LinkedIn on trust, tactics and the big B2B shift

Now, in marketing, we love AI, we love learning about it, but there is a flip side to it, which is that for many of us, it's overwhelm, it's a feeling of burnout and the stress of trying to keep up with all of this change. So when you're part of a community of people that share that common feeling, how do you get help? This week, my guest is Brendan Wong. He is the news editor at LinkedIn here in Australia. And it's always great to have another journalist on the show. And the reason we wanted to have a chat to him is LinkedIn's done some pretty interesting research globally, which looks at how B2B marketers and decision makers are relying on networks, in other words, their peer networks and their trusted relationships to make decisions. Now, we, of course, intuitively know that's the case, but I wanted to dig into the news a little bit more to understand how networking platforms are being used to help validate really important decisions that we make. We also touch on AI, of course, and the future of work and how we're dealing with a sense of overwhelm, how to build connections as well. Really great conversation to understand what it's like to create positive, ongoing networks from an organization that knows all about it. Brendan, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. I want to start with, I think, perhaps the most fun question that appeals to my sense of humor. How many hours a day do you spend on LinkedIn? You know what? I've never done an audit, but I would say several hours. Well, if you include the workday, that's eight hours. Right. And then time before and after work, I could spend nearly 10 hours. Yeah. To 12 hours. So you've got a background in journalism, a little bit like myself. So, you know, from Momentum Media News Corp and other publications, now you find yourself at LinkedIn, describe what influence that's had on how you think about the B2B marketplace. I think when I think about my career in journalism, and then even segueing into the PR world, corporate affairs, and even digital content marketing, now at LinkedIn, the one common thing I've noticed is the importance of relationships. Like, even as a journalist, relationships are what matters. And then when you go on the flip side and you're on the corporate comms or the PR, you need those relationships. And that was something that was sort of very natural to me when I started my career. I was so passionate about doing coffee catch ups and building a network of relationships because it's through those relationships that opportunities arise. They want to buy your product or support what you're offering is. Okay, and from, I guess, a relationship and network connection, there's a nice through link here to some research you've done, we'll talk about that in a second. I'm interested to understand how you see the, you know, B2B networks evolving at the moment. You've got a pretty unique window to see the way people talk, the way comments evolve, the types of things that we write about at the moment on LinkedIn. In my view, there's been quite a significant shift in, I call it the Facebookization of LinkedIn, right? And I only mean that in the context of personal stories becoming paramount. What's your take on, you know, how the tone of LinkedIn is changing? I think particularly during that lockdown period, we saw the shift to the sort of personal stories. But I think the reason why it's taken off and is what people really resonate with on LinkedIn is because it's real, it's authentic and people want to hear personal stories. They want to hear, especially from leaders, they want to hear how they've navigated their careers or certain aspects of their, you know, their jobs, what challenges and how have they overcome it. I think that's the point. It's not just, you know, here's a personal story, but it's what are the professional learnings and the takeaways that others can be inspired or take something from? Right. So if we go to this survey, the interesting stat that stood out for me just to stay on this personal thing for a second, a 60% increase in people posting about feeling overwhelmed and navigating change and then a 29% uptick in people posting about AI related topics. So actually, by this score, double, right, people feeling overwhelmed. What's a really interesting statistic in terms of the experience of being online and in LinkedIn? Tell me about how that connects to the role of trust and these networks that you're talking about. So I think when it comes to feeling overwhelmed, I think our data was taught about in context of AI, people feel like learning AI is like a second job. And so they're overwhelmed. This is expectation from maybe from what they see in the news about AI and its impact on the workforce, but also in their own companies where they work is that there's this requirement now that they need to upskill on AI. But at the same time, they have to do their day-to-day job and deadlines are piling up. There's just so much work to do. How do you make time to learn about a new piece of technology? And I think this is where it's important for workplaces, for example, to provide the parameters. It's not just go off and learn and use this, but give them guidelines to give them expectations of what tools can they use? How can they use it? What are the policies around it? Because there's a lot of data privacy and ethics involved in that. And I think when it comes to being on LinkedIn, is