0:00
Colin Day
Welcome to this webinar from Oktopost titled how to use your personal brand to impact business strategy. I'm Colin Day, I'm the managing director of Oktopost business across Emea and I'm joined by two esteemed guests. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Jonathan from our friends over at AppFlyr. Jonathan, I'll let you do an introduction in a minute. And Neil Murphy, my friend and colleague from Oktopost. Neil, if, if you could just introduce yourself after Jonathan, that would be grand. So Jonathan, look, welcome to the conversation. Thanks for, for joining this, this webinar today. Could you just give the audience a little bit of overview and insight and color To Jonathan, the man and appfly of the organization and why this topic's dear to your heart.
0:55
Jonathan Raveh
Yeah. Hi. Well, hi everyone. I'm Jonathan. I work for AFSAR as head of thought leadership. I actually started AFSAR deals with mobile marketing and I come from the mobile marketing industry which is why I was hired in the first place. Part big reason for why I was hired was to help our CEO Oren boost his own thought leadership and his own personal brand to help the company brand. And you know, as the story goes, I find myself doing that for Oren and for all the other employees in the company. For the past three and a half years I've written about 1700 posts for about 200 of the company employees and just helping every person in the company that wants to build is own personal brand, thus building our company brand, help them write, express themselves and become leaders in their own domain. So that's what I've been doing for the past three and a half years and that's why I'm here.
2:06
Colin Day
Excellent, Jonathan. I look forward to unpacking some of that across the course of the next 45 minutes. I know we're going to go into much more detail, my friend.
2:14
Jonathan Raveh
Right, yeah.
2:16
Colin Day
Perfect. Neil, welcome to the conversation.
2:19
Neill Murphy
Thank you, Colin. Yeah. I'm Neil Murphy. I'm one of the county executive at Oktopost and you know, my role over the last couple of years has been to, to help mobilize organizations to share more content across social and to, to empower their employees really to help them build their own personal brands and ultimately then tie that to business impact as they move forward. So it's all around, you know, helping marketing teams predominantly and sales teams, not just those organ, not just those teams, but predominantly those teams build confidence in themselves to kind of find, share, create content to educate, you know, their, their target market with the, the primary focus of being able to build confidence in both themselves and their organization. So that's a bit about me and kind of the role that I've got adopt a post over the last couple of years.
3:09
Colin Day
Thanks, Neil. So look, as I said over the course of the next 45 minutes, we want to take you on a bit of a journey of discovery, right? It's like looking at the whole topic of employee branding or personal branding, right? It's like we'll take a little bit of journey on what's in it for the individual, right? It's like why focus on this in the first place? What's in it for the organization, right? It's like we've got some great talent on the, the call with us today and that's not just to, to big up Jonathan and Neil Slacker. If there's anyone out there in the industry that knows how to do it, it's certainly these two, two gentlemen, right? So you know, we'll be looking at some use cases as well, right? How to, to actually put some of this into practice and into action. There are certainly challenges, right, to doing this from a company level as well as from an individual level. We'll lean into Jonathan and Neil across our time together to understand some of those challenges, some of the pitfalls, some of the do's and don'ts, the trials and tribulations. So if we're all sitting comfortably, let's buckle up and go on with the task in hand. So I guess gents, you know, the, the first question that would spring to mind for me, right, it's like, you know, just to level set for, for the organization and maybe level set for us because, you know, we may have a different understanding ourselves, but really what is personal branding? What does it mean to, to, to each of you? If I turned around and said, hey, Jonathan, describe, describe a personal branding strategy for me or you know, tell me what, what personal branding really means. What, what would spring to mind? What would, what would come out of your thought processor?
5:05
Jonathan Raveh
So I think that when I talk to anyone about personal branding and about the people that I help write and express themselves, I usually sum it up with one, with one sentence, one headline, which is I want people, when you write, I want people to tell themselves, wow, that person knows his shit about X. That's it really, it's. We can, we can talk about how to expand it and, and how to do it. And you do it, you do do it through communicating your personal values and strength and showing, basically showing, maybe not showing off, but showing your skills. But at the end of the day, all roads lead to people finding you reputable in a certain area of expertise. That's it. I want people to think calling day is a professional in whatever he wishes to be perceived as. That's it. That's the bottom line. A reputation like Jeff Bezosev is what people say, say about you when you're not in the room and social media is all about that. You're never, you're always there but you're never in the room. So personal branding works the best in social media.
6:31
Colin Day
Thanks, Jonathan. Neil, anything that you would add to that? If as you're standing in front of customers talking about personal branding strategies, what do you, how do you position it? How do you position, you know, those, those two key words, personal branding.
6:52
Neill Murphy
Yeah, I mean I'd echo pretty much what Jonathan said that, right. It's around kind of building confidence in yourself and identifying, identifying knowledge gaps.
7:00
Colin Day
Right.
