How Senior Leaders Can Embrace Social Media

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: 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 fifteen minutes or less. Today, I'm talking with Jay Palter, a social media strategist and personal brand expert. Jay works with B2B companies in the finance and technology sectors. Let's start off with a question just in terms of the social media landscape pre-COVID and what 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?

Jay Palter: 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 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.

Mark Evans: What I'm wondering about is whether you've noticed a discernible difference in how people are 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 they come and they they go. Some people ignore social media. But overall, have you noticed a change in behavior?

Jay Palter: 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 kind of 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 that I mean, you share ideas, you learn, and 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 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 gonna stop. I think even though the COVID pandemic is gonna play itself out over a longer period of time and there's gonna be some opening up, I do think there's gonna be an ongoing need to maintain our relationships through digital, virtual social networks.

Mark Evans: I noticed the same thing on LinkedIn. You know, Microsoft made a very savvy investment when they bought LinkedIn. 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. 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?

Jay Palter: Yeah. But it's it's true that social networks do get they get crowded. They get noisy. There's lots of people competing for attention and they I mean, everybody still wants some attention for themselves and, you know, 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. And, 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 is just pay it forward. And my experience has been it's hugely a hugely powerful tool for getting people to pay attention and cut through the noise. My expression in social networking is always be opening, not always be closing. So if you're 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 social networks. You get a lot more benefit by building an audience, opening up new relationships, 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 about selling something.

Mark Evans: 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?

Jay Palter: 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, and 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, you know, 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. As I, you know, 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 at the side on the sidelines and left 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, you know, in support of the organization.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I'm really interested in business leaders taking a more active role in social media because, you know, by and large, you know, you see a lot of employees very active on social media because they've got their own agendas. They want they're looking to raise their profiles. Maybe they're trying to change jobs. But for business leaders, I mean, 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? So it helps them. It helps their companies. It helps their employees and customers.

Jay Palter: 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's, you know, 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 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. Having said that, 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 complementary to that messaging. And I would argue, in fact, to be social. I think a lot of businesses could benefit by emphasizing the strong personality characteristics, or leadership aspects of the leaders. 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, you know, authentically, close to your heart, that's where there's real opportunity, I think, for leaders to step forward and complement their brand's messaging.

Mark Evans: 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.

Jay Palter: The first thing to do, I think, is to be strategic about the people you want to reach out to. Because we're not I mean, at some level, you're gonna engage an audience in, you know, 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 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, you know, 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 that are and make sure that those are consistent and aligned with the brand messaging. And then we start to engage. And, you know, that's why I'm trying to identify some strategically important folks because the way you're gonna get attention from anybody in your network is paying some attention. Even if you're a CEO leader, I mean, it's still valuable to pay attention to what others are sharing and engage in those kinds of conversations and interactions. So 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, you know, a mouthpiece for the brand. You actually have a personality. You're a leader or a person in your own right, and you have some authenticity as a leader. 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.

Mark Evans: So let me ask you a more challenging question when it comes to working with senior executives. How do you define success? At 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?

Jay Palter: 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 and how effective 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 with a high-value person in the industry you're working in. And that, you know, that's it's a hard thing to measure. It also doesn't happen overnight. So you have to be patient, take some time with it. But there are also metrics just around visibility. 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. LinkedIn these days is the best, but off 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, you know, build relationships with high-value individuals in the industry. And, of course, you might get invited on podcasts. You might get invited to speak at events when they return or on virtual events. Those are all also markers of success in building relationships and authority and visibility in the industry.

Mark Evans: 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@markevans.ca. See you next time.