B2B Social Media Strategy Discussion

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dave Gerhardt Show – B2B Social Media Strategy Discussion

Date: April 27, 2026
Host: Dave Gerhardt (Exit Five)
Guests: Brianna Doe (Verbatim), Jeff Meltz (Atlassian), Moderator Carmen (Slate)
Main Theme: In-depth discussion on modern B2B social media strategies—what works, what doesn’t, the realities of personal branding for marketers, measuring success, navigating community building, and advice for B2B practitioners.

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Episode Overview

This panel-style episode draws from a Social Social Club webinar hosted by Slate, featuring Dave Gerhardt (Exit Five), Brianna Doe (Verbatim founder), and Jeff Meltz (Head of Social at Atlassian). They candidly tackle the realities of B2B social: building a personal brand, overcoming skepticism, translating B2C learnings into B2B, nurturing online communities, and sparking executive participation in social. The tone is casual, humorous, and practical, with real-world anecdotes, tips, and tactical takeaways.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introductions and Icebreakers (03:25–06:59)

• Guests introduce themselves and share their "latest internet rabbit hole."
  • Brianna Doe: Exploring AI relationships and the future of digital connection.
  • Jeff Meltz: Geeking out on NASA’s moon missions, astronauts on TikTok.
  • Dave Gerhardt: Enjoying “real human content,” fitness memes, and observing generational shifts in social media trends.

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2. Personal Brand Building in B2B (07:18–22:01)

Early Adoption and Justification

• Brianna: Started on LinkedIn for networking and credibility, not lead generation. Faced skepticism from employers about her motivation ("Are you looking for a new job?"). Justified the time spent by highlighting valuable conversations and career growth.
  • "I was really looking to network... and not be so reliant on a resume." (09:32)
• Dave: Views personal brand as organic, an extension of sharing one’s interests online. Personal brands in B2B don’t require celebrity-level followings to drive impact.
  • "Nobody owns my social media presence. I own my social media presence." (10:52)
  • "If you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, you're basically like Mr. Beast in B2B." (07:45)

Dealing with Trolls, Skeptics, and Online Criticism

• Ignore the haters: The negativity is a small price for much bigger benefits.
  • "If the person that's trolling you isn't living the life that you want... just ignore them." —Brianna (16:23)
  • "You just have to choose to ignore it and not let it get to you." —Dave (13:53)
  • Jeff stresses that “social is the third space now”—where people naturally share what matters to them, inviting feedback (good and bad). (15:16)

For Marketers Who Don’t Want to “Build in Public”

• Internal vs. external visibility:
  • Jeff values making his work visible inside the company more than externally. (17:58)
  • Brianna broadens “building in public” to include community participation, not just posting.
  • "You don't need a quarter million followers—if it's the right five, go off." —Brianna (21:40)
• Dave: For specialized roles (like social media managers), public presence may be expected; for others, it’s optional. Posting work online can be the best “living resume.” (19:56)
• Separation between persona and reality: Not everything has to be shared, and you can play a character online that supports your business objectives.

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3. Brands vs. Communities: How to Build Both (22:01–27:45)

• True community is self-sustaining and peer-driven, not just an audience glued to a brand (22:53–23:46).
• Brand pages should exist as a resource, but the most value comes from elevating individual voices within the company (24:47).
  • "What we want as consumers today is to hear from the subject matter experts directly." —Dave (24:51)
• Dave on the business ROI: Senior stakeholders care about MQLs and pipeline, so social teams must make the value clear and tell a compelling story internally about “why” and “how” social works.

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4. Audience Questions & Tactical Advice (29:41–38:59)

Appealing Across Generations (Gen Z to Gen X)

• Research your real customer—don’t assume age stereotypes.
  • "Appealing to Gen Z is not just about memes; it's about understanding your audience, whatever the age." —Dave (31:12)
• "B2B buyers are not all 'olds'; many are Gen Z, and everyone is glued to their phones." —Jeff & Dave (30:01)

Getting Executives to Post (32:15)

• Show competitive examples to motivate leadership.
  • "Show them their competitors who are already doing it." —Brianna (32:22)
• Start small: Suggest 15 minutes/week; focus on expertise, not personal life (32:37).
• Don’t over-rely on ghostwriting: Today’s audiences see through generic posts. Tie executive content directly to platform goals and authentic voice (33:56).
• "There isn't a shortcut to social success—like abs, you gotta do the work." —Dave (36:12)

Moving from B2C to B2B Social

• Longer sales cycles need KPIs beyond immediate conversions. Set both primary (long-term) and secondary (short-term) metrics.
  • "Have your primary KPIs and your secondary. The secondary KPIs tell the short-term story." —Brianna (38:25)
• Trust matters more: Building and measuring audience trust is a cornerstone of B2B social (37:56).

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5. Modern LinkedIn Tactics & Shifting Strategies (39:38–41:20)

• Old tactics: Hook-first copywriting once ruled, but as followings grow, continued story and value matter more than having a “killer first line.” (39:38)
• Flood the ecosystem: Brand, founder, and employees should all tell their version of the narrative for greater share-of-voice (41:20).
• "Best results come from a unique POV—a news ticker approach for brands, but real voices from real people." —Dave & Jeff (24:47, 41:20)

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6. B2B vs. B2C: What Can Each Teach? (42:23–43:55)

• Misconceptions: B2B isn’t inherently boring—it's about relevance, timing, and message.
  • "Don't obsess too much over the difference between B2B and B2C. The route to 'yes' is just different." —Dave (42:28)
• Relationship-building: B2B social requires nurturing over months, not instant transactions (43:28).

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7. Rapid Fires: Favorite Accounts, Best Books, Top Tips (44:22–48:47)

Top LinkedIn Follows:

• Morgan Ingram (for human perspectives on AI, 44:46)
• Louise from Tela (video, YouTube, 44:51)
• Animola (Brianna, 44:57)
• Dave (per Jeff, humorously—“just for Christina,” 44:58)

Inspiration Not From News:

• Dave: Discovery via Reels and small creators—“I look for people who have one viral video but aren’t Insta-famous yet.” (45:21)
• Work/corporate humor accounts like Corporate Bro, Corporate Natalie.

