0:00
Alina Dallal
I'm Alina. I'm the Content Marketing Manager here at Oktopost and I will be your host today. Welcome to our webinar how to confidently roll out and scale your executive advocacy strategy. So before we dive in, a couple of quick things we'd love to hear from you during the session. So please drop your questions in the Q and A box as we go and we'll get to them at the end. And don't worry, you'll all get the webinar after this recording, as well as our new executive Advocacy guide. If you look over a few housekeeping things. If you look over at the bottom toolbar, there should be a Resources tab if you click on more and where you'll find some great content on executive advocacy under the Link tab. And you'll also see the links to Jordan and Archana's LinkedIn profiles in case you want to connect with them. That'll be under the Speakers tab. So, without further ado, let's kick things off with our session about executive advocacy. Your C suite has the loudest voice in the room, but it's only if they use it. And it's one of the most powerful ways to build credibility for your brand. The tricky part is getting them to post in the first place and overcome the do we really need to be on LinkedIn hurdle. So that is where you guys come in and it's where our incredible guests today come in. And honestly, you are in for a treat. Both of them have been named as one of your B2B socials, rising 30 to start off with. And you'll understand why within Jordan's got his award up. You'll understand why within probably about five minutes of them speaking, they really, really know their stuff. And what's cool about this session specifically is you're going to get a 360 view. So you'll see from the ground up and from the top down how this strategy works. Jordan is the one putting in all the practical work day to day, getting buy in, creating content, growing his program. You name it, he's doing it. So today he's bringing his tips, tricks and those. Watch out for this moments for you today. And then we've also got Archna. She's a marketing leader who has literally been there, done that, and now she champions executive advocacy from the top and she's going to share with you how she's led it in the past and what marketing marketing leaders look for us today, look for, look for in us today and your and the rest of your social team. So you can run this strategy with confidence. So let's kick things off with some introductions. I'm going to hand over to your speakers. Jordan Archer, please. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and from your lens, either as a social practitioner or a marketing leader, what's been your proudest moment driving executive advocacy? Jordan, I'm going to start with you.
2:28
Jordan Tennenbaum
Sure. Hey everybody. Great to meet you. I'm Jordan. I'm the head of social media at talkdesk. I am a one man army, meaning I do all things social media over at talkdesk running all of our channels. I love my job and I think that this is a really fantastic question to kick off with just because I have two answers that are slightly different. I'd say the first thing is something that I really did myself, which is I created multiple different AI powered applications through vibe coding to increase executive level thought leadership. So whether you're a VP or a C level, I have tools that basically go from taking a lot of your time to maybe 30 seconds to create content for social media. I'll touch more on that later. But I think the second thing that is honestly a little bit tied to that is actually taking the time to present to executive leadership teams about the importance of social media and the ROI of employee advocacy. Both of those kind of in combination are some of my proudest moments that have really driven executive level thought leadership and employee advocacy. And I don't want to share too much, but I will touch on those more later. I'll pass it over to Archana.
3:45
Archana Dhankar
Thank you Alina and thanks Jordan. That's really great. Great. Well, for me, I've been in like B2B marketing for about 20 years and I started B2B social media. My first campaign was in, well, 2011. I don't even know, like that's way too far down. But I've been doing B2B social media for since then and I feel like influencer marketing, which hasn't been B2C for so long, hasn't been, hasn't taken off as well in B2B. It is picking up now. There are organizations who are recognizing it and doing work. When I did my Dissertation, my exec MBA project on how B2B organizations can actually scale influencer marketing essentially to drive revenue and pipeline because that's what is what matters really. So from that perspective, I think exec advocacy is really the top of the funnel. That's how you drive influencer marketing because those are the influences you've got in house for your own organization. For me, the proudest moment in whenever I'm running an exec advocacy or a social media as a marketing leader is the qualitative feedback feeding in from leaders and from salespeople to say like I was at this event and guess what? I've had a contact come to me or ping me on LinkedIn because we posted this or they actually read my post and referenced it back to me and I'm like, that's the aha moment for them to realize how powerful social media can be in driving those conversations with the real connects that they've got in their network. Because yes, you are connected with them on LinkedIn, but if you're not really active, they're not listening from you. You're not in front and center of their mind really. So you are easily to be forgotten. So for me, that's really the proudest moment and that's when the buying starts to happen automatically.
5:34
Alina Dallal
Definitely. Thank you both for sharing your proudest win. I think you've shown us already how much you can achieve with this strategy and I'm excited to now get into the details of how you actually got got there. So let's ground this in why it matters from your perspective. Why is executive advocacy so powerful and why does it really matter? Jordan, I'm going to start with you.
5:56
Jordan Tennenbaum
Sure you're going to hear me say this a lot today, but it's in my opinion the most important vein that runs through all of social. But executive advocacy is low effort, high roi. It literally fills the top of your funnel with really high quality leads that are seven times more likely to convert than leads that don't come from social media. It's also a fantastic way to get your product, your launches, just your brand name directly in front of your audience consistently and in a non invasive way because it is social media. You're not sending them an email, you're just posting on your own social media. I think it also just helps round out your company. It makes sense building your brand and your employees. Brands seem organic and natural and interesting. And again like I said, it gets leads in the top of the funnel. And from a executive advocacy perspective, spending 10 seconds to potentially impact pipeline by millions of dollars is like a no brainer. So to me executive advocacy is one of the most important aspects of social that's also overlooked. So I'm really glad we're digging it into digging into it today. But yeah, that's what I would say. That's why it does matter to me.