7:00
Neill Murphy
And providing consistent value to those, to those people that you want to provide value to. So you know, from a personal perspective, you know, I talk to this as, you know, an account executive at Oktopost and I know the kind of my target market or the people that I want to address and build knowledge of is, you know, marketing executive, social managers and, and then the sales team.
7:22
Colin Day
Right.
7:22
Neill Murphy
In order to help them share content. So you know, from a personal perspective, what I'm looking at is on the conversations I've had with those marketeers, with those sales teams, you know, what are the common knowledge gaps that I can add some value in helping, you know, or maybe some common misconceptions in the market I can help address. And as Jonathan says, you know, provide then, you know, consistent value. For me it's in the form of video so that when people are, you know, watching those videos or looking at my social post, there's very little around Oktopost as an organization in those posts. And I'm sure, you know, Jonathan would echo that with Appspire, but it's around providing value so that at the end of that video or at the end of that social post that someone's read, they can take something away that's going to help them in their day to day role. So that's how I personally would look at personal branding. Right. It's well, how can I provide value, give consistent value, non product related content and to help anyone in their roles be better than they were yesterday.
8:20
Colin Day
Great. Thanks Neil. Thanks Jonathan. So I heard a couple of things there, actually I heard quite a lot there. But you know, some of the key things or Key words and phrases that I heard was confidence or building confidence, how do I help or how do I build confidence in me, the individual, right? How do I express myself? How do I use the power of expression to Jonathan, as you said, like when I'm not in the room yet, leave. And you use me as an example, right? So it's a bit weird that I'm talking about myself in, in a third party, but you know, how do, you know, does Colin Day or whoever the, the person is building the brand, how do they like, you know, leave an impression when, when they're not in the room, what is it that people think about them? So thought leadership springs to mind there as well, right? And Neil, I think you, you mentioned value at least half times, right? Like, you know, how do you drive value for the individual? You talked about certain media that works well for you. For you, Neil, right, Like video being, being the point in question. And I'm sure we'll, we'll, we'll dig deeper into that across the, the remaining times. But you know, thanks, thanks for that, gents. So, you know, I think this diagram really sums it up for me, right? So like when I think about, you know, personal branding, but those of you that know me know that I'm a simple guy and I love to keep things simple, right? So this little diagram here, slack, you know, really slack, keeps it all succinct into matches. Personal branding is really the intersection, right? Or the interchange between what you think about yourself and what others think about you or more importantly, what you want others to think about you. Going back to that point that Jonathan made about you're not always in the room and you're certainly not in the room from a social media perspective. So gents, as we think about the value of social media, as we think about the value of personal branding, right, it's like, you know, improving credibility and reputation, right? The ability to, you know, increase visibility of me, the individual or the individual in person, right? And getting that recognition that Jonathan spoke about being seen as maybe a thought leader or an industry leader, right? In a given topic or subject matter, right? The ability to drive more opportunities for personal growth as well as for business growth and business success. All of that really comes down to though, having better networking and networking capabilities. So Jonathan, as you think about personal branding and the, the strategies and experiences that you bring to your CEO and the rest of the organization, so to Owen and the team, is some of that around, you know, driving the network effect and being able to increase the networking opportunities is that part of what you're seeing here.
11:50
Jonathan Raveh
Yes, it's part, but it's not, I would say it's not. It's only part. I don't know if it's small part or big part, but it's only a part of the bigger picture. What credibility and reputation do is they, they just open the door for everything else and networking is part of it. When you have a great reputation, when you foreseen as a credible person, a credible expert, then networking options are so much easier for you. People have more network requests for you, you won't have to chase people to increase your network. And the same goes for everything else. It goes for offering partnerships, it goes for pinging people to create sales opportunities. It's easier for you to share content later on. It all starts with credibility and reputation. Now on LinkedIn we like to think of network as a big part of what we do. Like I have 10,000 followers, I have 20,000 followers, which is all great. Of course we all want to increase the network, but network is just means towards an end and the end goal is creating meaningful relationship that later on mature to partnership, sales and all the rest. So I'd like to think as reputation credibility and thought leadership in general, as basically as Udi Ledergo once the CMO of GONG used to say, making sales easier, that's what marketing is really all about.
13:38
Colin Day
So Neil, bringing, I mean that's a great segue into you, right? Making sales easier, that's what marketing is all about. That's what I just heard Jonathan say there. And as a sales professional yourself, you know what, what would you like to, to add to that one?