Best Books:

• Harry Potter (Dave, 46:28)
• ACOTAR (A Court of Thorns and Roses, Brianna, 46:33)
• Twitter takeover exposé (Jeff, 46:41)
• Sapiens (Eric, founder, 47:03)

Breaking Into Personal Brand Building:

• Start with comments: Don’t put pressure to post immediately—engage in conversations and use these interactions to find your voice (47:28).
• Have a clear opinion: Know what good looks like, and be willing to say it (47:47).
• Don’t chase a ‘personal brand’—just talk about the real work you’re proud of. (48:25)

Notable Moments and Quotes

• "If you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, you're basically like Mr. Beast in B2B." —Dave (07:45)
• "If the person that's trolling you isn't paying your bills, ignore them." —Brianna (16:23)
• "You can have five followers, if they're the right five, that's success." —Brianna (21:40)
• "Don't try to build a personal brand. Do good work, and talk about it online." —Dave (48:25)
• "Social is the third space now—what else are you going to talk about?" —Jeff (15:16)

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Useful Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introductions & Icebreakers: 03:25–06:59
• Personal Brand & Skepticism: 07:18–22:01
• Community Building: 22:01–27:45
• Gen Z & Leadership Social: 29:41–36:39
• B2C → B2B Shifts: 36:39–38:59
• Modern LinkedIn Strategies: 39:38–41:20
• B2B vs. B2C Learning: 42:23–43:55
• Rapid Fire Round: 44:22–48:47
• Closing Banter: 48:56–51:05

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Takeaways for B2B Marketers

• You don’t need to be a superstar—quality, relevance, and connection trump follower counts.
• Internal advocacy and visibility are just as vital as what’s shared externally.
• True community goes beyond broadcasting; facilitate member-to-member interaction.
• Measurement and KPIs should fit B2B realities: think relationship-building, trust, and slow-burn pipeline value.
• Trolls happen—learn to ignore them and focus on your professional north star.
• Start by engaging and commenting—posting comes later, once you know your voice and audience.

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For more tactical advice and community support, the panel recommends Exit Five as the top private learning space for B2B marketers.

Transcript

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey, it's Dave.

[Dave]

I want to give a quick shout

[Dave Gerhardt]

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

[Dave]

So what happens?

[Dave Gerhardt]

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

[Dave]

I want to give a quick shout

[Dave Gerhardt]

out to Vector for sponsoring today's episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people. The ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. And it connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving Pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment.

[Dave]

Go and check them out.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It's Vector Co that's V E C T O R CO Vector.

[Christina Lee]

You're listening to the Dave Gerhard show.

[Dave]

234-12-1234. Hey.

[Christina Lee]

So I was on this webinar with

[Dave]

Slate and Christina Lee at slate, all

[Dave Gerhardt]

about B2B Social for their Social social club webinar.

[Dave]

And it was me, Briana Doe, Jeff Meltz, he runs social media at Atlassian, and the team at Slate. And it was such a good conversation about B2B social. All things organic, creating content on social on LinkedIn, personal page versus company page. How to ghostwrite and create content for your founders. Thoughts on video and social, how to think about this, how to measure it, how to build a strategy internally. And after it, I sent Christina a note. I was like, that was an awesome discussion. Can I have the audio for that? Because I want to run it as an episode of my podcast Because I know that people who listen to this show would get a ton of value from the conversation that I had with Jeff and Brianna. It was awesome. So we're going to run that here. Thanks to Christina and the team at Slate for giving us this recording. Enjoy this episode all about B2B social.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I'm Carmen. I'm the social and content lead here at Slate, and I'm going to bring on our guests, I would say, all at the same time, just so we feel like we have a nice full room. And then I would love if everyone could introduce themselves. I feel like in the past we used to intro people, but I think that it's actually better to introduce yourself because you can tell me the things you think are relevant to share about what you're up to these days. So name, let's say your role or what you're working on these days. And then my one icebreaker, lame question for you is, what's the most recent Internet rabbit hole that you have traveled down? Let's start with you, Brianna.

[Brianna Doe]

Oh, crap. Okay, so I'm Brianna, founder of Verbatim, or Influencer, marketing agency. And I host Stop the Scroll, which is a new newsletter and podcast where I explore Internet culture and decode virality. I would say the most recent rabbit hole, AI relationships.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah.

[Brianna Doe]

Why people dive into them, what hooks them, and what that means for the future of human connection.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah. One of my favorite podcast hosts was recently talking about AI psychosis, and that was quite a juicy topic. So. All right, I love that. Jeff, why don't you go next?

[Jeff Meltz]

Cool. Hey, Chat. I'm Jeff Meltz. I'm the head of social at Atlassian. Yeah, I had a newsletter that I don't really do anymore. So I can't talk about that. I don't have any kind of anything other than what I'm doing at Atlassian at this point. An Internet rabbit hole. I mean, look, we just did a fly around on the moon. So, like, I'm deeply obsessed with all the NASA stuff, as usual. Also that, like, the astronauts are also on TikTok doing dances with their kids. Like, just kind of obsessed with getting to know more about the folks who are hundreds of thousands of miles away

[Dave]

from all of this.

[Jeff Meltz]

So stoked to be here.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Totally. I think it's crazy to live at a time where social media and potentially landing on the moon again is coinciding the opportunities for content. Moon content. Through the roof. Out of this world, even. Dave, you're up.

[Dave]

Yeah, I'm just gonna. There's no chance that we went to the Moon in 1969. If you want to go there right now, we could take it there. Like, they spent $93 billion to just fly around it, but 60 years ago we went there. No way. So I'm in on that. That's been my whole week this week. The corner of the Internet that I'm in, though, is actually the opposite of AI. My wife would kill me if she saw that I was googling content about AI relationships. It would be a rap for me. So I'm not messing around. I'm not playing in that. Brianna. I'm actually really in on, like, real human content. I actually think the Instagram is kind of like, blowing up in my world. I'm a late 30s white male dad, so I'm like. It's all like, guys, like, running on treadmills and working out at four in the morning and, like, it's that life. And that's my content. Those are my people. I'm hanging hard there.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

And a lot of creatine content.

[Dave]

Oh, my God, so much creatine side. Creatine story. Creatine. Then I'll shut up. When I was 18 years old, my mom found my creatine and thought I was, like, doing steroids, and she threw it out. The culture has gone so far that my mom, now 68 years old, called me about a month ago, and she's like, what do you know about creatine? I saw it on the Today show that women my age should be taking it. So we've gone full circle, and I'm in the car right now, car seats behind me because I had to unexpectedly take someone to an appointment. But I got good service and I'm Happy to be here.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Great. Well, thanks everyone, for joining us. I'm going to dive into questions because I want to make good use of our time. I'm going to start with a kind of tricky one. It's for Dave. I want to know how you feel. Just with the knowledge that Brianna has at least 40% more LinkedIn followers than you. And is that something that keeps you up at night?