sharing that story. I think leaders can come onto the platform and just talk about what their experience is. And it doesn't always have to be polished or perfect. It could be, "Hey, I'm struggling just as much as you are, but this is something we're working out and learning as we go." Yeah. There's an interesting, well, it's not really a conflict, but it's an interesting little dilemma where there's a lot of polished brands. And I think in the marketing CMO space, we know that brands have value, and so we have to protect them. Brand guidelines are this almost like this sacred idea that you don't deviate from the brand guidelines. If you have a particularly polished brand and your tone is very slick, this approach to being super casual almost seems like an antithesis. It's kind of hard to push people out. What's your take on how marketers can approach being authentic without sort of wrecking their brand? I think there is a balance. And I don't think there's no place for the polished, but it just serves a different purpose. I think, for example, a really beautiful website, beautiful marketing is great for grabbing attention and raising awareness of the brand. But in terms of getting people to the next stage, which could be buying the service or using it, I think that's where the storytelling comes in. And I think from the research that we have found at LinkedIn is people want to hear from others. When it comes to decision making, they'll go to their network. Do you use this product? What do you like about it? They'll go to the other buyers who are involved in the process. And I think it's the personal experiences that people have that will help someone make their final decision. Well, the stat that I pulled out here, it's quite interesting actually. Globally, 77% of B2B marketers say buyers rely on their personal networks to vet brands. And I know from particularly being at events, conferences with CMOs, they will say to me, I had this recently, actually, I'm here at this event because I checked in with the other CMOs and Heads of Marketing to see if this was an event we liked, right? It was sort of this brand validation, I'm only going to spend time with other CMOs in my network at these events that we trust. And what this is saying is that idea extends out to all of the B2B landscape, not just in the marketing community, right? Yeah, I would agree because there's no shortage of choices. People want to know that if they're spending money, that they're investing in the right thing or tool or product. And so it's important that they kind of find that out and through other people's knowledge or experience. Yeah. Is there a good way to do that? Speaking personally, I send people messages all the time. Is it as simple as that saying or there are other techniques that are better? How do you see people actually doing that vetting? I think they do call-outs on LinkedIn. They might be share a post and say, I'm looking for this, I want it to do this. What are you using and how are you using it, share your take. But if you do know others who are using it already or maybe in the similar space, then just you send an email or just reach out to them directly and ask the question. Yeah, I'm just trying to picture, imagine, it's like sitting at Catamarks at Pigeons. You tell people, I'm evaluating this big software company versus this big software company. And then suddenly you've got all these salespeople flooding in. Yeah, that's the double-edged sword maybe. That's the risk. That's why I think when you have a network, you don't really have to do the public shout-out. You reach out to others. Yeah, you go private. If you go to a few selected few people, I think it's important to keep it small because I think if you widen the scope too much, you will end up with just information overload. The other thing about this story is the concept of organic advocacy among the customer base and partners and so on. I mean, that's always been a big thing, particularly from my experience in comms and marketing. We want that advocacy level to keep going up, that noise if you like, to be always on. What are some really great ways of fostering that? I think it's getting your people involved. So I'll talk about it from a company's perspective. Your internal employees and also your customers are your biggest champions. They can be. I think it's important to leverage that, encourage them to share their experiences or their take. One example that I can think of is the financial services company, AMP. I think they do a really good job because if you take a look at their LinkedIn page, they involve a lot of different people in their updates. If you've got a grad, you've got their economists who are very prolific on their own and they're always doing funny, fun videos that just make economics a bit more palatable and they also engage other sort of stakeholders in their company and their leadership team. And I think the importance of that is it just humanizes the brand. It goes from just a company page with an update to real people and you can get a glimpse of what's happening behind the scenes and I just think it's just such a powerful way to bring something to life. Raise a good question too about the whole concept of B2B influencers and I haven't seen it as much lately but being a thought leader, thought leadership was pretty hot a few years ago. Lots of interest in how to be one, etc. What's your sense about how leaders and experts in their own domains