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How Senior Leaders Can Embrace Social Media
48 Plays4 years ago
Social media a perilous territory, which explains why many senior business leaders happily avoid it.
But Jay Palter, a social media strategic and personal brand expert, contends senior leaders can successfully leverage social media by delivering insight and value while avoiding the pitfalls.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Jay offers pragmatic advice on how senior leaders should use social networks like LinkedIn and how success can be defined.
For more details about Jay and the podcast, check out the show notes.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are 15 minutes or less.
Meet Jay Poulter: B2B Social Media Strategist
00:00:20
Speaker
Today, I'm talking with Jay Poulter, a social media strategist and personal brand expert. Jay works with B2B companies in the finance and technology sectors.
Has Social Media Replaced Networking Due to COVID?
00:00:29
Speaker
Let's start off with a question just in terms of the social media landscape pre-COVID
00:00:34
Speaker
and what happened has happened since because you know the reality is we're not socializing the way we used to going to conferences and meetups and actually going to visit prospects and customers so has social media become a lot more social
00:00:50
Speaker
Yes, I'm really an advocate that social networks are in fact social networks first and not really marketing channels in their primary instance. So I believe in the absence of in-person meetings, we really have social networking. We have video conferencing and phone calls, of course, we always have. But social networks and social media platforms are more important than they ever have been.
LinkedIn: The New Conference Room
00:01:14
Speaker
today because we have to stay in touch with people, we have to nurture and build our networks and we have to build what I call social capital, which is really a positive outcome from those social interactions. What I'm wondering about is whether you've noticed a discernible difference in how people are
00:01:30
Speaker
using social or trying to use social because, you know, a lot of people are, some people are really into it. They're social media animals and others are, they come and they go. Some people ignore social media, but overall has, have you noticed a change in behavior?
00:01:46
Speaker
My experience has been in the last several months that there's much more focus on LinkedIn than ever before at a professional level, that people are desperate to meet others, engage, do all the things you do when you attend a conference, for instance, or you go to an in-person meeting.
How to Stand Out on LinkedIn?
00:02:05
Speaker
You share ideas, you learn, and
00:02:09
Speaker
I've seen a lot more people engaged in those platforms. There's a lot more conversation happening in LinkedIn between people. There's people writing articles. There's way more content that way, just people having a need to express themselves. I certainly see business networking, which I think is a really important part of social media and often overlooked in a corporate setting. I think that kind of behavior is really turned up. And I don't think it's going to stop, I think, even though
00:02:38
Speaker
The COVID pandemic is going to play itself out over a longer period of time and there's going to be some opening up. I do think there's going to be an ongoing need to maintain our relationships through digital virtual social networks. I noticed the same thing on LinkedIn. Microsoft made a very savvy investment when they bought LinkedIn.
00:02:56
Speaker
I'm curious about your thoughts on the amount of content that is being published on LinkedIn. Everybody seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. Some of it is very good. Some of it is good. And some of it, you wonder whether people are just going through the motions.
The Power of Relationship-Building on Social Media
00:03:11
Speaker
One of the things I wonder about from your perspective is how do you break through the noise on LinkedIn? And should people be worried about breaking through the noise when perhaps the value of LinkedIn is the networks that you can develop and the engagement you can have with other people?
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, but it's true that social networks do get, they get crowded, they get noisy. There's lots of people competing for attention and I mean, everybody still wants some attention for themselves and whatever services they might be offering to the world. My feeling has been for a long time that if you want to get people's attention, then you give people attention.
00:03:47
Speaker
You know, for a corporate brand to do that, it can be kind of challenging and a little bit awkward to pay attention to people too much. When you're an individual, maybe representing a brand or working for an organization, that's a different activity. People are much more receptive to somebody who's paying attention to them and perhaps sharing their content or commenting on their content, which helps their content get visibility. I mean, that's actually one of the most effective ways to get people to pay attention to you is just pay it forward.
00:04:15
Speaker
And my experience has been a hugely powerful tool for getting people to pay attention and cut through the noise. My expression in social networking is always be opening and not always be closing. So even if you're trying to sell something in social networks, you're doing B2B social selling of some kind, you really don't benefit by trying to get people to buy things directly in
COVID's Impact on Business Content Strategy
00:04:38
Speaker
social networks. You get a lot more benefit by building an audience, opening up new relationships,
00:04:43
Speaker
and giving people a chance to get to know you better because when they're ready to buy, they'll do their homework and they'll show up at your doorstep ready to talk to you quite seriously and that's when you have a conversation about selling something.
00:04:55
Speaker
Now you spend a lot of time working with business leaders and helping them take advantage of social media. How do you think businesses have changed their approach to social media and social media marketing due to COVID? Have you noticed a change in their, is it thought leadership? Are they trying to sell more? Are they trying to drive more connections? Have you noticed sort of discernible differences?
00:05:18
Speaker
I think in general, there's been stepping back a little bit from the selling and the marketing. Certainly in the first several weeks of the COVID crisis, people were isolated, they were locked down at home or self-quarantined.
Leveraging Personal Networks for Business Goals
00:05:33
Speaker
It was just not an environment. People were distracted. It was not a great environment to be trying to get people's attention to sell them things. And so a lot of brands, I think, migrated in the direction of generally inspiring people, trying to keep people's spirits up and inspire hopefulness and good thoughts. And that's transitioned a little bit more as people recognize they have to get back to the business that they're in.