7:16
Alina Dallal
Amazing. And Archana, how do you feel is it similar things or is there anything else?
7:20
Archana Dhankar
What I would like to add to that is when you're looking at campaign or integrated marketing today, attention spans are so little, we are all distracted. Every organization is doing digital marketing. Like literally where digital used to be the differentiation factor, it's no longer is. So what is that differentiation factor? How can you get, as Jordan was saying, easy lift, fast, ROI done. And that's where exec advocacy can matter. It's also about modeling those good behaviors. When execs are active, I've seen employees, you know, the whole organization gets active as well. So that's really important too. And in the end we Forget like in B2B we are still connected as humans. Like it's the person selling to a person or you know, when you have a solution, that's great. But ultimately I would have to connect with somebody else in the organization and if I have a great relationship, I respect them, I would just like ping them and say like, hey, I know you've got that product. Can you tell me more? Because I think I have a need for that.
8:20
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. I think both of you have nailed it on the head. Why executive advocacy matters. And it humanizes your brand, it humanizes your people and it's very cost effective. Um, so the next question I want to move on to is Jordan, I'm going to turn to you. You've been get you the one who has been getting this off the ground. So what did launching an executive advocacy strategy look like for you and where did you start?
8:42
Jordan Tennenbaum
So fantastic question. I think it's obviously going to be different for everyone based on their company, company size, tools that they're using. But when I came to talkdesk, I started with the tools that we had and my first thing was like, this is new to me. I've used other employee advocacy tools. Let's learn this from there. Once I learned and figured out how to utilize it and started in like deploying it in terms of adding posts and content to it, the next step was moving to company wide education. I met with quite a few different teams. Excuse me, sorry, I'm a little sick this morning. But I moved to quite a few. I met with quite a few different teams and put on presentations about the importance of employee advocacy and executive advocacy, kind of sharing like the stats, the roi, all of these things that I've been talking about just to kind of get people excited. From there it was how can we adopt this? And honestly it's a lot of just asking people to do it over and over. Again, in different slack channels. There's something that I like to call executive leadership enforcement, which is you basically pawn off your tasks to executives and you ask them to ask people to sign up for your social advocacy tool. And then from there you kind of have like a pretty solid base. But people want to see their executive leaders modeling the behavior of that they're being asked to do. And so from there it's all about ELT or executive leadership actually doing executive advocacy or thought leadership, posting content, me supplying them content, me helping them post about launches or ghostwriting or whatever it takes to get them to share on social media. Because monkey see, monkey do, they are authority figures. And if they are the ones modeling this good behavior and getting leads in the top of the funnel, it starts to trickle down to the entire employee base as a whole. Now, I know I just kind of explained that pretty quickly and made it seem really easy. It is a lot of steps. It is a lot of time, especially if you're a new employee. No one's just going to be like, I'm going to do whatever you say and I'll just start posting on LinkedIn all the time. Kind of a, an additional aspect of this is just being a nice person, getting to know people, building trust with various employees. And that way once you ask them to do something or if you're doing it yourself and then you ask them to do something, they're much more likely to because they see that, oh, I'm already doing something and if I ask them to post on social media, they will most likely do it too. So there's a lot of like, practical steps, but there's also a lot of, I guess, emotional or psychological steps that, you know, just be a nice person, model good behavior, you know, don't be annoying. That really helps when getting people to do what you want.
11:20
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. Thank you for running us through the steps. I now want to flip the script so you talk, talking about the little practical things that you're doing. I want to ask Arcana from a leadership lens, what should a well executed executive advocacy program look like from the outside?
11:35
Archana Dhankar
Yes, I think this is a very interesting question, Alina. What happens is I'm passionately going to say that social should be, should have a seat on the table. Social should not come as an afterthought. Right. Like, I've seen a lot of content first strategies and content is like the king, but then social should be the queen. Right to it. And it's essential because you can see the difference when you have a social first Strategy where the content and the product launches are social first. You are thinking about how you're going to actually launch it, right? Like a white paper or even a product for that matter. How is that journey going from an exec to the employees to the market? And there's a difference when you have a social first because you can literally tell from the content that's coming out. Have they actually thought about videos? Have they thought about how they're going to activate their employees and their staff and their execs? And I think a lot more social integration is not happening. We have limited staff most of the time. Social teams are the smaller teams in our marketing today, and they just, like Jordan said, a single person doing a lot more than is expected today.
12:51
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. And I couldn't agree more with what you said about social being queen. We have a little joke in our marketing office that if content is king, social and advocacy has to be queen, because how can content reign if nobody sees it? So I very much agree with you that social needs to have a seat at the table. Thank you for your answer, Jordan. I'm going to come back to you. So once you were in motion, you ran us through those practical steps. So once you did it, what roadblocks came up? How did you earn trust, time and credibility?