can take it to the next level? Most people do videos, selfie videos, I'm guilty as charged. Selfie videos are fantastic. Right. What are the best ways to get cut through and to really build your reputation on LinkedIn? I think it's to really start by thinking what are those key areas that you want to be known for that's aligned to your profession, to your expertise. I think it's better to start with that foundation so then you're not trying to post about everything to everyone but that you know who your audience is and what you want to talk about and I'll start there and then secondly, I would think about the posting cadence. We typically recommend post once a week. That seems to be a good starting point and then with each post you want to keep it to a single idea. What's this one thing that you want people to take away and always think of it as what is the lesson or the thing that you want people to read and come away with and always think of it as a conversation starter because LinkedIn is a social media platform. You don't want to just share information passively. You want to engage others so the easiest way to do that is to finish your post with a court action which is just a question. It could be as simple as what do you think, let me know in the comments and then after that it's not just post and send forget, you have to come back to the comments and engage and respond to people who are making the effort to reply to your post. When it comes to comments, I think it's just as important as posting so when on the days or the times you are not writing a post, be engaging with the post of others in your network and write comments because they actually get seen by others in your feed. LinkedIn is a very important tool. It's a good way to foster some relationships with your connections and also build that connection base. So you don't just need a content strategy, you need a comment strategy. That's right. That's a good point. I have noticed that myself. Sometimes you get this feedback as to how many people have read your comment which is quite amazing. Tell me about the broader career space because we were talking about before about how to find the best brands and I know a lot of marketers are also thinking about jobs and careers and their future. There's a huge topic right now as to how to best position yourself. It's a natural follow on to our question about the sorts of content you should be writing. What's your take on how people will be using LinkedIn to find jobs? I think from a job seekers perspective, they need to have more than just an online resume. I think based on sort of following on from what we talked about with those best practices for sharing posts and showing up, I think that's what job seekers need to do if they want to stand out in a really, really busy market. There are so many job seekers, how do you stand out? I think being active on LinkedIn and showing up, sharing your thoughts, weighing into conversations is really handy because the recruiters, the companies, they're on LinkedIn and they're looking and when people are submitting their job applications, they're going to be looking at people's profiles and I think having the content and being in posts that's been done over a period of time will show that company or the employer, "Hey, this is what this person knows," they've demonstrated that and we know that before we've even looked at their resume, we've had a conversation and an interview. It's a real confidence builder. Yeah, correct. Yeah. I think we're talking about personal brand. I think LinkedIn is a great place to build that because regardless of whether you like the turn on it, because some people find personal brand a bit yuck, but I think we all have a personal brand and it's important to invest time to build that. You know, what I think you've hit the nail on the head, which is that, and I have talked about this a bit before, which is CMOs have to manage their own brand as well as their company brand, right? The personal brand versus the public brand that they're also catering and keeping those two things in mind and finding the Venn Diagram link where you can talk about the same things or the same interests is quite key to all of that. The community side of things, so the report talks about 88% of market is investing in community driven content. Can you tell me a bit more about that? So what does community driven content look like? Does it have to be aligned with your personal brand, for example? When it comes to the community aspect, I think because what I mentioned before with being a social media platform, community is all part of that. I think as you use the platform showing up regularly, connecting and building connections, you will form a community and you'll find that when you're posting, you'll get sort of similar people coming back to respond to you and if you're responding back to them, it's kind of fostering relationships virtually. And I think that's why it's so important that you don't take a passive approach you're engaging through. After commenting, through posting, and encouraging others to engage with your content. And I wonder whether there's another strategy here around community strategy because if I think about my network, I've actually got lots of little discrete pockets of groups or individuals in certain interest areas and just personally, I'm always hunting for sort of golden threads that tie everybody together. The best way I can think about it is like