[Dave]

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

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I mean, I did rough math. I'm not. I'm a social media. I don't believe she had more than me.

[Dave]

Let me fact check you.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I just wanted to know.

[Dave]

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

[Brianna Doe]

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

[Dave]

Well, we're in the same chat.

[Jeff Meltz]

Get her to 250. Chat, get her to 250.

[Dave]

No, fuck that, get me to 200. What are you talking about? So, no, but look, she deserves it. She's put in a lot more effort than I. I just like, kind of promote my company and randomly post webinars and stuff. But I will say one of the coolest things that I think about with B2B Social is that those 250,000 followers, whether you take my 190,000, no big deal, or Brianna's 250, someone once said like, jokingly, but I think it's actually serious. Like, oh, if you have a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn, you're basically like Mr. Beast in B2B. And that was kind of a joke, but it's also serious. I'm sure Briana could speak to this running her agency in a business. But like, when you work in B2B, I think the thing that people miss with B2B Social, it's like, it's actually not about a ton of volume. It's not about crazy engagement. It's like you might get a handful of leads and those are six figure deals. Just the economics, it's so different. And so if you can crack B2B social, it's such a different opportunity than like, if you were trying to like sell another, like, you know, CBD, seltzer online, 100%.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I mean, I'm sure someone has done a more realistic, like linear equation, but I feel like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn is like a hundred thousand on Instagram. You know, like there's a comparison there, but. Okay, I want to talk a little bit, well, a lot, a bit about Personal brand building. And I have more than one question. So first of all, I think it's safe to say that you guys were building personal brands before that was a playbook and before that was seen as, you know, an obvious way to differentiate in a very competitive space. I'm curious how you went about justifying or let's say quantifying those efforts at a time where there might have been more pushback about its value. Thinking. Thinking go first. Yeah, go for it.

[Brianna Doe]

So for context, when I started creating content on LinkedIn, I was working in house. I didn't own my own agency. So I did get pushback from my managers around, like, even though I was posting before I even got to work that day, I was getting pushback about how much time I was spending on LinkedIn, was I looking for another job, stuff like that. But my goals were also different. Like, I think Dave made a great point, right? Like, you can drive six figure leads with 10,000 followers. I wasn't looking for leads at that time. So the way I justified it was more on the conversations I was having. I was really looking to network, really looking to connect with more marketers in the space and trying to figure out if there's a way for me to also kind of build credibility in my space and not be so reliant on a resume. And then it's, you know, it's shifted, obviously when I started verbatim, and now it's a lot more focused on leads, still on credibility, and also just like connecting not just with marketers, but with, you know, C Suite and things like that. But that's how I justified it at the beginning, was am I having really valuable, impactful conversations and how is that impacting my career trajectory?

[Dave]

Yeah, I think just like I've always been frustrated because I own that profile. Did I lose you all? I only see myself, Christina Lee, just backstage trying producer tricks or something.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, she's just doing jump cuts, that's all. Leonard Cook, she's doing her thing.

[Jeff Meltz]

Ready camera two. Ready, camera two.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Exactly.

[Dave]

I think I've always been like, nobody owns my social media presence. I own my social media presence. And so like this, there's no justification for it. Like, I can do what I want as a human. And you know what I think people have told me this is a very American thing. I am American, so I can't apologize for that. But like, we put a lot of stock into what we do for work. I go to meet someone, I get seated next to Briana at a dinner. Very first thing I'm going to say to Brianna is, oh, nice to meet you. Where do you live? Oh, what do you do for work? And I think with LinkedIn and B2B Social in particular, you kind of tapped into this whole world of people who, guess what? We spend a lot of damn time at work. A lot of us, we want to talk about what we do online. Because 99% of my friends at home in my little town in Vermont, my friend group, they don't care what I do for work. They don't want to talk about B2B marketing with me. But like Jeff does, Carmen does, Briana does, these are people that we meet online. And so I've never thought of it as like, I am out here building my personal brand. I'm like, you know what, I like marketing. I think I'm good at it. I like business, I like writing about this stuff online. And when you write about something online, whether you're a 40 year old suburban dad running on the treadmill, like I said, or you're a B2B marketing professional, when you write about that stuff online, you attract like minded people. And so for me, it was more like as I did these things, I got followers and I was like, oh, wow, there's something here. It was never like I set out to build a personal brand, but now when I post about a webinar, people go to it, right? When I post about something, people sign up for that. I get a bunch of likes and comments and engagement. But I also get DMs from people that actually would never have commented on my post. And so it's kind of like the triangulation of all that. And then as a result, today you have a personal brand. But I wasn't like, mom, I'm gonna go build myself a personal brand.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah. I mean, I think that it has become a playbook. But in the early days it was just like you say, like you could be enthusiastic about something and then you wanna share that with other people. I actually couldn't believe how much engagement there was on LinkedIn. When I first started posting, like two years ago is when I found out there was a thing called LinkedIn. And I was like, gosh, people engage so much on here. This isn't like Instagram where you really have to like where the comment threads feel so hard to revive. Okay, I want to play devil's advocate for a moment. Not because I don't understand why we like quote unquote, build in public, but because I think that people online love to skewer those who are caught trying, you know, those who are trying in public and clearly putting in effort. So what would you say to the kind of archetype of a troll who claims that perhaps personal brands are just, you know, self promotional fluff and it's a distraction from the actual work, Pretend I'm the troll.

[Dave]

I would do this to you.

[Brianna Doe]

Yeah, I don't know if I'd speak to you, but I do think, like it's easy to say that from the sidelines. I think people that have that perspective have never tried or put themselves out there, online or otherwise. And I think that mindset also stems from kind of what Dave was mentioning, your own personal brand. Like, I also never set out to build a personal brand. You're personal brand online should just be an extension of who you are in person. So what's the problem with me showing who I am online?

[Dave]

Right. I think also, like, if you look at 99% of the way my wife and I communicate with each other is by sending each other someone's Instagram story strictly to go look at the comments, you know, like that's what you do now. You send something, you go look at the instant right to the comments. This isn't just a personal brand. This is just a human look at from Taylor Swift to Bad Bunny to Amanda Batula and West on Bravo right now, like pick anything. People have an opinion. It's like you posting online gives someone else a right to like say whatever they want. And I literally just think that is attacked for playing this game and you just have to choose to like ignore it and not let it get to you. So I, I honestly, I've shifted over the years of this. I used to like reply back to everyone and just get in fights with people online. But I'm like, dude. And then what happened to me is I met a guy, my number one troll. I met him at a conference. This guy walked up to me like, oh, Dave, hey man, good to see you. Didn't say anything in the nonsense that he would say online. And I'm like, dude, that's just how people are. And so if you want the life and benefits and like funnel benefits, like, Brianna has 250,000 followers. That is a massive advantage for her in her business. There's going to be some pain in that. There are going to be people who don't like what she's doing. There are going to be people who are haters. But I just think it's just a small, a very tiny small percentage of the overall thing. And so I really My advice would be like, that's not the whole game. Please don't spend much time on that.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, fair.

