Melissa Rosenthal is the co-founder of Outlever, where she’s Editor-in-Chief of its two publications: State of Brand and State of AI. Before Outlever, she was Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, EVP of Creative Strategy at Cheddar, and Global VP of Creative at BuzzFeed.

In the 3 months since she launched State of Brand, they’ve hit roughly 1.5M monthly readers, and her own Linkedin went from 100k impressions per month to 4 million per week at the peak.

In this episode, we talk about how she’s building her own newsroom, publishing 3-5 news stories every day, leveraging it to go consistently viral on Linkedin, her “media listening machine” behind every story, where AI fits into her workflow, and more.

We discuss:

- The complete behind-the-scenes of how she runs her two newsrooms for State of Brand & State of AI, to publish 5-6 news stories every single day

- How it took Melissa’s Linkedin from 100k impressions/month to 4 million/WEEK

- How to write viral B2B stories

- Why she posts at 7pm and thinks “everything people say about how LinkedIn works is a lie”

- Her media listening machine that surfaces news stories with viral potential in real-time

- Where AI / Claude fits into all of this

- The three legs of the stool of her media machine: news, interviews, and internal thought leadership

- Why you should never aim to build a media company

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Connect with Melissa:

Melissa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissarosenthal5/

State of Brand: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/

State of AI: https://www.thestateofai.com/

Outlever: https://outlever.com/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

Hope you enjoy!!

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