13:54
Neill Murphy
Yeah, I think what Jonathan says makes sense, right? I mean, you know, when we look at the data and you know, we look at, let's talk about conversion data, right? Which is where someone eventually becomes part of your marketing ecosystem, fills in a form, downloads a white paper, something like that, right? And if you look at, you know, conversion analytics when it comes to social, 90 of them come from insights articles, right? So insights, thought leadership stuff, non product related content. And that ties into what Jonathan is saying around building valuable relationships, right? Sending, you know, if you are providing links, providing links through to thought leadership articles as opposed to demo requests on your website with the end goal, not the first time that someone clicks those articles, becoming part of your marketing ecosystem, but slowly maturing individuals into, you know, understanding your value as an individual across say something like LinkedIn or any other social channels to the point where they then do become part of your marketing ecosystem. But the way that I would describe personal branding is, you know, the first, the first instinct should be to provide value, knowing full well that further down the funnel that person will eventually become part of your marketing ecosystem. Right. If you were to use personal branding and trying to tie it to a business impact. So that's the way I'd see it. I'd look at it as providing value first and foremost, providing getting credibility across your social channels to the point where this guy knows what he's talking about, as Jonathan alluded to at the beginning of the webinar. And then ultimately that will and can be tied to business success when someone does become part of your marketing ecosystem further down the line. So that's how I kind of talk about the benefits of building a personal brand, a strong personal brand.
15:32
Jonathan Raveh
Anyway, I'd like to add to what, to what Neil said. He really explained it very well. I'd just like to add, I think that the bottom line here and is what founders, CEOs and VP marketing should really understand about social media is one very harsh truth. And I may be generalizing it, but for the sake of this webinar, I'm going to. Nobody cares about your product and no one cares about your company. Literally no one. Most of the people that do care about your company are the employees of your company. Other than them, hardly anyone cares. So that's not the door to talking about your features, about your product. That's not the right door to open if you want to work with them. And I am just reminding both of you and everyone who's listening that you never sign deals on social media. You conduct personal meetings and zooms and then you meet and then, and then you sign and you get it through legal and everything is done in person or through zoom, but certainly not on social media. So social media is not a way to sign deal. Social media is the way to create opportunities for deals and that's the right mindset for companies to keep.
17:05
Neill Murphy
Also add to that this is an opportunity to influence deals within the cycle as well.
17:10
Colin Day
Right.
17:11
Neill Murphy
So, and I don't just talk about this from a sales perspective. You know, from a customer success perspective. If you have, you know, meaningful relationships you want to build with your clients, you're connected with them across LinkedIn, you know, you're going to build those relationships faster and better if you're consistently adding value across, across LinkedIn and across your social channels as well. So, you know, totally agree with that. It's a great opportunity to influence, you know, opportunities to influence individuals without directly, you know, Closing deals, you know, through social media alone. Totally agree.
17:44
Colin Day
There's some great conversation there. Like the way I always talk about it is, it's that first word, right. Social. When we talk about social media. Right. Like it's about the information exchange. And I think, Neil, that that talks a little bit to the value. Right. That, that, that you, that you're talking about. Right. Like, you know, there, when, whenever you know, there's a conversation, you try to have some form of value exchange. Right. Like whether it be in your personal life, it's like, you know, my, me talking to my children. Yeah. And there always seems to be some kind of value exchange. It's normally me giving them the value. Right. Like, not too sure what the exchange is, but the exchange rate certainly isn't that good. But that's a topic for a different, a different webinar, I'm sure. But look, whenever there's, you know, any form of, of activity going on, there needs to be a value exchange and that's no different from social. Right. And you know, Neil, I know, you know, when you and I talk and when you and I look at some of the statistics that we see with inside our customer base with regards to, you know, the conversations that take place. Right. People are more likely to have that conversation with an individual than they are to have with a brand. Right. In actual fact, eight times more likely to have a conversation on social with, with someone in their sphere of influence or someone that they see as a thought leader in their field. Right. And that really comes down to an employee branding or even a personal branding perspective. Right. How do I ensure that I'm that thought leader? Because if I, if I'm able to establish myself in that way. Yeah. The conversations that I have. Yeah. Or the more likelihood of me having a conversation when I publish something on social is, is actually eight times more likely than if it was a brand publishing content. And then you're talking to that, getting that, that pen out on, on social. Right. Jonathan, Couldn't agree more. Right. You're never going to sign a deal. Yeah. On maybe you will in times to come, who knows? But you know, people don't sign deals on social. Right. Like, do they? You know, but you can use social, as Neil said, as a, an influencer to an opportunity or, you know, a conversation starter that could lead to the start of an opportunity. And statistically, you know, people are seven times more likely to take a conversion step off of a conversation that they've had with an individual on social than they are through a conversation that they've had or a monologue that they've had with a brand. Neil, would you, would you agree with that or kind of setting different?
20:38
Neill Murphy
Yeah, I mean, if you look at it from a sales perspective. I know, I mean if I look at myself as a marketeer for a minute, right. If I, if I was connected to, to two salespeople, two account executives on LinkedIn, one of them was providing consistent value, hadn't reached out to me in any regard at this point, you know, but was providing consistent value. I was finding value from the content they're creating over a period of three or four weeks and then they reached out to me on a one to one basis through Sales Navigator or call me or whatever. My propensity to take that call, my propensity to engage with that individual that knows his stuff is much higher than someone that's not doing that at all.
21:14
Colin Day
Right.