13:20
Jordan Tennenbaum
Sure. So the biggest roadblock for executive advocacy is time. Archana and I were speaking just before this webinar just about how time is such a huge roadblock and even a person as busy as her doesn't have time to manage LinkedIn because it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort to engage and interact and post and iterate and create content. And so you must get around your executive leadership's lack of time. And there's a few ways that I've developed to do this. The first is prove the ROI of social media and the earned media value of employee advocacy. There's plenty of tools that will give you an exact number of earned media value from your employee advocacy program. It's very Easy to track UTMs and send them to Salesforce to be able to figure out how much pipeline you're generating. And once you have a solid case that social media and executive advocacy and employee advocacy is generating tons of pipeline, it makes it much easier to speak the language of executives. And so the next thing that I would implore you to do is find, figure out a way, no matter what, to present to your executive leadership team. Talk to them, talk to them about social media, get to know them personally. Again, that kind of psychological, emotional connection and prove not only your own value as a social media practitioner, but prove the literal value that you are bringing to your company through employee advocacy and executive advocacy so far. And then try and figure out some sort of a calculation or an equation to show that, you know, maybe we have X amount of executives posting on LinkedIn. If we had X +15, the ROI would be ABC or, you know, whatever silly equation you can come up with to kind of show them that with 10 seconds, you know, 30 seconds a week, we can potentially add millions to the top of the pipeline. And so to get around time, you must prove value, you must prove ROI and essentially speak the language that executives care about, which is making money.
15:29
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. They want to know that your work is having impact on the pipeline. And I'm sure everyone listening can agree with that and experiences that as well. Thank you for sharing that. That was really detailed and super helpful for everyone listening. Ark and I'm going to come back to you again. I'm going to come back to you as a marketing leader. So what do you look for when someone is asking you for buy in or resources to support executive advocacy?
15:52
Archana Dhankar
I think what Jordan said is so applicable here as well. But if you go a little deeper to say, how are you going to measure that? Resources, they always come at a cost. When we start talking resources, it's either budget or time essentially. As a leader, whenever we are looking to dissect or allocate budget or resources, it's essentially about how am I going to get more out of this than if I were to put it into another bucket essentially. So look at and think like, would it be delivering more than something else and then have a strategy in place which is scalable and repeatable because leaders have this buy in or like a head which is how can I repeat it again and again? How can I improve it and take it to multiple regions? So it should not be a one time campaign. It should be more of a strategy that can live and breathe. Couple of years, there's a lot of change management. When you look at advocacy, it would probably be like year one would look very different when year two would look very different. So if you can also show your maturity curve for that program of how it will impact the year one, but then yes, there is more growth and opportunity for year two that would probably get a bigger buy in and more resources up front.
17:10
Alina Dallal
That's really interesting. So anyone listening who wants to get their leaders to say yes, let's start with this because I think it's really interesting to see that you take it past the one year and you show how it can grow and how it can scale with the company as the company moves. So that's really interesting.
17:23
Archana Dhankar
When I once did this, I did a three year maturity curve program which was here's a pilot. That's when we scale it. After the scaling, the strategy actually changes because people have now learned how to do it. And then after that you get the real gain and even year three as well.
17:39
Alina Dallal
Interesting. Okay, thank you for sharing that. And it actually leads me to the next question, so stay with me because I know you've done it in the past and you just sort of mentioned that. So you've also scaled executive advocacy content across multiple leaders previously. So what systems or structures did you put in place to scale your executive advocacy strategy?
17:55
Archana Dhankar
Yes, I think social's been here for long, right? I think two years back and even now though not everybody in the exec outside of marketing would understand LinkedIn or social media as we do. Right. Like we speak a very different language as a group. All of us like listening to this versus our sales and our product teams who are actually also going to go and post for us. So educating them about, you know, the benefits of LinkedIn, but also how to use that platform to the best. It's not about just having a loudspeaker and talking about their product and their services, but having a balanced view. Because people don't want to be just posted content they want to be engaged with. You're still talking to a human and it's just, I mean we can't take social out of the social media. Right? That's the first thing. But once you've done that part, one thing that I saw which really worked and the pyramid structure actually came out of my research long time back, it's essentially the same model as you would do in B2C but slightly more tailored. Now for employee advocacy, your tier one influencers are your C suite execs. And then as you go into your mega to micro and the Nano influencers, think about this is the same model. So use your C suite exec with, you know, white glove treatment. Give them the content that you want them to post, maybe tell them how they can also keep posting a little bit more of their personal content to create that 360 degree voice. Then you've got your industry influencers, senior execs, senior leaders who might not need that much of a white glove, but you are still tailoring, creating, maybe an AI led LLM trained for their voice. So they are more self sufficient. And as you go beyond, you've got professional advocates, managers and specialists and your employees. And you might have different content tiers as well. Right. Like for employees, you also might be giving them some, some content which is around your HR organization so it looks balanced and you're not all the time selling. But this model really helps you scale different type of content pieces with different type of audiences.
20:00
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. I think it was really interesting this pyramid structure that you're using and for anybody listening can also send you this after. But feel free to take a photo of this if you need to, to remember because it's a really good way to make sure everybody in each level is getting the attention that they need so the strategy can, can keep going. The next question I want to ask both of you, we can't do this webinar without talking about AI, right? Of course, everybody's using it and you've both experimented with AI to help and scale, help support and scale your strategies. So the question I have for you guys is how has it helped you and what have you learned about balancing AI with authenticity? Jordan, I'm going to start with you.
