman
Agreed. Alex, I'm going to stay on you. Right. And you kind of hit on it. Right. So you don't want to post too much or you need to be the right place, right time. Maybe Instagram's not the place. But how do you balance Right. The demands of your specific role with also fostering this ongoing and meaningful executive presence on the right platform?
30:32
Alex Rumble
So I'm extremely lucky because everything that I do is to do with communication, whether that's in. In product marketing or corporate communication. And as of that, I also have the social and the internal communication. So engagement is very front of mind for me and for my team. And it's all about creating engagement. So no one wants to hear me. And I think somebody said that earlier and I think possibly that that was yourself. Jorg. You know, nobody wants to be hearing me talk about, or other execs for that matter, about how great ifs isn't just boasting about, you know, things constantly that it's just, there's no interest in that. And we talked a little bit about, you know, the authenticity that we need to have. And yes, it's a word that is overly used, but I think to the people that, to whom it matters, they know what we mean, which is about being themselves and therefore me, like other executives, I'm not going to just post because there is a post available. But for example, when I did my round of events for our IFS connects, I was posting because there was so much to share and it was very authentic to the person that I am, which is all the great work the teams are doing that I wanted everybody to see to see out there. So it's not so much of a balance because of the scope of my role. But one thing I will say, social is very transparent. So the minute you have something that is not authentic, or you're going too much too fast, or you're not tailoring the post enough to yourself or to who you are, it shows very, very quickly.
31:59
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah. And then you can adjust your sales and, you know, reset pretty quickly as well. And I think that's one of the powers of social media. It's, you know, a lot of things in marketing, as we said earlier, you. You have to invest and take time. And I think that's one of the best things about a social Strategy is you can see pretty quickly what's working and what's not and fix it pretty fast. I'm going to open this to. All right, we're kind of getting into, right what, what works, what doesn't. But I always find this question enlightening and helpful, especially, you know, for our peers. But what are some of the common mistakes or pitfalls to avoid and share stories? I mean, if you want to, if any mistakes you've made, how you fix them. But where do you think the most common ones lie?
32:40
Barney O'Kelly
I think the lack of. A lack of doing it right. So. So in line with the previous question, I do it because it's my job to do it. It helps me on a number of fronts. One, it's my job to do it, and if I can do it, then others can follow. I've always believed in marketing you have to put yourself in the same positions of discomfort you expect others in the organization to occupy. But also it teaches you how the platform actually behaves. And then I think you realize that, you know, LinkedIn in particular keep adjusting their algorithm to focus on quality over quantity. So they've gone quite antiviral in their last update. I think you can see that coming through sometimes in impressions and all of this kind of stuff. They're trying to serve up content that's more relevant. But then you learn which formats work and which formats don't work. And you know that sometimes sort of somewhat lazily reposting stuff isn't very effective. Or actually PDFs work really well on LinkedIn, which is annoying for people in digital marketing because we've been trying to kill them for years, but they're actually a really effective format or photos work, and actually a relatively crude selfie of you with a load of colleagues having a lovely time might outperform the greatest piece of thought leadership you've ever created. And just understanding that that mixture of things, you know, posting stuff about your team and the people you work with will always outperform most other things that you do. Changing jobs will outperform anything else you ever do. So if you really want good engagement, just keep moving on. But I think the common mistakes are overthinking things genuinely and just not giving it a go and seeing what happens. People seem to think that the attention of the world is on them all of the time. What you do realize is how irrelevant you are in the grand scheme of things. So if you really screw up the chances of it actually being noticed, unless you've done something outrageous or taken a point of view that's utterly egregious is just going to be ignored. And that's not very painful.
34:33
Alex Rumble
And I would add to that, Barney, and you've raised a really interesting point when you talk about, you know, taking pictures of teams. Things in LinkedIn has evolved and you see much more nowadays, people doing and sharing these internal things. And I think it's become not less of a business platform, but it definitely has broken out much more into the individual people sharing of what their life is and the personal things that they do at the weekend. And I think it's important to know that it will keep evolving. So you can't stand still and just say, we're just going to stick to doing this. You have to absolutely move the.
35:15
Barney O'Kelly
Great
35:18
Jennifer Gutman
A York. I don't know if you're on mute. Maybe try again. I see lips moving. Maybe headphone trouble. All right. While you log out and log back in, if I think that's what you've left, I think what, what I think I found very interesting about some common pitfalls or mistakes that I always think about as we're writing our content or putting together a strategy is the fact that many of us marketers understand that we need to be authentic. But as we were talking about, right engagements, we know content needs to perform. So I always find overthinking about the authenticity is also a pitfall because sometimes what you end up doing is you become inauthentic because then you're just in it for the engagements and you see your engagements increasing. But then how meaningful are they? Jorg, welcome back. Yes.