[Jeff Meltz]

I would say also that, like, Social is the third space now. So, like, what else are you going to talk about? You're going to talk about your work, you're going to celebrate the things that you're working on, you're going to share some of the behind the scenes pluses and minuses of all the things that are happening in, you know, for your team, for your life, for your company, whatever it is. So it's perfectly natural that you have to find the venue to have those stories get told. And I feel like that's just the nature of what we're doing. Broadly across every category. Right. Whether it's B2B social, whether it's B2C social, whether it's social or something else. Giving people kind of a behind the scenes look at, like, what you really deeply care about is just kind of the nature of where we are.

[Dave]

Just like, go to Amazon, find a book everyone agrees is like one of the best books of all time, sort by stars. I guarantee you that book has one or two star reviews and people just hating on what they wrote totally.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

And I think that just like what you're saying, Jeff, like, Social is this third space where you share what you care about. And anytime you share what you care about, people can be like, oh, I don't care about that. So it's like, you know, when you say I care about something, it's also an invitation for somebody to tell you how much they don't care about what you care about.

[Brianna Doe]

Okay, I'm sorry. Well, I think I also built like my mental fortitude when I first started posting. Like, I. I also used to engage with everybody and I used to get really offended or hurt. But candidly, the people that are leaving feedback that isn't constructive on really people whose lives I'm trying to emulate anyway. So I think if the person that's trolling you isn't living the life that you want or building the career that you're interested in or paying your bills, I'd strongly recommend just ignoring them.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, totally. I made a video about taste and being chronically online. And the other day somebody said, oh, really rich Somebody with your hair and your accent talking about taste.

[Brianna Doe]

That's so weird.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I was like, wait, accent. Those trolls. Like, if you want to meet some nice trolls, go to TikTok. I can point you in their direction. Okay, final question that's sort of around this, like, personal branding. Moat, I want to ask your thoughts on marketers who don't want to build a personal brand, because I empathize with them and I'm somebody who works deeply in these spaces, in these algorithms. And I feel like sometimes there's nobody who deserves to log off more, more than marketers and people who work in social. But I think there's this unspoken rule now that to be good at your job, you have to be visibly good at your job. Like, it's not enough to just to do the work, you have to like, talk or show the work. And I'm just kind of curious what you think. Like, is this something that everyone needs to overcome? Do we all need to work visibly? Or is this kind of trepidation, like, warranted?

[Dave]

Can I jump in as somebody who

[Jeff Meltz]

doesn't have quarter of a million followers on LinkedIn?

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Let's hear it.

[Jeff Meltz]

Plus so yeah, my feeling generally, at least on again as internal at a company like doing social with a team, my build in public perspective is the internal resonance of the work that we're doing. So how that's coming about with leadership with folks that we're cross functionally collaborating with. I talk about making the invisible work more visible all the time, less so. Trying to figure out how to tell that story on LinkedIn or Instagram, for example. I think that that's just the nature of advocating for the work generally. But like, I don't build in public to the degree that I think some folks on the call who are speakers or in the chat are doing. There's no plus or minus to that approach. It depends on what your goals are and how you want to show up in the right ways. So I look at it from the perspective of advocating for the work that you're doing internally to get more of that work seen, loved, and like, funded. So I think it really depends on the internal versus externalizing of those stories.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Brianna Doe]

And I think we need to broaden our definition of building in public. Like, I would consider building in public to also include being active in a community like Exit 5, even if you never post on LinkedIn, I think it's also important to just network and connect with people. And social is a great way to do that. And I also think building in public can look differently. For example, I don't really talk about my agency online. I mean, if you want to look at case studies, you can go to the website. But I spend most of my time on LinkedIn talking about my values, the way I work, like, how I approach management and career building. Because I want people to. I want to connect with folks who feel the same way and also give people an opportunity to understand me and how I choose to show up offline. And so I don't think this pressure around posting everything that you're doing on LinkedIn is really warranted. I think it can look different, and it can just look like networking and connection.

[Dave]

And I think it depends on the role. Like, I've been a VP of marketing. I'm hiring people today. I think if you're a social media manager at a company, like, I would kind of expect you to, like, have something to show and be creating content online. If you're the product marketing person at a company, a content person, like any other type of role of marketer, like, no, I absolutely. I don't think there's a prerequisite to create stuff. My only pushback on that would say, like, companies lay you off, that, you know, we're all family, but they'll lay your ass off as soon as they hired you. And so my defense mechanism would be like, I want to share all the things that I'm doing at work online, not even to build my personal brand, but, like, there is no better resume available to you today than sharing your work online. And so that doesn't have to mean Jeff is posting a picture of him eating a sandwich, but if his company, like, ships something that he's proud of and he's posting that video and he's like, I want to shout out my team. Like, look at the video we made. I'm gonna hire Jeff one day. And I'm looking at that. And he's getting credit for that work. So there's a difference between, like, posting. There's a whole level of, like, you know, you see it now, right? LinkedIn has almost become Facebook in a way, or Instagram, where, like, I could post anything. People are posting, you know, engagement announcements, birth announcements, deaths on LinkedIn. You don't have to choose to do that. And in fact, if you actually know anything about Dave, in my personal life, I think that I play a character online that has helped me build my business where I'm like, I'm Dave who only cares about B2B marketing online, because that is the Persona, because it helps me with my business, and that's the character I'm choosing to play. So you can also take an approach like that. There are lots of things that I don't write about or share online, so I don't. I don't think you have to do that. I think you hear A lot of marketers talking to marketers in Exit 5 and in other places where everyone feels like, oh my God, everyone has LinkedIn followers. But I don't think that's the reality or necessary.