20:37
Jordan Tennenbaum
Sure. So this is probably my favorite question of the bunch because personally I think AI is the best thing since sliced bread. I use it to make myself more efficient. I use it to tackle more tasks, I use it to cover more ground. And my goal is to help executive employee, or excuse me, executive advocates as well as just employee advocates do the same. So I know I talked about coding some apps. I've coded 5 using AI powered tools. If you've heard of vibe coding, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. If not, I would highly suggest you Google it. But the whole point of these tools are to improve social media. Quite a few of them are to improve an executive level advocacy. And so I have developed a tool where you can drop in a YouTube video, a blog, an article, a LinkedIn post and it will tailor the content to the person's title, to how serious or how entertaining they would like to be, to how technical or direct and simple they want to be. And this is will be soon rolled out among our executive leadership team, which is really exciting because rather than having to ghostwrite tons and tons and tons of content, there's a self service model where they know launches are happening, they know articles are being written about us, they see them, they share them. Now instead of coming to me and saying Jordan, what you know, what should I say about this? They can just post whatever link that they want into this tool that will create multiple versions of posts, a short and long, a medium and like a kind of a power version that combines all four and then all they have to do is just click the, the copy to clipboard button and share it on their, their social media. And so this has gone from something that, let's say they send me an article and then I have to go use a Gemini gem and then I have to edit it and you know, make sure that it's okay and send them multiple options and then they have to get back on Slack and copy it and paste it into LinkedIn. That takes, it could take 30 minutes, it could take an hour if they're busy. But now this tool takes about 30 minutes or 30, sorry, 30 seconds just for them to, you know, copy and paste an article link and then copy whichever version of social posts that they want. Now this tool is not perfect. It is an AI powered LLM tool similar to ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Claude or you know, Grok or whatever you prefer. So it does make mistakes. It's not perfect. It's pretty close. I'm really proud of it and I think that, you know, just like with everything that is AI generated, you need your team to be aware that they can't just go about this blindly. Spend the extra 30 seconds and read the post before you. Excuse me, post it, make sure that it sounds good, make sure that it's in line with what you want created. I am not an engineer. I have been coding for two weeks so I cannot guarantee anything. But if it works 99% of the time, then this is a really powerful self service tool that can be used. But of course with a little caution and checking, I did see someone in the chat say, can I have a link to that tool? I apologize, the answer is no because it is an internal talk desk tool. But if you would like to learn about Vibe coding, I strongly suggest you do it to get ahead of all of the competition that are currently not learning about Vibe coding. Because in my opinion it is a social media managers or a head of social media manager management's best friend. So that's, that's my answer. A little long winded, but I hope, I hope that helps some people.
24:15
Alina Dallal
Jordan, I've been wanting to get my hands on this tool since you spoke to me about it. So I'm in the same boat as the people that want their hands on it. But I do think I saw you posted on LinkedIn a bit about how you created it or maybe the background. So if anybody wants to learn more, head to Jordan's LinkedIn. And definitely I agree with you about checking AI. We use ChatGPT, I love it, but I will never post anything else straight from it. So really making sure that the idea comes from you and that afterwards you've read through everything and you make sure it sounds exactly like you, your brand or your executives, however you're using it. But I kind of, I'm interested to hear about you as well.
24:48
Archana Dhankar
Yeah, I think this is, this is an interesting question. Look, AI is there for productivity gains, right? Like we know that. And I've been always like, when I'm talking about AI in my organization or externally, I've always said like first the organization, everybody in the team should be AI literate. Which is essentially to say what are the dangers, what are the benefits of AI and how to use AI? Because we are also going into a self serve mode where everybody is using AI one way or the other. The other thing is to also make sure, like as you talked about authenticity, yes, you can throw in a link and yes, you know it will create a post for you based on your tone because you've trained the AI model on it. I've done it.
25:28
Alina Dallal
So.
25:28
Archana Dhankar
But I think at the same time, unless we have an opinion as an exec, it's very hard for the AI to know what that opinion is. So I would always say like, yes, digest the white paper, read the blog, have a summary throughout, but then have a take which is very much human coming from you because that's what your audience cares about. That's what your staff, your employees, your customers or prospects want to know, which is what does, what do you think about it? Not AI. It's very easy today for folks to figure out an AI written post as well. So having that original opinion is critical. So yeah, that would be, that's what I've been training execs as well to say. Like at least throw in your own words and make sure you have an opinion and not just a chatgpt written post.
26:17
Alina Dallal
I agree.
26:17
Jordan Tennenbaum
Let me just mention one thing really quick because I agree so much with what Archana is saying that if you are an executive and you're listening to this and you don't have an opinion about a big launch or a product release or something going on in the industry, you should not be an executive. You should be knowing what's going on in the industry. You should be knowing what's going on in your company. You should feel proud, you should feel excited, you might feel scared about a launch or a competitor, whatever it is, you're a human and you're feeling something and Archana is so right. You must include that in your social content. I wish I said that because you sounded fantastic saying that, Archana. But it is so important. That must be a thread that is woven into all social media. So thank you for mentioning that and sorry, I didn't mean to take over.
27:06
Archana Dhankar
No, great.
27:08
Alina Dallal
Be our guest. I love it when I hear your opinions go all in. So thank you both of you for talking about I really agree with you guys are saying there were some comments in the chat asking what Jordan was talking about. So we can also get to it in the Q and A and also check out his LinkedIn. So the next question, Jordan is actually for you. So you kind of mentioned before, I think you use the phrase monkey see monkey do. I think I might have heard that phrase. He has very good phrases that he likes to bring to the table. So I wonder how have you seen executive activity, sorry? On LinkedIn create a ripple effect, whether that's with employee advocates in your wider company or pipeline or engagement.
