29 | MJ Jaindl on AI-Powered Content and Social Selling Strategies

AI is transforming content creation and sales, but how can businesses use it effectively? MJ Jaindl, CRO at Miva, shares his journey from LinkedIn beginner to thought leader, using AI to streamline content while maintaining authenticity. He breaks down how social selling is replacing traditional B2B tactics and why companies should empower employees to build personal brands. Learn how AI tools like ChatGPT and EasyGen can help you create high-quality, high-impact content in minutes. 

If you're in sales, marketing, or leadership, this episode is packed with actionable insights to grow your brand and business.

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Transcript

Audrey: 0:00

Hello, and welcome back to the AI Marketers Playbook, where we cover actionable frameworks to help you leverage AI and marketing strategies in your business. I'm Audrey Chia, your host, and today I have with me someone really special, MJ Jandoh. So our guest for today, MJ is a sales and marketing expert who has built and scaled revenue engines for some of the biggest Baker's Names and Says. Now he has sold over a hundred million and says subscriptions helped grow buddy media from just zero dollars all the way to a 750 million acquisition and doubled Mivas, his current company's GDM efficiency in just a year. But beyond that MJ on LinkedIn also has a secret talent. He is a leader in AI powered content creation, and I'm super excited to have him on the show. Welcome to the show, MJ.

MJ: 0:50

Audrey, thank you so much for having me on. It's interesting when you say I'm a content creator on LinkedIn, because literally a year ago I had created nothing and I knew nothing. About content creation on LinkedIn. So it's, it's been a fun journey over the last few months.

Audrey: 1:03

Wow. Tell us more about your journey. So how did you get started on LinkedIn? And of course with AI and how did both worlds come together for you?

MJ: 1:11

Yeah, I've told this story a little bit before about why I started creating content online and The reason is a little bit weird. So when I started creating content online, I saw this interview It was a fake interview between Joe Rogan and Sam Altman and in this interview was AI generated They were having a conversation and the conversation was a good one. It sounded like both of them. It was very interesting. The topics are topics that they probably would have selected. And I thought to myself, wow, that's amazing. The reason why that was so good is because they have hours and hours, hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of content online. And at that time in 2023, I was relatively invisible. So I had no content. Online at all. I mean, I had some old interviews from a decade ago. I had, you know, some tweets out there, but I didn't have much. And so when I saw that, one of the reasons, one of the things that I was thinking about is I have 2 young boys. So I have a 2 year old, a 5 year old. And I thought to myself, if I could put a lot of content online, you know, over a long period of time, that Maybe in the future, they will be able to ask me a question and there I will be able to give them advice through an A. I. or through something. and I thought that would be cool. I thought that would be a great gift. And so, so that was my initial thought. But it was very difficult to go from creating no content to creating a lot. So what I started doing is I started posting on linked in based on what I knew what I had expertise in. I have a A over 20 year career in B to B sass and sales and so I started posting about that and then as I started growing my account, I started learning more about writing the LinkedIn algorithm content creation. I was using AI to create content and then I just started posting about that, which worked really well. Just posting about what I knew, what I was learning about, even if it was something that I learned the week before. And so that's kind of how my, my whole content journey started. And I've just built off of it, from there.

Audrey: 3:07

Oh, the starting point was I want to leave a legacy for my kids through AI.

MJ: 3:12

Yeah.

Audrey: 3:14

It's literally like, it's

MJ: 3:15

literally like the weirdest reason. Like when I tell people that they're like, this is incredibly odd. You want to like live forever and recreate yourself and have an AI. And, I was like, well, yeah, kind of, but this is more of, you know, a gift for my kids. So I know that when I'm not around one day, they can ask me a question. and so I thought that was pretty cool, but it was all sparked from that interview. I was blown away by it. and that was, you know, two years ago. So things have advanced so, so much since then. So I think that that initial vision is pretty much a reality. Now it's a lot of people are recreating themselves with an AI avatar using some of these tools. So it's pretty cool.

Audrey: 3:50

Really crazy, right? How far AI has come. There is a company called twice, and I think there are a couple of others where they try to create AI clones of you. Some of these cases could be interesting. For example, if you have a family member who is about to perhaps leave this world, right, then that would be a good time to capture those important memories. I guess LinkedIn is one of them, but also maybe telling personal stories could be another thing that we might want to capture.