21:14
Neill Murphy
So, you know, it's absolutely going to help in that regard if you're looking at it from a personal branding perspective to, to help influence, you know, a conversation with a decision maker as a salesperson. And Jonathan, I'm sure will have, you know, different insights from, from sort of his role, creating content on behalf of a CEO as far as how brand buildings helped him. But, but absolutely, you know, it's, it's definitely, you know, a strong tie to business impact. In my case, lead generation and, and you know, firming up meetings and influencing opportunities as it is to, you know, to build my own personal brand.
21:48
Jonathan Raveh
At the same time, I actually, I actually want to use my own, myself as an example. So I, when I started working at Appslar, I wasn't writing on LinkedIn at all. And after six months, eight months, something like that, I figured, okay, if I'm doing it for others, I might as well do it for myself and learn how the process works, learn how the feeling of getting a good post out of a bad post out, how does it feel? I'll learn a lot from it. And I started posting once a week about what I do and two, three, four months later, people started contacting me, contacting me on LinkedIn in personal message asking for consulting, asking for just one on ones, asking for lectures, sessions, just asking for stuff just for me, writing about the realm of thought leadership, not even writing about what I do at appsquire, just writing about that topic created the perception that I am an expert in that field, which for me was magic because those people that contacted me, they didn't really know what I was doing in apps. Like they've heard about apps like which has a good reputation on its own. But they didn't know what exactly I was doing at AppSlider but me writing it was enough to create that reputation of someone who knows this about thought leadership and that's really magic.
23:32
Neill Murphy
And Jonathan on that, I mean you know, it's interesting isn't it because you know if you, when you do start posting across social I think a lot of people stop doing it. They'll start, you know, they'll do it for a week or two weeks and then they'll look at the, you know, whether or not they have likes comments, you know, whether they have click throughs to their website and you know, quite often that isn't the most important part. You know I think when you look at, you know, what happened with you at Apps Fly there the people that reached out to you, they may or may not have liked or commented on your post. But the likelihood is the people that reach out to me off the back of videos I push out on LinkedIn they haven't liked the video, they haven't commented on the video. They probably watched it or I know they watched it but, but I don't know who that is right. So you know, to, to give confidence to anyone that's wanting to build their own personal brand. I wouldn't necessarily be looking at the analytics that closely. I'd just be doing it getting your name out there, trying to provide as much value as you can without paying too much attention to how many likes, how many comments and how many clicks you had on those on those posts you're pushing out. Would you agree with that?
24:31
Jonathan Raveh
Jonathan mealsoff I agree. I think the real analytics here is for me, I'll give another example. One of the people that I write for, an executive in the company, one of the KPI he's using to know if a post was really has really resonated with his audience is the amount of CVs that improve that you know, candidates send him after reading his post saying wow, I want to work for you and for this company. That's a KPI profile. Views that really spike when you have a good post that's a really nice KPI to look at. The rest is like it's not vanity matrix because they do mean something, they do mean some sort of direction and they can help you navigate better and optimize your, your, your, your next content better. But it's not everything and maybe we'll talk about this later on but personal branding is always in social media is always a long term Play. It's a marathon, more than 100 meters race or 400 meter resolution, even 3K race. It's really, really, really long. If you want to really see results, then, you know, come back after a year and see if your profile gets more hits. If you got offered a job, if someone offered you to speak in a panel, that's when you know that it really resonated. But sometimes it takes six months, eight months, a year, even more to really understand if it went well or not.
26:11
Colin Day
Jonathan, that's, that's some great points there, right. From, from you and Neil. So, you know, just to summarize a little bit of, you know, why personal branding for the individual and the organization. Right. You know, if I think about it from a, an individual perspective. Right. Effective personal branding requires a deep understanding of your own strengths and values. That's what we've just heard you guys really talk about. About, Right. As well as an understanding of who the target audience is. You talked a little bit about what are the metrics that you could, should maybe use in order to measure success. Right? You talked about those KPIs, Jonathan. So with careful planning and execution, personal branding can help you as an individual achieve your personal goals and enhance your career prospects. Right. It's like, you know, Jonathan, you, you talked about it, about enhancing career prospects of others. Yeah. Being that, you know, one of the, the executives that, that you work with, you know, their, their KPI is how many CVs, extra CVs like came through or come through the door, post, you know, some, some articles or copy going out that, you know that, that they're sharing and material that, that they're writing or indeed you're writing on their behalf. Right. So, you know, I think it's safe to say, right. That, you know, to summarize, you know, requires a deep, requires you to have a deep understanding of yourself and your values. Yeah. Know your audience and know what, what your goals and objectives are going to be in order to be able to measure and determine that success. But it's a, it's a, a long game rather than a short game. And I think, Neil, what you said was, you know, what really resonated for me was consistency. Right. It's like, you know, if you're, if you're going to start off on this journey. Yeah. You need to be consistent. Right. With, you know, when you're, you're creating and delivering content. Right. When you're publishing content out on social. Because people look for you.
28:24
Neill Murphy
Right.