[Brianna Doe]

Well, and you also don't need a quarter million followers to be building in public successfully. That is not the definition of success. You can have 500 followers and be doing just fine. You can have five followers and if it's the right five, I mean, go off, I guess. And so I think also just letting go of those standards, I think people look at like how many followers I have and think that that means that I'm doing it better than somebody else and it really doesn't mean that.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, I like your point too, about how like I think there's this miscalculation or something where a lot of people think that being active online means self promotion. And it's like you're saying it doesn't have to be self promotion. It might just be talking about your values or it might be like, yeah, like I don't think it has to be like, oh look, I did such a good job. I think anyone who actually posts knows that. And I think that people who don't post don't always recognize that. Okay, so I have a theory that people who are good at building brands, be it personal or financial for a company, you know, they also have a knack for building community. And you know, there's a relationship between these things, brands and communities. Even though I think we toss around the word community and don't always mean it in the true sense of the word. So I want to know something concrete you would do differently if you were trying to build like a capital C community as opposed to just grow an account.

[Jeff Meltz]

I'll jump in on the brand side, I guess like capital C community to me is kind of self run. Like it's not at the direction of a brand or company, it is a space for that community. Again, not audience, because I agree, Carmen. It's like audience or community. It's its own entity entirely and it's self managed. I would say from a brand perspective, like you have business goals, you have objectives for your year. I think if you can think about community as a place where your buyers, your customers are learning from one another, they have a safe space to share, like what they're building in public, for example. That's community and it's self governed by the best case scenario.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Any more thoughts for me, Dave?

[Jeff Meltz]

What do you think, Brianna? I see faces on this chat.

[Dave]

I mean, I Think a community. Like, I get this question a lot because I run a community that is a paid community, that is a community. And it's like, should we build a community? And that is not what I think the definition of community is. You know, like, CrossFit is a community. People who work out, people who. Like Drake is a community. Right. And you share that stuff online. So I think it's like, what job are you trying to do as a brand? Like, does Slate? I think it would be in Slate's best interest as a company who wants to sell to social media managers and leaders to have a voice about the future of social media. And people follow them as a brand to learn what's going on in social. That is also community because you're like, connecting people who have this shared interest of social media. But Slate doesn't have to have a private community of social media managers. You know what I mean? I also think the other big thing that's changed, though, is like, I probably wouldn't spend a lot of my time focusing on the brand page. I would focus it on people within the company. I think you need to have the brand. And, you know, Jeff's probably the most relevant person on here. I mean, he's. This guy's been at Sony, at Square. Like, you've done it at really legit companies. So don't take what I'm saying from it. Even though I have more followers than you, that's because you're doing the real work behind the scenes. But, like, I think it's like a couple of voices. I think that what we want as consumers today is we want to hear from the subject matter experts directly. And so my play would be inside of a company, like in Slate's example, who are the people that have interesting things to say about the state of social and what's happening? And let's elevate those voices. And then, like, from a brand perspective, it's kind of like a news ticker. Like, the Slate page should exist. It should have recent updates, it should have information about the company. But I think either you need to give it like a quirky personality. Like, everyone wants to try to be like the Wendy's Twitter account, but that's just harder to do in B2B. And so I like people first, and the people are kind of all around rallying around a cause. It's more of a cause than a community. Right. It's like the cause is people who work in social media and elevating that as a discussion.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, I mean, I've Chatted with lots of people about community. Sophie Miller was on in January and she was saying that she felt like what a community was is when it stops just being like you are speaking to a group, but then the group is speaking to each other. And I think that that was like an interesting way to define it. I feel like there's like a sort of hot topic on lots of social platforms right now, which is that everyone. What is it? It's like everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. And it's this idea that like to make a real community, you don't just get to access resources. Like you also have to devote resources. And you know, those resources are often your time and they might involve being kind of like quote unquote inconvenience sort of thing. Like you have to kind of be there. And I feel like a lot of brands want to build a community, but they just want to abstract data.

[Dave]

Well, they want to build it so you can tell the management team that we have a community so eventually we can find out how to nurture those people. Because it's always the same thing. It's like, cool. Briana's got a big ass audience now. Okay, great. Well, how many MQLS has that generated for us? Yeah, my angle with marketing is like content social media, brand building. But I've also been in a seat as a VP of marketing where I've had to like justify. So I see both sides of this. I think the best thing, I see a bunch of this in the chat. Like I think the best thing you can do as a person in social media is, is to just assume that nobody knows how social media and the Internet works and take it as your job to explain to them like what good marketing looks like and show them lots of examples. I think too often we just get too defensive and we're like, measure. No, measurement doesn't work here. We instantly go to defense versus like, okay, hold on, let me tell you why we have a strong point of view on social for our company. And here's how this is going to work and here's why we're going to do this and here's how we're going to think about things and here's some examples of other people and other industries. And this is. And the result is because every time it works, all the measurement questions actually go out of the door. Because when it works, when social works, it's essentially just a brand channel becomes so obvious, people are showing up at your events, you're getting more inbound than

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

you ever did before.

[Dave]

You're getting more engagement. People are messaging your CEO, coming up on sales calls. Oh, I saw one of Slate's, you know, TikTok videos or whatever. But it all gets killed because we don't ever give it enough time to actually reach that point point. And so like it starts with having a discussion around like, and this is a hiring thing too. Let's have a strong point of view. Let's not just, we can't just post shit on social media anymore.

[Jeff Meltz]

That doesn't work.

[Dave]

This is not. When I first started, when I, you know, my first job was essentially that if you posted at all on social media, you got engagement. Now it's like, no, we got to have a real like unique point of view and a unique play here. And that is the role of social media. And that is why social media managers command high salaries. But you have to earn the right to then like explain that to the rest of the company.

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[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah. Christina Lee in our backstage, I'm curious if you want to pull up maybe or queue up a question from the audience. Cause I feel like there's tons and I haven't addressed any of these and I want to do some in real time.

[Dave]

Woo.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Okay, I'll read it out. I feel like there's a lot of talk of appealing to Gen Z and social media marketing, especially in B2C. How would you approach the opposite in B2B? A Gen Z marketer trying to appeal to millennials and Gen X while staying creative. I like this a lot. How do you appeal to people like me?

[Jeff Meltz]

I mean, should we talk about how. I think the stat I saw a few months ago is like 40ish percent of like, B2B buyers are actually Gen Z. So, like, there's a weird bifurcation happening between, like, I guess, thinking of a Gen Z audience as, like, not a decision maker and that not necessarily being 100% true, depending on what you're in B2B for. I think appealing to Gen Z maybe is just like being funny and quirky. And is it about tone of voice? Because I feel like that's also kind of a softball way of thinking about talking to Gen Z.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

No, but they're saying, how does a Gen Z social media manager appeal to the old.