36:33
Joerg Klueckmann
All right. I was wondering why nobody wrecks. I was always trying to speak and everybody was like, all right, good. Now I feel better. Hey, one thing I wanted to say, common pitfall, just don't be boring. Be provocative, be bold. Don't use stock photography. Be relevant and have the courage to stick out. Have the courage to be different. Because as Bonnie said, you need to be very outrageous to really create a chaos here. But you should be bold enough to have something to say that's relevant. People say, oh, that sounds interesting. What does he have to say? Or she. So I think biggest mistake or one of the biggest mistake I see that many corporates do is just they, they do the same stuff. They use the same words, they use the same creative, they use the same colors, light blue and tag everywhere. Very hard to differentiate. And it probably doesn't get a get better. If everybody starts to use Gen AI to. To create their text, it's going to be more of. Of the sea of sameness. Yeah. So that's why I think take the time to think about a provocative statement that sparks interest.
37:44
Jennifer Gutman
Agreed. I believe the next slide here is our final question and we can stay here for a bit. But right, one is one actionable tip and you've definitely given quite a few. So I hope everyone who's listening in again, you're going to receive the recording. But if you've been taking notes. Right, what's one piece of advice, one actionable tip that you want to leave our audience with today before we head into Q and A on how to effectively leverage LinkedIn can be as a platform for the organization or to spark business growth.
38:18
Barney O'Kelly
I'm happy to go first on this one. So as an individual, if you're interested in exploring building your own platform, I would recommend tool called Authored up and Installing. That that's pretty cool. That gives you some really good data points and it helps you sort of understand what works and what doesn't work. It also gives you reminders and so on of things you posted previously. Where was that on September 12th I asked I think for organizations as a whole, a really good amplification platform. I can think of one in particular that I would encourage people to look, I think, I think technology needs to be your friend in this kind of stuff because you're trying to mobilize at scale and a highly bespoke concierge service will fall down after about four people get involved. And I think to spark business growth, it's just that visibility play and just I'm really interested in your ex attribution model because that could throw up some fascinating things about where the magic is actually happening commercially for the organization. So yeah, pick your brains about that if you be so kind. Those are, those are three tips that spring immediately to mind.
39:34
Joerg Klueckmann
What I would say is make sure you know what you want to do. Yeah. So you need different. It's a general advice that's pretty useful. I believe there's a difference if you want to create demand or if you want to address existing clients, probably making them stick with your tech, telling them how others failed. Replacing tech, for instance, or to brand your. Your company as an employer. Yeah. So it's three complete different objectives that need different messaging, different content, probably also a little bit different creative. The problem is if you don't differentiate that and you mingle everything up and you have like a feed where you have a demand post and then some executive saying something and then employer branding comes in and it all looks the same and it all Mingles up. So I think it's really important to understand that those are like three different streams that need dedicated content, that need an aligned a publication schedule, because otherwise you create a mess and messages will blur and people are confused what this is all about.
40:51
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. So listen, I'm just keeping tabs on time and so I want to open it up to the Q A. Now. I understand. I believe the chat is disabled, so I believe you have to type in through the actual Q and A. And so I have some questions that have already come through. I'm going to throw them out there and then, you know, when we get to time, if anybody has any additional questions, please feel free to go ahead and reach out, you know, to any one of us. You'll have the presentation. Everybody's LinkedIn is linked and we're happy to continue the conversation. So the first question that I have coming in, anybody's welcome to take says in using Oktopost, how are you able to prevent what we call the advocacy circle whereby your employees and executives who are interacting in the closed circle instead of with the outside others?
41:43
Barney O'Kelly
I'm, I'm a bit more relaxed about that than I think some others are. And I get it a lot here is I only see content from Alex Partners people. It's like, well, yes, you're disproportionately over connected to people from the organization you work for. So you will, I think interacting with your colleagues content is important. It gives it a boost. It gives it an algorithmic boost. It will get notified to your network if you're liking and commenting on topics. So you are doing a very low level of onward transmission in that respect. I think that's, that's less of a concern for me right now. My biggest concern is the habitual and intentional posting of content on a frequent basis. And I would rather have a, that too many people are seeing too much stuff from their colleague problem than the no one seeing anything from anybody problem.