28:24
Colin Day
It's like, you know, people you'll build right as you start to get that brand right, you'll build a following. Yeah. You'll build a group of people that will go out and look for your content if it resonates with them, if it's getting that value that Neil said. So as we move along, it's like we started to explore the impact. Of personal branding. And I just want to now take some time with the gents to drive into a few other areas, right, of, you know, how do we see it compared to, you know, other aspects out there, right? Like, you know, is it part of, of public relations? Is it about like selling yourself? Is it about, you know, just, just branding yourself? Like, you know, if we think of it from, from, from this diagram, gents, where, where would you really see it? And I'm not going to give you a, a clue because it's got a big red line around it. But, you know, is it all of these things? Is it just about brandings? Like, you know, help me out here, help me, help me unpack this one.
29:50
Jonathan Raveh
I think when we're, we're talking about, about LinkedIn, what we usually see, what we see a lot is the, is the per. Is the, the personal selling section, like, I'm great, I've been doing that, I've been doing this. Our company just released that, they just released that, a new product feature. We just got funding, we just did this, we just did that. All are great. You know, I think that's a very important point, like promoting yourself or the company. It's not a bad thing. What we're talking about here is impact. What we aim to drive is the highest impact. So personal selling, like I'm great or the company I work for is great, that's okay. There's nothing wrong about it in terms of impact. It will always drive very weak impact. The same with advertising, which is, you know, hidden by that red circle is just repeating the same, the same message over and over again, either by ads or by organic posts. We're great, we're great, we're great. There's no proof that you're great. And then we move on to pr, which is kind of more interesting because you're not saying you're great. Someone else is saying that you're great. Either it could be G2 or, I don't know, Forrester or TechCrunch or any other blog or research company that said you're great, which provides some sort of social proof, but all those still won't drive the understanding of the other side that you're Great. And branding happens when the other side realizes or kind of thinks subconsciously that you're a great company, that you're a great expert in what you do. And that's what the entire personal branding strategy is all about, is reaching that level.
32:03
Colin Day
So Jonathan, really it's about building credibility, right? That's the great element that you, that you spoke to there and you know, with, with a, a view to driving more sales. Right?
32:18
Jonathan Raveh
Yeah.
32:18
Colin Day
What, right? What, whatever, whatever the, the ultimate outcome is, right? It's like, you know, it may be financial reward from a, from a sales perspective. Right? It's like, but, but ultimately it's, you know, that, that credibility in order to, to, to drive those, those business outcomes that, that Neil spoke to Slack right at the, the, the top of the session.
32:44
Jonathan Raveh
I'm going to share an example here. So one of the things that's happening in our industry, in the mobile marketing industry is the, is the momentum that privacy and privacy regulations have on advertising and marketing. Right. Everything the data has to be private. Okay. And one of the aim, one of the goals of our company of Apps Lark is to be perceived as a privacy centric company. Okay. And so we've been doing a lot of content around thought leadership with our DPR data protection officer. Now our data protection officer isn't going to sell. He's not a sales salesperson. She usually doesn't sit in sales meetings and she doesn't sign the contracts. She works with R and D, she works with product but she's not a salesperson. However, if what we're doing with her as has any impact, then she becomes very well known as a privacy expert. Thus the company, it becomes very well known as a privacy centric company and solution provider. And then it becomes much easier for us to sell our SaaS product to companies that realize that today privacy is the first thing on their plate. That's the entire gameplay of inspiration. That's our goal.
34:18
Colin Day
So Jonathan, Neil, we've talked so far about the what and the why. Right. Like, you know, now let's, let's change tack a little bit and, and talk about the how. Right. How do we go about getting started? Right. Jonathan wondered if you can explain like you know, some of the, you know, some of what you've done like over at AppsFlyer, as you've been working with, you know, some of the team, whether it be Owen, from a CEO perspective for other people with inside the organization, how have you gotten started?
34:56
Jonathan Raveh
Well, that's, that's a, that's a big question. And I'D love to hear Neil explain his take on that. But getting started is really about understanding what you, what the, or the other person, if you're writing for another person, is what that other person is all about in terms of expertise and passion. Okay. Sometimes those, you know, collide, sometimes they don't. And you need to find a way to, to, you know, to kind of touch both. But what you really want to grab hold of is their passion, what they love talking about, writing about, doing, working, and what their expertise in the company is. Is it customer success? Is a specific niche in customer success? Is it marketing? Is it growth marketing or product marketing or pr? Is it managing teams? Is it R and D, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? What comes later on is actually finding the right topics for them to talk about and really just preparing kind of an interview for them, just interviewing them and really extracting those opinions, insights that each of them have about what they do about their day to day work. And then later on comes the, you know, the real hard work, so to speak, for me, which is writing posts from these insights. That's usually my way of working with people. But I'd love to hear Neil's take on how to trigger people to get started.
36:40
Neill Murphy
Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. I think what Jonathan's done there is awesome.
36:43
Colin Day
Right?