[Dave]

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

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, well, also.

[Brianna Doe]

No, you'll just be curious if they've. Do they know this for sure? Like, I just, I can't tell from this question. If they know for sure, they should be marketing to millennials and Gen X. Or is it Gen Z or is it a mix? Because my answer is kind of boring. It's the same way you would appeal to Gen Z. It's like, have you talked to the customers? Are you doing research on social. I know it's not like the fun answer.

[Dave]

No, but you're right, you're right. Like, appealing to Gen Z is not just like making online content. There's a certain type of, oh, this is a meme that Gen Z folks would find funny. This is a style of video. Right. But like, some of the most addicted people to their phones in my life that I observed are people that are my parents age, like late 60s, 70s. So I think that, like, that is not true anymore. That it's only like, no, my customers are not. Look around, everyone I see. I was just sitting in the doctor's office. Everyone in the waiting room from young to old is glued to their phone like this. So the issue is not that your audience is not. Not online. It's like, how do we speak to them in a way that appeals to them? And so if you have a hypothesis to Brianna's point, like, if you think your audience is skews older, then this is like, let's do the demographic on them and we're going to Make a meme. We're going to make a joke. We're going to use comedy or music or whatever that relates to them, not to someone who's relevant now to Gen Z. It's like, this is what I love about marketing. It's like if you peel it all the way back, it's the same question, how do I understand my customer and how do I reach them where they are?

[Jeff Meltz]

What do they care about most? You know, whoever they are.

[Brianna Doe]

Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

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

[Brianna Doe]

If they're reluctant, maybe I would say show them their competitors that are already doing it. That's my first go to. Yeah, that's what I would add.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I like that. I feel like C Suite always has like an arch nemesis.

[Jeff Meltz]

Well, but it's also like investment of time versus return on that. It's a return on investment. Like start with 15 minutes a week of like investing your time in whatever part of the process is right. Like reading news in the industry and being able to respond to them or how to find your opinion on where the business is going. It's carving out time but proving that it's a valuable use of that time.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, I mean, I've worked in B2B for a few years now and certainly this is like a kind of hot topic that comes up because I think social media managers see the value and it can be hard to get that value communicated higher up. But I feel like that's also a structural thing too. It's like part of who's supposed to advocate for you is your manager or their manager. And again, maybe that's a boring answer, but it's like that's their job, you know. So I think that if you report to like a head of content or even like head of marketing, I think like you make the case to them, they get how marketing works and then it's their job to then like this idea that like a social media manager is like knocking on the CEO's door and it's like, please ma', am, would you do 15 minutes of. You know, it's like they're going to obviously be like, what the hell's going on? But it's like, yeah, like I think that's when you have to kind of lean on this system a little bit and say like, hey manager, here's what I need from you. Knowing that, you know, you have buy in to my skills and value.

[Dave]

I think it's also a different game Now, I think that play of, like, I'm just going to GhostWrite for you 15 minutes a week and we're going to post for you. I don't think that works anymore. That's just so easy. Especially now with, like, man, I could just create a project in Claude and I can create a voice and I could just ghostwrite and post a bunch of crap for any CEO right now. Yeah, I think the way to actually stand out is to really understand. I think the great people that do this is they have a platform first approach. And so they're not just like, I want to get my CEO to post. It's like, nope, I have a strong point of view that, like, just as an example, we're in B2B, our customers are on LinkedIn. We're not going to be on TikTok right now. We're not going to be On YouTube right now. We're not going to be having a podcast right now. The only thing we're going to do is we're going to focus on text content from our CEO on LinkedIn. Like, hell, yeah, that sounds like a better place to start for me. And then you actually have to be there. You have to, have to, like, read the comments and engage and reply. And so much of the magic of social media is because of what's happening in the comments. And so much of the success of social media is not just how many leads and clicks and comments, but, like, I use it all the time to test messages. I know I've always used it as a product marketing stamp. I know what message is going to land in our product launch. Because, like, I've kind of already said that bit on LinkedIn and I got a bunch of comments on there. And so I would start by first showing the, like, here's why we want to do this and here's what success looks like. I never want to get in the treadmill of just like, we're just going to get you to post, we're going to get you to post, and if we get you to post seven days a week, this is going to happen. Because it's like, no, no, let's really present to them, like, what are we going to get from this if we're successful here? What does this mean? How are we going to measure it? What types of content is going to work? Like, really elevating to that level? And then also, I hate to comment about, like, this is hard and it takes time. Well, no kidding, right? It's like back to Briana, like, her having 250,000 followers is an absolute incredible advantage for her company, for her brand, for whatever she wants to do in her future. It's like if you want to get this secret advantage, this like level up, then you got to put in the work. It's like we always want the six minute abs, we want the GLP one, whatever it is. There isn't that for this and so you can get these outsized rewards from it. But are you going to be willing to like, yeah, it actually does take work. I just hate that we never, for some reason it's always marketing across the company. In any other area it's like, well yeah, it's work but in marketing it's like I don't have time to spend on posting on social media. It was like, wait, hold on. But look what you can get from it.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah. Interesting to see that it's like. Or your point about it being like a marketing specific problem.

[Brianna Doe]

Well, and I think Jeff made a good point too. Like you can just pull your CEO's perspective and use that for content somebody posted in the chat. That was interesting. Like a lot of CEOs in C suite do want to stay offline and they want to stay private. You can decrease that fear by letting them know they don't have to post about their families all the time or what they're doing for vacation. Like centered around their expertise. And remove that blocker too.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, totally. Okay, Christina queued up another one here for us. What's your advice to social folks who shift from B2C to B2B, particularly in an industry with multi years long sales cycle? Okay, so long sales cycles, how do you break out of the focus on traditional B2C goals, metrics, et cetera?

[Brianna Doe]

I'm the worst at these questions because I always have like 15 follow up. Like I just, I love your context. Like is it the focus? Are they struggling to work out of the focus? Is their team that's struggling break out of the focus? Because I mean with longer sales cycles, I mean a B2B you should be defining success and your KPIs internally with your team before you launch any sort of campaign on social and influence, marketing, et cetera. I feel like fundamentally that's how you break out of the focus.

[Dave]

Yeah, it's like what's their goal? I think a lot of B2B founders, I think it's maybe instead of like trying to go viral or impressions or whatever the baby know consumer folks care about, it might just be as simple as like what's a simple goal? Do we need to. We need more people to know that we exist. Right. Like we want to grow to 10,000 followers on this person's account. Like, I think it needs to start with some type of North Star.