MJ: 4:14

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you could use this now in a business sense. And so this is where I want to start taking this idea. So you get enough content out there. The algorithm can digest that like a an AI algorithm can digest that and replicate what you're saying. This makes things very easy from a marketing perspective, because in 2025, people want to buy from people, you know, the B2B landscape has changed and personal brand is becoming more important at the forefront, and so using tools like HeyGen or Synthesia or some of these other tools that could recreate a video of somebody, pretty lifelike and real, makes it a lot easier for marketers to go out and create very powerful messages coming from What looks like a human is very believable and could be a message that comes from that person, but it's just easier to produce that video. You know, you don't have to set up the camera, you don't have to set up the lights every time, you don't have to read the script, you don't have to go through all the iterations. So I think that's really powerful and that's something that we're going to start doing at Miva this year is more of those videos, videos of our CEO, our director of marketing, and we're going to start creating more AI generated videos like that, which I think is going to be really helpful for us.

Audrey: 5:24

Super cool. I know you have a ton of experience in the B2B sales space, especially, you know, in sales, right? So how has the sales landscape evolved over the past 20 years that you've been working on it? Because I know you mentioned personal branding, but I would love to see that from your point of view, have you seen the landscape change, you know, have, you know, leadership, also consider other avenues of growth. What has it been like?

MJ: 5:45

Yeah, I would say the biggest change is that. B2B buyers are really acting more like D2C buyers. And so this has been a big shift, like this is a fundamental shift that happened. So when I started my career, there was a lot of face to face B2B buying, especially in higher ticket, high touch SaaS. So it was like putting on a fancy blazer, having a nice dinner, buying a fancy bottle of wine. And this is how B2B SaaS deals got done. Today, nobody wants that. Nobody really wants that interaction and it's more happening online. And so the same way that you would research a product that you buy for yourself, a lot of B2B buyers are researching products for their company or, you know, products that they want to buy, productivity tools for their, for their company. Okay. And so I think because that's happened, we need to shift the way that we think about B2B sales. And I think one of these shifts is diving deep into personal brand, which is another one of the reasons besides cloning myself, that I wanted to explore. You know, creating content online, because I think social selling is becoming the new B2B SaaS, where again, the principle is people want to buy from people, they don't want to buy from companies. That's where the trust level is higher. And so what that means for companies today is that creating content that's coming from a person is ultra important, way more important than it used to be in the past. And so that's, that's the kind of shift that I'm seeing now. I encourage Anyone who's revenue generating at Miva today to be creating their own content online. And so we have, we have SDRs, we have channel relationship managers, and they are out creating content on LinkedIn. So they're putting their voice out there. They are talking about kind of the benefits and what we can do for for other companies. They're sharing case studies. And it's coming from them. And I think that's very valuable and important. And it's like, it's something that we're going to lean into very heavy this year. And I think all companies should, if you want to modernize the executive at the executive level, and then even coming down to the employee level, companies should be encouraging their employees to create content, which is like a, kind of a whole new world for the way that. B2B businesses used to think about content creation. It used to be just post, you know, kind of repost a company message.

Audrey: 7:56

It doesn't go really far, you know, it's just like, ten people have seen the post.

MJ: 8:01

It doesn't work. It's kind of lame. People don't want to do it. They don't want to put their signature on a, you know, a company's message all the time. They want to show their personality. They want Build their own brand. They want to build an audience for themselves that they can leverage at that company or when they move on and continue to build their career. So I think it's great for employees. I think it's great for executives. I think it's great for companies and I'm excited about it. So 2025 should be fun because I think a lot of Companies are going to start waking up to the fact that this is the new B2B sales, which is going to be really cool to watch. Yeah,

Audrey: 8:34

and I think it's like, it's currently still relatively a blue ocean, right? So if you go in now, you'll be one of the early, earlier movers. We're not even the earliest movers, right? There are people who have already built their braids and leveraged that first wave. So I would say this is like the second or third wave. If you are thinking about starting your personal brand, the time is now, there is a mini window in which you can still grow pretty, you know, quickly. but like any other platform, LinkedIn will become eventually saturated, much like how it is on TikTok, on Instagram, where it's a lot harder to grow. So now we're in the early phases. I think like what you say, companies. And your team members should capitalize on that. And maybe you can tell us more about what you have been doing at Amoeba because it seems that you have a different role there and yet you're also advocating for personal branding. Tell us more about what's happening.