36:44
Neill Murphy
It's what we speak to customers about all the time as well. Enabling people to share content. I think that's the key thing is enablement in the first instance. I mean, as Jonathan, you've got CEOs that want to share content, product teams want to share content, marketing teams, sales teams, CROs, everyone wants to share content, but it's around, well, how do we enable it in the first instance? So again, this will depend on the size of organization. If you're a smaller organization, you've got far less moving parts. It's actually a bit easier to do it in a larger organization. Organization with, you know, people in different industry verticals, different regions, it can be a little bit more challenging. Most of the people I imagine on this webinar will be marketers or maybe sales people as well, looking to build their brands or maybe even CEOs. But the first thing that I would do is, is I would send through a survey. So similar to Jonathan where he talks about interviewing people, what are the people passionate about sharing? There's no point providing content to individuals, trying to enable them to share that content if they just don't care about that content in the first instance. So I try and understand a Little bit around, you know, their passions. What are they passionate around? Sharing. Whether that be full leadership, content, Maybe it's employer branding stuff. You know, in a perfect world, what would they want to share more of? And then I, I'd probably start off by running a pilot with a select few individuals that have raised their hand and say, look, you know, I'm interested in getting involved and put together, you know, no more than two posts a week per person to initially start sharing out across LinkedIn. And then I pay some close attention to the data from there on in. So as a marketeer, I would say initially, how do you get started? You're the facilitator, right? So you're facilitating people to, to find and share content, you know, to their own personal profiles. And then moving forward, what you'll find is that people will then start creating their own content a little bit more. So to begin with, it's providing a few posts for them to share or augment themselves. And then from there on in, you'll start to see people create content off their own back and you're kind of half the way there. So that's typically how I get started. Start small with a select group of individuals, find out what those individuals are passionate about. If they're passionate about that content, they'll share that content and then pay close attention to the data from there on in.
39:03
Jonathan Raveh
I'd like to add something. What Neil said is great and also use the word facilitating, which I love using, but since I'm not a native English speaker, I sometimes forget facilitating is really the right word here. There's one trick, one very important trick that I think at that stage, marketers should use when they start create program, whether it's employee advocacy or just limited thought leadership for, for that, for themselves or for executives. Do not mention the company name, Just don't mention the company. That's the trick. Once you mention the company, it's very easy for everyone else, for everyone that feels kind of embarrassed. We'll talk about, you know, challenges later on, but it's really easy to venture into the company, what the company does, what the company is. The whole trick is never mention the company. We want to create like an empty space for thought leadership. When the company gets inside that space, it kind of, it contaminates the post. Forget the company. Don't mention the company. Any sort of that, any sort of content that is created should be just clean and the company should always stay, you know, in the background, unmentioned. So that's a very important tip
40:37
Neill Murphy
to one point there. I mean, yeah, the, the interesting thing that you'll find though is that, you know, some people will then come back on that and say, well look, we don't have the bandwidth to create all that, that much content, right? So just, just along from what Jonathan said there, as a marketeer, we don't need to create all this content ourselves. We can work with product experts within the organization, with salespeople within the organization to create this thought leadership content and with other people within the marketing team in conjunction with the C level team. Because a lot of the time organizations won't always have the bandwidth to create this content alone if they have a small marketing team. Right? So working with those product experts to help, you know, develop that narrative. Again, as Jonathan says, not mentioning the company name as a first instance, a first point is super, super valuable. And marketing teams shouldn't feel they need to create all of this content on their own. They can absolutely leverage experts within the organization to do that, to grow the employee advocacy sort of strategy faster than what they could if they were on their own.
41:39
Colin Day
That's a great point there, Neil. So just picking up on that, right, like you know, Jonathan Neal, what advice have you got for those of us on the, on the call that are not marketers? Right. So Neil, you said that marketing teams don't need to create all that content themselves, right? But what advice would you have for, for those individuals that are not marketers on, you know, how they can help contribute content or create their, their own content? What, what advice have you got for those folks?
42:14
Neill Murphy
I mean, I'd be looking at things, you know, such that we're all having conversations on a day to day basis, right. Whether that be with potential customers, prospects, current customers. What I'm doing is I'm looking personally at knowledge gaps that I see. I mentioned this at the beginning of the webinar. From all the conversations I have, what are the most common misconceptions that I see from customers that I'm speaking to? It might be that, you know, they've got five challenges or you know, they're just not sure about something in their day to day roles, whether that be sharing content with their employees for instance, and things like that. And then what I'll do is I'll put together non product related content to provide value, initiate ideas and to give confidence. Right. So that's the first thing that I'm doing to making it part of my day job is I'm picking probably two or three things each week that I hear most commonly from my customers and then starting to craft a narrative around that through the medium of video or social posts. Not talking at all about our organization, but helping solve some of those challenges with links to interesting articles or ways to sort of solve some of the challenges that they're facing on a day to day. So that's personally what I'm doing. From an account executive's perspective, that's great.