27:46
Jordan Tennenbaum
So like everything, there's qualitative and quantitative options. To answer this question in terms of qualitative, it really is monkey see monkey do. If executives are modeling good social behavior, employees follow suit. Follow suit. They see that executives are building their brand, building their network, connecting with more people, gaining followers, creating a name for themselves and for people who work in social marketing sales, that should be par for the course. And so I think qualitatively they see something that's exciting and they want to engage with it as well. Now in terms of quantitative, when executives are creating content and sharing thought leadership like, like I've said before, pipeline goes up, earned media value goes up top of funnel leads increase. It's just something that is so it's such like a, a click pull or click push. You know, you press a button and then something happens. And so if you can get your executives to start creating thought leadership content, you see a very positive effect across the board, quantitatively and qualitatively, which in my opinion both individually are great. But when you can combine them together, change the culture of a company and also change the bottom line of a company, especially me. I'm a one person, you know, one man army or one one man band. It's really powerful and again it gives you more credibility, it gives you more strength to potentially ask for budget which can help increase the, you know, employee advocacy efforts that you're already doing. So it's kind of this positive cycle that happens over and over again when executives start to post content.
29:37
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. Thank you for sharing the results you've seen. I want to make sure we have time for the Q and A. So I'm going to move over to the next question. Ankana, I'm coming back to you. I'd love to know from your perspective and I'm sure a lot of people listening also would want to know, but when someone from your team presents their social results or their progress, what do you want to see to feel like what they're doing is really driving impact? And how often should your team present these results to you?
30:02
Archana Dhankar
Yes, I think at least quarterly for sure. Like the time moves really fast. If you're not doing quarterly reviews, it's very hard to be on the pulse. But when it comes to like social. Look, I've, I've been through this journey, right for 12, 13 years doing social media for B2C. Being a B2C influencer myself, I, I have been there as well where we all used to get excited by the number of likes, the shares, the views and sometimes these are good metrics but they're, they can also be vanity metrics in B2B. And what I mean by that, especially with like execs, right. A lot of employees would also like their post, which is great, love it. But we have to look at like what was the purpose of this program. So whether you're doing a social media campaign or you're doing employee advocacy as we are talking about today, understand why you have started this program from the day one. So like always have that goal, the purpose right in front of center and make sure your metrics and your KPIs are driven from that goal essentially to say hypothetically in a use case where you are trying to drive pipeline, which is most of the times a common goal, then think about how many likes or views or penetration do you have from your audience that is actually your buying audience. At the same time, if you're tracking your follower growth because of your employee advocacy or social media program, look at not just the number of follower growth but how many of those are from your right audience, set countries, job titles. I know this data is there available maybe just one tier down. So yeah, that's where I think I always question my team and say like yeah, it's good to have those big numbers and they look really cool. But let's go in and say like even if 100 views are coming, but they're coming from the right Audience, that's a win.
31:42
Alina Dallal
Amazing. That's really good to hear. I think that's really interesting also, as us, as social media practitioners to learn from. So thank you for sharing that. I'm now going to move on to the last question. I'm really excited to hear what you guys have said because you both have so much excited experience in this. But if you had to give one piece of advice, what would you want everybody that's joined us today to walk away with from this conversation? Jordan, I'm going to start with you.
32:04
Jordan Tennenbaum
Sure. I know you asked for one, but I'm going to give three short ones. The first is if you are an individual like me running all things social, just know that you can't do everything. Every single program that you run cannot be perfect and effective. There are just too many things for one social media manager to do. So give yourself some grace. Grace. Take a breath. Just, just know that it's okay. You're trying your hardest. I'd say the second thing is ensure that social media, and by default, employee advocacy and executive advocacy is fun. It should be entertaining, it should be educational, it should be funny, it should be informative. If you are missing out on those pillars, you're just kind of spinning your tires in the mud and kind of wasting time. Because social media is such a powerful tool and you want to take advantage of it. Especially consider you're getting paid to do so. And finally, the most important, no matter what you can do, prove why social and employee advocacy, executive advocacy, thought leadership are high, or, excuse me, are low effort, high roi. Figure out a way to get in front of your executives and force them to put their eyes on the numbers that are showing why you are important. It's good for yourself, it's good for your career, it's good for social, it's good for the company. If you're not doing that again, you're shooting yourself in the foot. So I just, I know I say this kind of with a strong tone, but I just want everyone to be able to achieve their full potential. And I think, at least in my opinion, those are the three most important ways to do so in terms of what people can take away from this conversation.
33:37
Alina Dallal
Thank you. And you've definitely been very inspiring. So thank you for sharing that advice because we can also see, and I know how much you're doing at Talk Desk with this. So really, thank you for sharing that. Arkana, how about you?
33:47
Archana Dhankar
Yeah, I think I've always said, I mean, yeah, I think I've always said this in other conversations not here today, but I'm coming from a B2C mindset as well. When I look at social in B2B a lot of times I think B2B social media teams are afraid to experiment and we have these brand tools and brand voice and we'll have everything looks so polished. Just be bold and brave, right? Like as Jordan said, have fun. Think about what is happening that you can take from that B2C playbook and maybe you'll have to tailor it. You cannot just take it as is for your brand voice, but do something different. Because if everybody is going to do the same post, same type of content, you're not going to get stand out in front of your audience, in front of your crowd. So yeah, that would be my takeaway is like do something different. Have fun with it. Don't feel like you are just constructed by the brand all the time.