[Brianna Doe]

Yeah, I mean, maybe it's.

[Jeff Meltz]

Sorry, Carmen. Maybe it's also just. I mean, Barona's question also like follow ups. I mean, it's also like the separation of purpose for social between B2B and B2C. Right? Like B2B.

[Dave]

Yes.

[Jeff Meltz]

It's a longer game, which means trust is involved more than anything else. But in B2C and B2B, you still need that attention to then build the trust. So it's not too dissimilar, but it is based. I would think about it from the perspective of really having clarity on the purpose of what you're trying to do in social for the differentiated audience. Start there. You'll have a goal, you'll have metrics attached to them, but the purpose for why you're there is what's defining it.

[Brianna Doe]

And I always tell our clients too, this is very influencer specific, but I'm sure there's overlap in other facets too. Have your primary KPIs and your secondary. And the secondary KPIs are what are telling the story in the short term. Right. Like, we didn't see 200 conversions from this one post, for example, but like this percentage of the viewer demographics matched our icp.

[Dave]

Yeah, that's a good one. It's like not about that one instant metric. It's more like, are the right people seeing our stuff over time? You know, that's a good one totally.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

And I think there's a lot of like, redefining of metrics that you have to do in marketing, regardless of whether or not you're in B2C or B2B. I want to get LinkedIn specific for a second here. And you can answer this from the perspective of like a company account or a personal account. But I think, like, clearly a lot has changed in the last five years on this platform. Like, it's a totally different place than it was right after the pandemic. I'd love to know from each of you what's something that worked, say, like back then and again, this can be like company or personal account, maybe something that used to work that you sort of had to let go of and then something you're doing now that just like you never could have gotten away with in the early days of LinkedIn.

[Brianna Doe]

This is a spicy take. I think the hook matters a little less now. Like, I used to spend a lot of time on that first sentence, like making sure it was just the coolest hook. Like, everybody want to read the rest? Now I can just kind of get into what I want to talk about or what I'm thinking about. It doesn't have to be this role stopper necessarily. I think it's a matter of the post as a whole. Is it going to continue to engage people throughout it? What story are you telling and what value are they leaving or what value are they gaining after they leave that post?

[Dave]

Maybe that's because you have a quarter million followers now, dude, As I said

[Brianna Doe]

it, I was like, I don't know if this is.

[Jeff Meltz]

It needs to be a. There's a gotta be a swear jar. For how many times we've mentioned Brianna's followers.

[Dave]

There's gotta be. I'm doing it on purpose. It's a bit. This is a bit I'm trying to find.

[Jeff Meltz]

No, I love it. I love it. I mean, Carmen, I think, like, I look at LinkedIn, obviously, like, I think we all do as an ecosystem, right? Like, I mean, Slate, I'll give you guys, you know, your shine too. Like right now, like, you have to kind of flood the feed and flood the zone to be unmissable. That hasn't changed necessarily over the years, but the intention to do that from an employee, from a founder, from a brand page, it's increasingly more important to just have everything in any kind of context, to meet all those different buyers, decision makers, people who can consume that story and have those ways to do that. So somebody in product is telling the same story from a contextual perspective, from their context. The founder is doing the same thing, brand is doing it in a different way. It's the same end goal or whatever the sort of topic is, but the story is the most important thing to sort of build sort of that ecosystem approach.

[Brianna Doe]

Yeah.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Okay, I have one sort of final question on my list and then I've got a couple rapid fires. This one I wanted to touch on. And like, truthfully, the more we talk, the more I feel like maybe it's kind of an irrelevant question. I used to work in B2C. I work in B2B now. And if I had to ask myself honestly what the big differences are between these two zones, like, I don't feel them so acutely. Like, the work that I do in social is largely just about thinking, like, what's the message that resonates with the right audience? And like, how can we get in front of the most amount of eyeballs that are the relevant eyeballs. So in my mind, there isn't like this binary system where there's like, B2C over here and B2B over here. But I do think that there are misconceptions about B2B, that it's, like, stuffy and boring and whatever. And all these things that I just don't think are true in 2026 and haven't been true for a long time. But if we're kind of like relying on these or if we're acknowledging these misconceptions, what do you think that the B2B world in 2026 can teach B2C? What are the big lessons that we could kind of lay down?

[Dave]

Do we need to teach them?

[Brianna Doe]

Like, I don't know, perhaps?

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

No. Perhaps. No.

[Dave]

I think that, look, I've spent a lot of time, my kids now say, blah, blah, blah, B2B marketing, what the heck do you do? Like, they have no idea. And I've been on this story for a bit. I think that it's not worth obsessing too much over the difference between B2B and B2C. I think it's more like the thing you sell might be different. Right? Like, I might be sitting on my couch on my phone watching a show. I see this hoodie and I buy it. That's the difference between, like, I don't know, am I going to sign up for Slate? Like, the Slate pitch was good, even though none of you voted on the poll. Like the Slate pitch. That's cool. It doesn't translate into, like, people might not necessarily buy Slate tomorrow, but they might six months from now. After hearing wow, I first went to the webinar. Then I saw Christina Lee speak at this event. Then I met the founder. I started following him on LinkedIn. So I think just like the way you get from point A to B is different. And I think just knowing that kind of changes then, like, the roadmap that you might take to go there. This shameless. I have some feedback, by the way, on that whole. I do this for a living. I'm happy to give you advice and feedback on how to do the pitch in the beginning. I'll send you my notes after. Christina Lee, I've been waiting for an opportunity to professionally give you some tight feedback after. So I got you.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Sorry, why me?

[Dave]

I mean, you putting. You're putting on this webinar, right? Having. I'll have ownership. It's either you or the founder guy. We gotta. We'll get it, we'll fix it. We Gotta tighten up the ad. It was like, is it an ad or not? Like own it. Like, make it a thing.

[Brianna Doe]

I think we're gonna remove it from this stream right now.

[Dave]

I've done, I've done more for Slate using Slate in the examples in the last 30 minutes, this webinar than your ad did. That's a fact.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

That's actually pretty good.

[Jeff Meltz]

Yeah, I'll take 360 feedback. Coming in hot.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

No, I love this. Okay, I have a rapid fire final round. Let's get into it. Okay. Favorite follow on LinkedIn this week lately.

[Brianna Doe]

Like, you followed them this week?

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

No, just like right now in your LinkedIn land. Who's your favorite follow?

[Jeff Meltz]

Brianna Doe.

[Brianna Doe]

Yeah, Brianna.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Dave's like, please, somebody say me.