43:32
Jonathan Raveh
I just add to it like personal, like specific challenges that clients face on, on their everyday work. That's a great segue to talking about the pains, the pains of the industry, which is the reason why those executives created this company and that solution and why customer success people are actually helping their customers overcome those challenges. I think it all goes to what we market is called top of the, top of the funnel content. Creating that awareness that there is a problem, that there is a challenge, that those challenges cost us money and businesses and the fact that we can overcome those challenges and pains without mentioning the company, I think that's like the first line of offense, I would say when you, or when you're trying to make your first content, your first thought leadership content, that's where you should focus on if you're not a marketer.
44:43
Colin Day
And gents, when we were prepping like all those weeks ago, right. Like some of the conversation that we had was really around, you know, three core topics, right? It's like you know, making the content and the conversation personable, right. It's like, you know, relatable to the individual, right. It's like ensuring that any of the content that we create has strong backed up claims. Right. And hey, explain what's going on. People like newsworthy stuff, right? People like to live in the moment. So it needs to be relevant to the here and now. Any of that changed or is that still like what you guys believe in when you're, when you're creating that content for personal branding?
45:39
Jonathan Raveh
That's still, that still resonates always. I think there are so many ways and so many styles of writing and topics you could write about. But at the end of the day, if you want to create expertise in like in the area, in the vertical in which the company operates, then explaining what's going on, that's one of the first and I think most basic stuff you should be writing about. Usually in almost any industry, stuff's always happening. There's always something on the news. Some company bought another company, some company had a problem, something happened in that vertical. If it's. Well, if it's Oktopost, then it's. I think it's the easiest is the easiest because something is happening on social media all the time. Something is happening with Meta, something is happening with LinkedIn, with TikTok, with Instagram. Something is always happening and it is our kind of job as thought leader is to make that information meaningful, is to make it accessible and explain what does this mean for the average Joe, for the average Joe that works for, for, for a company. And when you kind of explain the news and explain what's going on and marks the benchmark for whatever is about to happen in the future that really impacts your personal brand as an expert in your field. So that's like the most basic thought leadership content you could have. But the problem with that is that you have to respond fast. When stuff happens on the news, you can't really prepare and ask the person to write something about it in a week. You have to prepare within 24, 48 hours tops. You need to have something out, some content out about it or it loses any sorts of relevance.
47:36
Colin Day
Jonathan, how do you then go about tying or integrating a personal branding strategy to the overall business strategy? What have you found works? What have you found as a success over at Apply?
47:55
Jonathan Raveh
Well, I hate to break the news but I, I find that really aligning personal brand with business strategy is really, really challenging. And for the most part I what I really try to align is to maximize the personal brand as much as I can without considering business strategy. The business strategy comes to play when I think about which employees I want to actually empower and work for and which ones I actually prioritize. But when I already work with someone, I don't find myself constantly thinking okay, how do I line this content with our business strategy to do A or to do B? Because usually that gets in the way of creating authentic personal brand. So I don't think about it all the time. But when I start to think, okay, if we're, if our vert, if 50% of our customers are games, then I were to I I want to work with our salespeople that sell games, that sell our solutions to game companies. I want to have a big emphasis on this. Like I mentioned our DPR doctor Protection officer. If one of our core elements is being privacy centric, then I want to work with our DPO etc. Etc. Etc. But once I get working with someone I kind of put the business strategy on the sidelines. I'm not ignoring it, but I'm not constantly thinking about how to resonate with that strategy.
49:46
Colin Day
Perfect. Thanks. Thanks Jonathan. Neil, I look, just, just going into someone that here at Oktopost, like you know, is, has a strong personal brand. Right. Like you know, you creating your own content, like you know, you're, you're demonstrating value to your audience. How are you doing it? What are you finding working?
50:13
Neill Murphy
Yeah, I mean it goes back to those sort of points I made earlier around, you know, finding gaps, basically knowledge gaps based in the, in the conversations I'm having on a day to day. But to go back to Jonathan's point on tying it to business strategy because this is super important for me as a salesperson rise to tie it to the business impact really. And you know, when you look at organizations ordinarily, when we're looking at trying to tie personal branding to business strategy, personal branding kind of falls into much more of a demand gen focus strategy as it would a lead gen strategy as Jonathan says. Right. We don't talk about product, we don't talk about our organizations. What we are doing is trying to provide consistent value to our followers and to people that follow us on LinkedIn. And ordinarily we're looking at this in two ways from the conversations I've had. One is can we tie it to brand awareness? So can we start building our company's brand by building our employees brand? And the second is from a demand gen perspective by providing consistent value across social. If we can identify who it is that engages with that content and then tie that eventually to a known record inside CRM, then we have been able to prove business impact from building personal brand across LinkedIn. So by that I mean if someone engages with a piece of content, a thought leadership article, let's say for instance, and then engages with, you know, an ebook, for instance, again a thought leadership kind of article on an ebook or, or something like that, and then becomes part of our marketing ecosystem three or four months down the line, then we can tie what we're doing across social to business impacts in that regard. But I think it has to sit with brand awareness or a demand gen focused strategy and definitely not one to generate leads from the get go.