34:41
Alina Dallal
Definitely. I agree. I feel like sometimes in B2B some people might feel it has to be by the book, but you can still be bold and you can definitely still have fun with it. So thank you for sharing your advice and thank you to both of you for joining me today. Here are our barcodes if you'd like to connect with any of us on LinkedIn and now's also the time to start sending your questions for the Q and A. We're going to change the slide soon, but just before I just want to let you know that you can still go in the in the bar at the bottom there's a button called More and then it has resources and you there's information on speakers. You can still also find our linkedins through that. But just before we dive into the Q and A, I just want to take a moment to show you some of the things that you can do with Oktopost to streamline your and execute your executive advocacy strategy while removing any hurdles. So first of all, you can publish executive content straight from our social publishing feature. So as you can see, I went in and posted for my CEO that says Daniel Kushner. He's a CEO of Ox Post and I can post from him from the board. So it means I don't have to chase him down to get his LinkedIn password, which he probably won't give to me. But that also removes one hurdle and it takes off another thing off their plate because you can post for them and we also have approval workflow so they can edit, suggest and approve content straight through Oktopost. The next thing you can do is engage with their audience through our social inbox everything falls into one place along with all your other notifications across your social media platforms. And you can respond to everything here because the last thing you want is your execs to be ghost posting and ghosting so you can make sure you're responding to everyone and making sure they still appear human all in one place. The next thing you can do, and probably one of the best, best, best things you can do inside Oktopost is actually prove your strategy is working. We are honored to be a certified and trusted LinkedIn B2B marketing partner, which means we are among the first platforms with access to LinkedIn's new Profile Analytics API. This means you can see exact follower growth, sorry, video engagement impressions, reposts all the metrics you need to see. They'll be inside Social BI alongside your other social results. And if you want to learn more about this, take a look at the blog link in our Resources section. And finally, with Oktopost, you can Also repost their LinkedIn post to your advocacy board. So just as you can see in this video here, I can pull up a post from any of my execs or any of my advocates, also upload it to my advocacy board and my advocates can repost it. They can like it. They can comment all from the boards. As you can see, we have done with our CRO Chris Bennett's post here. So I did run you through four features you can do. There's a lot of other things you can do in Oktopost for your executive advocacy strategy. If you are interested in learning more and trying to see how Oktopost can help you, scan this barcode. It's going to send you straight to my friend and colleague Jamie. He is great and he'll show you how you can achieve your goals with Oktopost. I am going to leave this slide up and we'll go into the Q and A. So there's the barcode there and his email at the bottom if you'd like to reach out to him. And we're going to hop into the Q and A now, so now would be a great time to send in your messages. Okay, so we got a question from Missy. She said, I've been going through conversations with executives recently about their concerns that come up with reposting our content. However, when I ask them for insights on why messages do not align, they don't seem to know what their voice really is. Do either of you have any guidance on having these discussions so helping our execs find their voices?
38:11
Jordan Tennenbaum
Yeah, I can, I can, I can Answer this. And I'm sure Archana can provide much more. A 30,000 foot view. But if you are an executive, if you are a VP or a C level and you can't find your voice, you got to figure it out. It's just unacceptable to be that powerful and have that much weight to your opinion and to not share it. And if your executives are not doing that, if they're having trouble, you need to do it for them. Whether it's through an AI powered tool, whether it's through ghostwriting, whether it's through education, you need to prove to your executives why it matters and why they need to spend five minutes a week sharing their opinion on social media. If they refuse, it's okay. You can't force anyone to do anything on social media. It's their profile, it's their life. But I think if you have the ability to prove to them why finding their voice is so important, they would be silly not to seize that opportunity.
39:19
Alina Dallal
Thank you for sharing. If anybody also has more questions, feel free to pop it in the Q and A. Do you also want to respond to this one or we can move on to the next?
39:28
Archana Dhankar
I think I can just add a little more. I believe. Here's how I see it is sometimes people are scared, sometimes they don't have an opinion or they're busy. I would say you will always have some execs who will not post, right? Like if you have 50 execs in your organization, I don't think all 50 will get active or you need all 50 to be active. So you will always have some champions that will work. The ones who you still need focus on them. And that's where I think. I mean, three years down the line, I didn't have AI, so it was more of a hand, you know, understanding what they need and training them and coaching them. Maybe a little heavy lift today you have AI, so maybe train them on how to just put some thoughts in AI, give them some bullets. I think the challenge I've seen is with social media teams and we think we are like doing a lot of content. So let's give us like three templates to everybody and everybody will go and post that out. It doesn't happen because people want to have an opinion. They want to look unique. They don't want to post the same box standard content. So I'm speaking for also these staff that you're actually reaching out to say, I would actually loosely word it and say like here are the three bullets about this white paper. Here are three bullets about these webinar, like go and shape your own content. Give them that freedom. I think that's also very important.
40:42
Alina Dallal
Yeah, that's definitely useful. I just want to move on to the next question we've got from Emily. She said, do you have any advice for buy in when the goal is not lead generation? So we can't use that as a way to prove the value?
40:57
Jordan Tennenbaum
I do not.
40:59
Archana Dhankar
I'll take that one. That's fine. I think a lot of organizations are just doing pure brand building. Sometimes it's to also like drive hiring, you know, employee brand. So you still need a goal. Think about what that goal could look like. Yes, we want to build a broad brand, something that would last longer and we want to also look like a great employer. Those could be really good goals. It doesn't have to be lead all the time. And I think you are lucky if it's not lead.