a membership organization where it's quite clear everybody's interested in the same thing. If you're somebody who doesn't find it naturally easy to connect with others on LinkedIn or even in fact in life, what's the easiest way to start building up confidence and using the tools that are available on LinkedIn? My best advice is to start small and that could be something like who is in your network already that you haven't sort of engaged with recently and just reach out to them. Perhaps they're already on LinkedIn, comment on their post or you can send them an email and just start a conversation. Perhaps it could just be as simple as what are you working on? What are you seeing in your industry? I think it's important when you do that connection request is you actually write a message like why do you want to connect with this person? Why would that person want to connect with you? But I think especially and I think of it from younger workers who are starting out to reach out to people who are more senior, they're typically really, really busy. So I think it's key that they have an idea of what they want to get out of a conversation. It's not very effective to just go, "Hey, I want to do a coffee catch up." This senior person will be, "Well, I've got so much like things on my plate." But if they're like saying, "I want to understand how to pivot from this part of my career to this or make it to the next stage and I really like how you've navigated your career." I think they will make that person a bit more willing to make the time and the effort. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I'm glad you brought the generations up. I noticed in the report millennials and Gen Z make up 71% of B2B buyers now. I'm old. I just fell off the top end of that, Gen X, right? Tell me about the millennial and Gen Z approach to networking. They want you to be authentic. If they catch a whiff of anything that's kind of fake or artificial, I think it's an instant turn off for them. And I think to communicate with millennials and Gen Z, you just got to be authentically yourself. And that can mean being a little bit raw, a little bit imperfect. I think people will really resonate with that a lot in that generation. Yeah. And the contrast here, of course, is with intuition and insights that you get from AI. There's a real immediacy, obviously, about using a lot of these tools, meeting in person and fostering these networking sort of scenarios that we've been discussing quite obviously takes a while, doesn't it? Yes. You have a jarring sense about how long it takes and how much patience is required. Amidst your thoughts on how you see it from your perspective, I don't want to say it's a lack of speed, but it's just that human relationships take time. They do. And I think it's important to always have that long-term mindset that it's not going to be overnight or maybe even days or weeks. I think the mindset is a good word that you use there. And the mindset is I can get instant information, really, I can get instant insights now. I can't get that information instantly out of people, particularly if I don't have a trusted relationship. And so there's actually an intentionality that's required to go and invest in relationships in the long-term so that when it comes to getting really valuable B2B buyer information, there's a depth to it. And I think if you're in a hurry, it's a real dilemma. It's like, well, I don't yet have the network I want, for example. I guess I'm just sort of exploring what do you do then? I think you really have really highlighted what makes this whole, with AI, everything so instant. This is why it's jarring, as you've mentioned. But I think, yeah, I think with relationships, yeah, it is definitely something that does take time and does require some intentionality and effort. So probably come around to patience again, which is you've just got to keep building this up over time. Brenna, it's been fantastic to have you in the studio to have a chat about the work that you're doing, about some of this research and the trends. I'm really fascinated to see how the network impact will change the way B2B marketing unfolds. So again, thanks for your time. Thank you for having me. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Brendan. I loved his bit about leaders doing video online and particularly on LinkedIn. Of course, I'm doing the same thing right now. And he had a great tip, which is to end with a great question. So let me do the same. Let's take his advice. And my question to you is this. If you're feeling burnt out or overwhelmed by AI, how are you dealing with it? Maybe you can drop a note in the comments or send us an email. We'd love to hear from you. Well, that's it for this episode of The CMO Show. We'll see you next time. The CMO Show is produced by Impact Institute in partnership with Adobe. Impact Institute is a professional services firm for purpose-led organisations. Our unique blend of impact consulting, brand storytelling and event services help our clients create meaningful change. This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by your host, Mark Jones, that's me, and producers Kate Zidell and Kirsten Babels. Our audio engineers are Ed Chang and Daniel Marr. And a quick shout out to Adobe Experience Cloud, which gives digital businesses everything they need to design and deliver great customer experiences. Visit business.adobe.com to learn how Adobe can help transform your business.