[Dave]

How would someone remember that, you know, you follow them actually say. Even though I don't think that.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Who's your favorite person? Who's your favorite person on LinkedIn?

[Brianna Doe]

I'd say Morgan Ingram. He's been talking about like bringing the human back into AI and I really like it.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I like Louise from Tela. She's been doing really good videos that are. She's putting up on YouTube and I'm into it.

[Brianna Doe]

Animola.

[Jeff Meltz]

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

[Dave]

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

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Okay, don't. Yeah, help Dave out with the followers. The next one is good source of creative inspo Media. Inspo, but not news. What's something you're checking every day or like an account you like? Not news.

[Brianna Doe]

I don't even.

[Dave]

I think discovery. Look, I, I talked to this guy yesterday and he does marketing at ClickUp and they've hired like funny actors and stuff to do all their social at ClickUp. And he was like, you know how we found them? There's no agency that helped us find them. He's like, we found them because this is my job and I obsess over this. And so this was really genius. He's like, I like to find people that have like 3,000 to 7,000 followers on Instagram and they, if you sort by reels and they maybe have like one video that popped off, but they're not like famous. And so you could hire them to create for you for, you know, a couple hundred bucks, like, or whatever the hourly rate is. I was like, that's genius. And so for me, it's not necessarily my way of saying this is like, it's not necessarily a person. I think it's just the same thing that I Like about marketing. It's just about like, I take examples from everywhere. Looking at the for you feed me. Like, huh, interesting. This type of video is kind of popping off right now. Like, people doing this. Yeah. I'm in a boring B2B industry. But like, what's our version of that and how can we apply that? I'm never. It's never like person first. I like work humor, though. So like corporate, bro. Corporate Natalie gets me in a way. I like that.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Okay. Best book you read recently?

[Dave]

I read the first Harry Potter. It was great.

[Brianna Doe]

Can I say Acotar? Can we talk about that here?

[Jeff Meltz]

Who?

[Brianna Doe]

I just read that Acotar. A court of.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I know that I haven't read it, but it's. It shows up on my Tik Tok a lot.

[Brianna Doe]

It was really cool.

[Jeff Meltz]

Okay, Jeff, I'm reading the Elon taking over Twitter behind the scenes story. I forget what the title is.

[Dave]

Hmm, which one? The Walter Isaacson book?

[Jeff Meltz]

No, the other one. The one written by the two journalists.

[Dave]

I forget the title.

[Jeff Meltz]

Yeah, no, I'll have to. It's just literally, it's on my Kindle.

[Eric (Backstage)]

I'm well read.

[Dave]

My bad.

[Jeff Meltz]

Yeah, no, it's an interesting story.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Eric's backstage, but he'll probably want me to say that he read Sapiens recently. So founder guy Eric loves Sapiens. I'll just put that little plug in there for him.

[Jeff Meltz]

Our guy Eric. There's your next character in content.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Okay, and then last one, top tip for people looking to break into the wild world of personal brand building. Being a person who shows up online. Start with the comments.

[Brianna Doe]

If you're struggling to figure out like, what your point of view is or how you want to show up, take a look at what posts are interesting you interesting to you? Like, what do you want to engage with? What's it sparking for you? Don't put pressure on yourself to start posting immediately. Just start engaging in the comment sections and like shaping your voice there.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Nice.

[Jeff Meltz]

Yeah, I think having an opinion, being opinionated about what good is, what good isn't, what your sort of place in it should be is the most important thing.

[Dave]

Commenting is a great one to tie it all back together. Like to the founder CEO who doesn't want to do the work. I get some of my best post ideas from commenting on other people's stuff because it's essentially a prompt. Like, I don't have anything to post today. I'm just going to sip my coffee and go through the feed and just like write kind of like ratchet stuff on Christina Lee's content or whatever. But I actually did. But I hijacked her post because I wrote about how I farted in a meeting. I saw that most viral.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

The most mortifying thing to give you

[Dave]

a serious answer though, like, don't try to build a personal brand. I think the best thing you can do is like do good work, whatever type of creator. Like, it should come from the work and it should come from your results and the cool shit that you've done at work and then talk about those things online that will lead you to where that place. As opposed to like, I'm going to set out to build a personal brand and here's my hot takes, you know.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think if you're starting with hot takes, you got some hot problems. Hi, Eric. Did you want to talk about Sapiens?

[Dave]

Whoa, Christina, you can't just put me

[Eric (Backstage)]

on camera without a heads up.

[Dave]

My resting bitch face. Like that's a Venti quad at work right there.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

I just felt like you needed that moment, you know, of sunshine. So there you go. There's your spotlight. Thank you.

[Dave]

Thank you.

[Eric (Backstage)]

We will talk about the next webinar before we hop off. I'll post the link here. So our next webinar is going to be in two weeks. It's going to be our content power hour where we bring on a Slate customer and they're going to walk us through basically their workflows within Slate, but also just in general of how they create content as a team. The last one we did was with Sierra Nevada Social Team and the time before that we had the Detroit Pistons. This next upcoming one is a special guest that I can't tell you yet because it actually hasn't confirmed yet. So we don't have a guest yet, but we will. We will have a guest by the time this webinar happens talking to some mov teams, maybe a big entertainment company. So it will be a brand you've heard of and yeah. Sign up now for our next webinar and I'm going off stage.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Amazing. Christina, are you going to put up that little. I forget what it's called. Yes, the little cta. I don't he little linky dink stage. Like what the heck. Okay, well, nice. Well, thank you so much everybody for chatting with me about B2B. B2C. What is bees. You know, all the bees. What? We appreciate it. Okay. Christina and Eric, I think are just waging warfare on each other in the backstage, but appreciate everyone coming out, taking a little bit of time out of your day. Appreciate Dave, Jeff, Brianna, thank you so much for your answers and your oh, not hot takes. Just like completely genuine takes. I appreciate it. It's nice to talk about this sort of stuff.

[Brianna Doe]

This was great. This was my favorite webinar of all time.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Mostly because of Dave's admiration of your followers.

[Dave]

Let the record say that you both. You not both. Brianna's not responsible. You ended on that note, not me.

[Moderator (possibly Dave Gerhardt or another host)]

Yeah, that was my making. I'll take full responsibility. All right, bye for now. Bye.

[Christina Lee]

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5, and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers.

[Compound Growth Marketing Representative]

Building your own network of marketers who

[Christina Lee]

are doing the same thing you are

[Dave Gerhardt]

so you can have a peer group

[Christina Lee]

or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.