41:29
Alina Dallal
Definitely. I think also it could be easier to prove. Attracting talent, for example, is an employee branding play as well. So thank you for answering that one. We've got another question from Casey. It says, I've been tasked with starting an executive advocacy program by a very high exec turnover. How can I build a social program with poor employee retention which she has no control over?
41:54
Jordan Tennenbaum
That's tough. That's really tough. Obviously you don't want to be spending a lot of time, you know, creating this program to have nobody adopt it and then having to reteach and re educate any new hires that are coming in. I would potentially speak to whoever asked you to create this problem. Sorry, this problem, this program, and mention what you see as problematic being the high executive turnover and ask them what they think you should do. I think as social media managers or heads of social media or social media practitioners, we always want to fix things ourselves and some things we can't fix. And sometimes it's okay to ask your boss what to do. And that way if you do what they say, get it in writing because you can't be blamed. You're doing what your boss said. You know, it's kind of the same thing. Like if someone comments something really inappropriate on a company post, the first thing I always do is I say to my boss, how would you like me to proceed? And I do exactly what my boss says. And that way if someone comes to me and says, what happened here? Why did this happen? I can show them this is what I was told to do. And I would strongly recommend speaking to whoever asked you to create this executive employee advocacy program and explain your challenges. And see what advice they have because they might say, hey, let's abandon that and focus on something more important. Or let's instead of executive advocacy, focus on employee advocacy. And that kind of gives you a powerful place to pivot and then achieve success.
43:33
Alina Dallal
Yeah, I think that's a great answer. We have another question here from Lucy. It's how do you differentiate the content that goes for your executives to the content that goes to the rest of your employees? So I think what she's hinting to is that she has an employee advocacy program, but she wants to make sure her executive stand out separately. But is it okay sometimes if they post the same thing? How have you guys approached it in the past? Or Jordan now?
43:55
Archana Dhankar
I think I'll take that one. That's an interesting one. So, yeah, I think with you want to give a lot of content, but I think also we are all very time poor. We talked about that earlier as well. So think about really the most important messages that your execs would like to post. Also, don't use their profiles. I believe I would use them for really meaningful messages and not just for like lead gen and webinars to be pushed out. So think about like really key brand messages that they can push out, but then also help them, you know, to say, like have a, have a tone of voice for yourself. Right. Like if you have a launch or if there's an industry trend going on, please post about that too. Because what we don't want that execs to do is just post about their organization. It looks more robotic at that point. And in social media, we all want our execs to have a personality that people can relate to because that's how you build relationships.
44:46
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. We have another question here from Meg. She said oftentimes advocacy programs start off with a bang. I think we all know this story. I know where this is going. With participation tampering off and engagement dropping significantly after some time. What are the most impactful ways to keep participants engaged without annoying them?
45:06
Jordan Tennenbaum
What I do is I rely on my executives. I craft them messages that they can send in public slack channels to encourage employee advocacy or executive advocacy and kind of help boost launches or releases or important news. And again, it goes back to, as a social media manager, you can't do everything on your own and you don't have a VP or a C level title. And so when you ask, in my case, almost 1500 employees to do something, a couple listen. And so you must form good relationships with your executives and make it really easy for them to relay their message to a wider audience. Because of their authority, people will listen. And so there's very frequently when we have a large launch, I'll create like 10 different versions of content about the launch. I will send it to my CMO or someone important within the organization and I'll say hey, can you post this in XYZ public channel? Here's the document with all the copy. Here's the little blurb that you can include to explain what's within the document and why it's important to post about it. And they do so because it takes them again two seconds to copy and paste into a different Slack channel. And once you have that rapport and that relationship with your executives, it makes it really easy to rely on their authority to ensure that your program isn't falling by the wayside.
46:28
Archana Dhankar
Yeah, I think that's a great strategy. I mean we can all use that, right? And we all have done that. I used to do that as well. So I agree with Jordan. But I'll say something different here just to add a different flavor. We've all done big launches, right? Like we'll, we have a new strategy. We are now launching employee advocacy. What we will forget as Jordan was talking about attrition, there are people leave, they're in different stages of life, they sometimes get busy. I think it's very important to also refresh and just show people what's happening in a wider forum again. So that would be like a six months update to the employee advocacy or exec advocacy. Have people come in, do some drop in office, office hours, gather feedback. But once you've gathered the feedback, go back and say based on that feedback what changes have been made? Because that's where people feel like they've actually impacted the program you've listened to. You would anyways be making those changes Most of the time we're all very logical people so gather that feedback. But when you re launch or you do a refresh you actually say based on this feedback, these are the changes we've made. That is such a powerful way to change, manage and drive attention. It really helps gain buy in.
47:37
Alina Dallal
Yeah. Thank you both for sharing that. I think they're very useful tips. We are getting flooded with questions so I'm going to move on to the next one. Zoe asked. She said my peers are very engaged when I write the content but I do not have the capacity to write every single advocate post. So how do you encourage people to write their own posts? And do you, how do you keep this in line with your own strategy and company pillars.