52:05
Colin Day
Thanks, Neil. Jonathan. Neil, look, just as we start to wrap up and our time here comes to an end. Yeah. Can you give us some thoughts and clarity around some of the common challenges that people are going to face as they start thinking about branding strategies or personal branding strategies and some of the solutions that you guys have brought to bear in order to overcome those hurdles and those obstacles.
52:43
Jonathan Raveh
I'd actually like to hear from Neil first because I think some of the solutions on these slides are something that I should really be thinking about. Usually most of these common challenges I actually tackle them, you know, on a person to person basis. I don't create company wide solution to tackle those challenges. So I'd love to hear from Neil how like you're tackling them and then add my own.
53:12
Neill Murphy
Yeah, sure. I mean from a challenge it depends how many people you want to to empower to share content within an organization. But I think the key thing that we always look to try and do is to bring content to individual rather than individual looking for content. And you'll find that a lot of these personal branding strategies fall flat on their face when it's too difficult for individuals to find content. Be that if I sended it through Slack or through teams. So some kind of centralized place where people can easily find and share content, their own personal profiles and augment that content so that it's personable is absolutely key. The other challenge I would suggest is starting too big. You know, Jonathan works with a select few individuals on this. I think that's absolutely the right way to go initially if I wanted to help build the personal brand of a 500 strong sales team. It's just too difficult to do right from the get go if you've never done it before. So I'd maybe stick with your initial 5, 10 people maybe in each department depending on how much bandwidth you have to create the content. And start with a small amount of individuals, find out what they're interested in sharing rather than just sharing company led content the whole time and then make that content super easy to edit and to find in the first instance. And if you can start to prove the model with a select few individuals in an organization, it then becomes much, much, much easier to to grow that program when you have, you know, a cohort of individuals actively sharing content across social and augmenting that content to make it personal to their audience. So you know, those are the key things that I'd look for at least initially if you were to look at rolling this out within an organization as opposed to just one or two individuals.
54:54
Jonathan Raveh
Can I ask you Neil, what is from all from that list, what is the most popular common challenge like that you face like I have my own answer, I'm going to share it but I feel like to hear from you like from all of these, there are five here. What is the most popular challenge that you're facing?
55:14
Neill Murphy
I feel is the I'm not a marketer, right. Because you know, I think historically salespeople have always relied on rightly or wrongly Right. The marketing team to create the content, generate them. Leads drive inbound inquiries because historically, traditionally, maybe five years ago, marketing was much more lead generation focused right around generating leads, lots of heavy spend on paid advertising with the end result of driving inbound MQLs. They were all MQL focused. Whereas I think as times moved on, marketing teams have become a lot more clued up in that they know that the best way to generate leads is through a demand gen focused strategy where they're providing content, valuable content to the point someone becomes organically part of the marketing ecosystem. And I think there's a lot that sales can take from marketeers in that regard and start to think about how they can to generate the type of content that generates demand as opposed to lead. So I think that's the key one. That's a big, big challenge that marketers have.
56:17
Colin Day
And Jonathan, I'm going to, I'm going to interject there because I think that last one is actually a combination of all of the above. I think that was the, the hey, everything above equals. I'm not a marketer.
56:30
Jonathan Raveh
So you may be right. But here's the interesting part. Like for, for me maybe since I'm a marketer working for a marketing department and the marketing company, the am not a marketer challenge is the least common challenge that I face, really the least one. And also for me the easiest to, to solve. When someone tells me I'm not a marketer, I'm saying great, I'm a marketer. You know, let me help you. Right? Let me help you do that for me. Usually like the most common is actually the first one is that feeling of embarrassment that cringe that people feel like should I be promoting myself? That's really not me. Why should I like who am I to promote myself? This is, and this actually, and actually this for me includes all the rest is not knowing what to say. It's, it's been written before, it's high, I don't know how to write effectively. That actually include is all included in that cringiness that people feel when they're posting. And for me I think that's the hardest challenge to, to cross because it's super personal. It's super personal and people need to feel in the end of the day when they do that like on often in a consistent way. They need to feel comfortable. If they don't feel comfortable, they're not going to do it long term. So for me that's the most, that's the most common challenge and it's, it takes a lot of work to, you know, to, like, unravel that challenge and make people feel comfortable and in their own element. And helping them writing something in their own style really helps. And helping and writing about their own passion really, really helps to lower down those. Those barriers. But I find it really interesting that you're actually seeing other challenges that are much more popular than that.
58:41
Colin Day
And Jonathan Neil, on that note, thank you so, so much for your time. It's been an amazing conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Neil. That is the end of our time today. Thank you for joining the conversation.
58:57
Jonathan Raveh
Thank you.
58:58
Neill Murphy
Cheers, John. Thanks.