42:34
Alex Rumble
And I would add to that, you know, when we started trying to really develop, you know, the number of followers and social at ifs, one of the things that was really important was to get our employees understanding and participating. So we knew very well that for the first year we absolutely probably had more employees and executives sharing with each other constantly. But this year we've taken a much different approach in terms of the content that we create as well. But we've established that pool of people who feel confident. And therefore, with that new content that we're creating this year, we're actually reaching Further, because had we started with, I don't know, you know, 50 advocates within the company, regardless of the content, that, that 50 wouldn't have got very far. We now have thousands of employees, you know, who are sharing in on LinkedIn and therefore our content goes much, much further. And in that very short period of time, I think we're now at 170,000 followers. So that, you know, clearly has, has proved successful for us.
43:34
Joerg Klueckmann
Alex. The same for us. If you have a small number of advocates, of course they share with each other. Right. But as soon as you have reached a certain threshold, everybody's connected to people, then I mean, for us this circle thing is not a thing anymore because we have a few thousand advocates as well. And it's not a good.
43:52
Alex Rumble
It's a math thing.
43:52
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, people in math. Here we go. So I have two more questions I see coming in. There's actually more questions. So what I'll do is anyone who's, who did ask a question, we don't get to it today, I'll reach out to you personally as well. So we have as a question about geographies, multiple geographies. So with companies targeting larger organizations targeting multiple geographies, many time zones with different locations that speak to completely different languages, how would you advise the brand to move forward? For example, we are planning, for example to talk to sea countries, but we currently only have one single account handle with content in English and obviously our employees speak, you know, one language. Do we create a different account? Do we stick with the same handle? Do we post in different languages? Do we keep still in English to match where we're going? Curious to hear your views.
44:42
Barney O'Kelly
So it's okay if I go, sorry, I've started, but I'm quite strongly against lots of different accounts for organizations. I think you're massively splitting your audience and I think there are quite a lot of targeting tools, even in posting on LinkedIn company pages that should allow you to drive content to an audience on a linguistic basis, at the very least on a geographic basis as well. I think that proliferation of lots of different accounts for lots of different parts of an organization is something I've seen happen a lot. Typically what you end up with is a couple of problems. Your audience is split in lots of different ways. There's, there's an overhead aspect to it in terms of managing them. What typically starts as a good idea, that good idea should have a 24 month run on plan for what you're going to do with that channel over that time. Otherwise it happens in A moment and then gets quickly disregarded as other things take precedence. I think most organizations don't have thousands and thousands of people who are desperately interested in what they do every single day. So you should try and keep those people in one place as much as anywhere else. There may be a case for doing something more localized. There probably is in some cases. I've yet to see one in the organizations I've worked in.
45:59
Alex Rumble
So we do have local and they do post in their local language as well. And I'm a big supporter of that. I think where things can become unstuck, as described by Barney, I think you need to think about what governance you put in process for that. So we have a very detailed calendar of when our corporate post versus when France posts. So there are time slots that are allocated across the board so that we don't end up plastering everything over LinkedIn. I go back to the point that it's about engagement and it's about engaging with that content. And having lived in multiple countries, not having things delivered to me in my language makes me feel a little bit like the company isn't that interested in me, they're just interested in my business. And therefore for us it's worked really well. It's challenging, but as I said, the governance behind it is the key. Behind.
46:54
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, I think we have kind of a decentralized approach here. Company languages is English. So 99% of the content we publish is English. Yes. If we have an event in France or Japan. Right. There's going to be local posts as well. But we try to keep it in English because we would struggle to create the content centrally in like three, four or five different languages to push it out. But it, I mean, I believe ultimately it depends to your customers, to your business. Right. If you have clients that you know normally are not very good in English, then you have no other choice. Right. If you have clients that I don't know that are sea level at the bank in Malaysia, of course they're going to speak English, they're going to digest the content. It depends on the Personas really you address. I believe what I'm trying to say.
47:54
Jennifer Gutman
I think it's an interesting question and I wish time to dive into it just because we're coming up to time and I want to be mindful this has been a fantastic panel and I want to thank you for your time. So I hope everyone listening in has now mastered LinkedIn for professional success. And we all look forward to going on LinkedIn and seeing your posts. If anybody would like to connect with any of us again, feel free. The LinkedIn details are connected. Everyone will receive a copy of this recording. And I want to thank you all for participating today, for getting transparent about how we go about LinkedIn success. And I wish everybody a fantastic rest of your day.
48:32
Joerg Klueckmann
Thank you.
48:33
Barney O'Kelly
Thank you very much.
48:34
Alex Rumble
Thank you.
48:36
Barney O'Kelly
Bye. Bye.
48:36
Alex Rumble
Bye.