48:01
Archana Dhankar
I'll just quickly I know Jordan has done AI tools already, but based on whatever your organization AI toolkit today looks like, either the tools will have some capability that you're using to post to rephrase into AI, but at the same time, for example, when I had the ChatGPT enterprise within our organization, we would create default ChatGPT for everybody, like 7 to 10, 30, 50 execs. You can really quickly replicate that. That takes the weight out of you, right? You can actually say here's the content, use your GPT I can see, but it is really quick. At the same time, if you don't have that, you could still give them a prompt and you can create a prompt library. That prompt library is so powerful you can point people to say, like here are a couple of prompts to help you tailor content that you can use. So think about using AI to help elevate the burden, especially in these admin pieces.
48:59
Alina Dallal
Yeah, I think that's very useful. Jordan, if you don't, if you don't have an answer this one, there's another question we can jump to that I actually think you touched upon in the in our discussion already, someone asked, can you give an example of how you use how you would use executive advocacy for a new product launch campaign with a lead gen goal? So, for example, launch the first announcement from your CEO's LinkedIn page and then share it to your business page. Or is there any other ideas? I'm still at the stage where I have to GhostWrite all my LinkedIn posts for my executives.
49:30
Jordan Tennenbaum
It's tough. I think if you're a smaller company, having your CEO break the news is one of the smartest things you can do. I have spoken to many colleagues or friends who are leaders or CEOs of small companies and I always tell them like, don't pay that much attention to your company page. Work on your executive thought leadership when you are celebrating, when you are announcing. I think that is the most important thing that you can do once your company is larger and more established and has a larger presence on social media. I think in my opinion the best thing that you can do is launch from the company page. But at the same time, like let's pretend that's ground cover, have air cover via executive employee or excuse me, executive advocacy. So at the same time that a launch is coming from the company page or all executives should be posting, you know, at a similar time or throughout the day or throughout the week or whatever it is to keep the Buzz going. It is a pain because you're going to have to ghost write content for them or use AI tools to do so. But that kind of combination one, two punch of company content plus executive level thought leadership or advocacy, whichever you prefer to call it, in my opinion is probably the most powerful way to do so. It does take a lot of effort, not going to lie, but it is mission critical for a successful launch.
50:55
Alina Dallal
Yeah, okay, we did get another question. Sorry, I keep moving you guys around. From Ann Marie, what advice do you have to share on how to balance our internal goals for promoting our company's thought leadership versus promoting our thought leaders and their point of view? So I think what we're trying to get to is what is the balance of, of them being a thought leader on their own and their own perspectives versus the company goals.
51:21
Archana Dhankar
I had a formula which I gave. I think I've talked about this on my social media profile as well, but I'll just share here as we go. I've always said it should be somewhere between two is to 1, 2, 3, 1. So essentially every time you have a self promotional post, have three value sharing or two value sharing posts go out. So if you can like give that kind of a balance to your execs and say like that's the way we want to go because otherwise their profile will look like a self promotional page for the brand.
51:52
Alina Dallal
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. And I also think always that being a link going somewhere LinkedIn, you might want to prefer to also just have their own thought leadership and their own presence there. There was actually an interesting question that's come in from Tavis. Would you be brave enough to create a GPT agent that can write social media posts for the C suite, but that the C suite would use? So it wouldn't be us going in creating more for certain people writing things and checking it, but that your C suite would actually use it themselves and then free reign to post.
52:22
Jordan Tennenbaum
Yeah, yeah, that's what I did. That was exactly the, the application that I coded. I am not going to be creating content for our tons and tons of executives. One of the biggest things at talkdesk is self service that's on the product side and on the platform side. So nothing that I have anything to do with, but it's nice because I can throw that in my executive's face and say self service is really important at TalkDesk. And so rather than me writing content for all of you, here's a portal where you can drop in a link and have content generated within 30 seconds. That's 95% of the way there. And so, yes, if you're at a small company, I would maybe consider using AI to help you ghostwrite. If you are at a large company with lots of executives, you're going to have to find a way to automate, especially if you're a small team or a team of one like me. Again, the challenge comes with deploying and rolling out and adoption from the executive level leadership team. And the problem comes from I've been coding for two weeks and I don't know how perfect my tool is and how well it will hold up. I'm willing to battle test it. I want to battle test it, but I have slowly been rolling it out to various executives and they've liked it, but now it's how can they adopt it and be sure to utilize it going forward? So, to answer your question, yes, 1,000 million percent.
53:48
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Well, you heard it here first, Tavis. And he also sent a message back to you saying, music to my ears, Jordan. So I hope this gives you the bravery to go off and do it. We are almost we're running out of time. So if there are any questions that we didn't get around to answering, we will follow up with you. There is one last question, Arch. Now, I want to direct at you, if you don't mind. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but Devin asked, are there any recommendations on securing a Top voice badge on LinkedIn? And I think I remember you have one.
54:21
Archana Dhankar
Yeah, I mean, be consistent. And when I asked this off LinkedIn, they said your content needs to be of value to the audience. So think about, are you self promoting? Are you sharing content that really holds value for the people who are engaging with it?
54:38
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you for sharing. Thank you to both of you for joining me today. It has been amazing. I'm sure all of you understand why they are both B2B socials rising stars. They were nominated by you guys. So thank you both for joining me to anyone's questions we didn't get round to. We will reach out to you and make sure they're answered. So thank you so much. And thank you, Jordan Nakana, for joining me.
55:01
Archana Dhankar
Thank you.
55:02
Jordan Tennenbaum
Thank you for having us.