00:05:58
Speaker
As we've talked about, I feel that there's real opportunities for business leaders, for people who are involved in businesses, for the people that are involved in those organizations to step forward and get more active in mobilizing their own social networks. We all have them, and they're often parked on the sidelines and left
00:06:21
Speaker
for individuals to pursue if they want to or not, but I think the smarter leading corporations are looking at their human capital, their human, you know, the people working in the organization and the relationships they have and trying to figure out how to mobilize those relationships in support of the organization. Yeah, I'm really interested in business leaders taking a more active role in social media
00:06:46
Speaker
Because, you know, by and large, you see a lot of a lot of employees very active on social media because they've got their own agendas. They want to looking to raise their profiles. Maybe they're trying to change jobs. But for business leaders, I mean,
00:07:01
Speaker
A platform like LinkedIn is a great place to display thought leadership, but they also have to be very careful because there are pros and there are cons. You can do some wonderful things on social media, you can also get yourself in trouble. How do you work with business leaders to make sure that they're taking advantage of social media in the right ways and that they approach it properly so it's a win-win proposition.
Social Media Engagement: Challenges for Leaders
00:07:24
Speaker
So it helps them, it helps their companies, it helps their employees and customers.
00:07:29
Speaker
I think the first answer to that question is the bigger the organization, the harder it is for a leader to step forward and be effective in social networks. I just think the reality is there's more at stake. There's more people in the organization who are involved in managing the brand. There are potentially greater risks of doing so. And even with the best intentions, it can be very, very difficult. So having said that, I do think that that's a small number of
00:07:56
Speaker
organizations that are out there, businesses that are out there. I think smaller and medium-sized businesses have much more opportunity to really have leaders embrace social networking in a strategic and a complementary way to the brand messaging and the brand work that's going on in the organization.
Opportunities for Small Business Leaders on Social Media
00:08:13
Speaker
Having said that there there still are risks and you know i think it's really important to be mindful of the brands and the brand messaging to be complimentary to that messaging and i would argue in fact to be social i think.
00:08:29
Speaker
I think a lot of businesses could benefit by emphasizing the strong personality characteristics or leadership aspects of the leaders. That there are issues that are not directly related to the business you're in, but are related to maybe the role you play or a commitment to a social cause or a social issue or a charitable issue that's authentically close to your heart. That's where there's real opportunity, I think, for leaders to step forward and compliment their brand
Building a CEO's Social Media Presence
00:08:59
Speaker
the brands of messaging. So I'm the CEO of a fairly high profile brand. I've noticed the work that you've done with other senior leaders. And I say to myself, I want to be more active on social media. I want to have a better presence on LinkedIn. So I call you up. We agree to work together. Where do we start? Walk me through the process from not having much of a social media presence to having a solid social media presence.
00:09:29
Speaker
The first thing to do, I think, is to be strategic about the people you want to reach out to. On some level, we're going to engage an audience and social media in general, but there are specific high-value individuals. They may be customers in your current business. They may be prospects you have your eyes on. They may be influencers.
00:09:49
Speaker
in the ecosystem in which you're doing business, those folks become very strategically valuable. So I would start by saying, let's determine who's strategically important to us that we want to pay attention to. And then we do some basic, not dissimilar to brand profiling. We do some basic personal brand profiling, trying to understand what are those issues that the leader is passionate about and make sure that those are consistent and aligned with the brand messaging.
00:10:16
Speaker
And then we start to engage and that's why I'm trying to identify some strategically important folks because the way you're going to get attention from anybody in your network is paying some attention. Even if you're a CEO leader, it's still valuable to pay attention to what others are sharing and engage in those kinds of conversations and interactions.
00:10:37
Speaker
That's I mean in a nutshell you want to have a stream of insightful content coming out. That's not all coming from your organization You're not just a you know a mouthpiece for the brand you actually have a personality you're a leader a person in your own right and you have some authenticity as a
Measuring Success Beyond Immediate Returns
00:10:54
Speaker
leader and
00:10:54
Speaker
And so we want to articulate all of those things through curation and through engagement and commenting Yeah, and that takes as you can imagine that takes some time out of a busy week of a CEO So the more help you can get from a team surrounding you the better. So let me ask you a more
00:11:10
Speaker
challenging question when it comes to working with senior executives. How do you define success? By the end of the day, what would make someone say, Jay, this has been awesome working together. You've done X, Y, and Z, and I'm super happy because you've helped me achieve what? What do I get as a CEO? What is success to me?
00:11:30
Speaker
Well, it's a really good question. It's a question everybody always asks. And, you know, I think partly success is relative to the person and their objectives. So I indicated there are, you know, we would go into that with some strategic objectives. There are individuals who are more important perhaps to build relationships with. So we could measure some of our success in how effective
00:11:53
Speaker
We were at getting the attention of those folks of actually building relationships. I believe strongly that the ROI of a lot of social networking activity is in fact relationships. And so if you're the CEO of a company and you identify an influencer, you want to get to know at the end of the day, you walk away with a relationship that lasts for years to come.
00:12:13
Speaker
With a person that's a high-value person in the industry you're working in and that You know that that's it's a hard thing to measure it also doesn't happen overnight So we have to be patient take some time with it, but there are also metrics just around visibility You can you could be paying attention to making sure you're getting increasing engagement in your social shares and there's a whole variety of ways to measure that in the on the native platforms and
00:12:36
Speaker
LinkedIn these days is the best, but it doesn't have the best access or visibility into the metrics of engagement. So that's a bit of a challenge with the platform itself. But yeah, in a nutshell, I think your success is relative to what your objectives are. And in most business leaders, the objectives are build relationships with high value individuals in the industry. And of course you might get invited on podcasts, you might get invited to speak
00:13:01
Speaker
at events when they return or on virtual events.
Conclusion and Feedback Invitation
00:13:04
Speaker
Those are all also markers of success in building relationships and authority and visibility in the industry. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you have questions, feedback, or like to suggest a guest, send an email to mark at markevans.ca. See you next time.