MJ: 9:21

Yeah. So at Amoeba, I lead sales and marketing. So I'm the chief revenue officer there and I'm in charge of growth at the company overall. And so we do a couple things, right? The businesses. A B2B, we do B2B and D2C SaaS, but we have a particular niche. So we're very good at e commerce companies that are trying to sell and have a very large catalog. So if you're doing 10, 000 SKUs, if you want to sell B2B and D2C, A lot of the platforms out there that are household names don't really do that. Well, we do that perfectly. And then we really focus on our infrastructure. The company has been around for 25 years, which is amazing for a software company. And it's because we focused on quality. So fastest. E commerce platform on the market, which matters for conversion rate. And so we have a really solid niche for businesses that are, you know, kind of mid market that want to grow and we do traditional marketing. So we do SEO. We have a team that does outreach and outbound. We have channel partners that we're nurturing and we're getting leads from. So we're doing a lot of the traditional things, But I feel strongly that That is shifting like the world is shifting and marketing changes so much that you can't rely on those channels. And I think what we've seen is SEO is getting harder. You know, the Google core update that happened in March was really disruptive for a lot of companies that were doing programmatic SEO and some of these. Tactics, you know, paid ads are getting more expensive. We see that all the time. So whether it's SEM or you're buying social ads are just more expensive and less effective. And I think you have to adapt to the market. And I think the adaptation that most businesses should be making is this one of let's let's start building personal brands within the company. Let's focus on social selling, let's get our CEO out there as a thought leader, and let's produce more content and get social engagement going because that's really where trust happens. Trust is so important in generating leads, and that's really where trust is happening. So that's the fundamental, that's what we're doing, kind of how we're doing it, and then the shift that we're starting to make in our marketing, you know, all of our marketing efforts.

Audrey: 11:27

Yeah, and to build on that, right, I think what is interesting is, as companies start having their employees build their personal brands, there is opportunity to combine paid spend, with these personal posts. I have seen a couple of companies do it really well, where you have the CEO making like a, Really, really nice statement as a personal post and then they push it with paid ad spend and you can see that, there is super high engagement because A, it's personal, but B, you're putting money behind it to get it to more people, of the right audience, right? I think, and that combination of strategy could be interesting to see, in the months to come even.

MJ: 12:01

Yeah, we're going to experiment with that. We've boosted a couple of my posts. We did it, we just did a few. The results were pretty good. You know, like you can see they work and I think the nice thing about that is you can kind of see if a post is resonating first. you're a content creator, Audrey, you know that when you post something in the first few hours, you can kind of tell how it's going to do. In general, there's exceptions. Sometimes things take off like the next day, weirdly, but that happens randomly. But usually you can kind of tell in the first two hours what's going to happen. And so if you have a post that's just really flying for whatever reason, it just got picked up, you know, the right people were engaging with it and now it's. really starting to have legs, then you can choose to boost that. So I really like that because you can choose where to spend your ad spend and you can be very precise and strategic about it based on how the content is already doing. So so we're going to do more of that this year too, you know, boosting personal posts as well.

Audrey: 12:56

Yeah, I think that will be definitely an interesting like mix of strategy, right? but I know you are also a big fan of using AI. Tell us more about how you're integrating AI into that content creation process. Most people want to do so, but they don't know how. And when they try to use AI, it sounds very much AI, which isn't that great of a thing.

MJ: 13:15

Yeah, for sure. So the reason I started using AI, when I first started posting, I posted for two months, just doing text only posts that I was writing. And that process, staring at the blank cursor every day and trying to figure out what to write was very painful. I can't read it. You can't read it, yeah. I also have a day job, right? I have a day job. It's demanding. I have a team, I have, you know, we have growth goals, we have quotas. So I couldn't spend all day creating content. So it was out of necessity that I started exploring some of the AI tools for content creation. And, that led me down a path that I thought was really interesting. And I post about this all the time. For me, you know, the, the workflow that I've. I've fallen into now is on LinkedIn, I'm typically creating visuals first. So I'll like, I'll go into Kanban, I'll create an infographic or a carousel. And that is really the seed of a post. And that's where most of the work happens. You know, I get comments sometimes on my posts where people are like, You're just using AI, you know, you're not using your brain, you're not using your brain, you're, you know, and, I like to think of it like the work has happened in that, the creation of the visual and the graphic, and that's where the ideas are, but once I have that, I'm taking that and I'm putting it into an AI tool, and so if I'm creating Carousel, I create it in Canva, I I export the PDF and then that PDF is getting uploaded into, you know, Claude, you know, deep seek works well now. And, sometimes I'll put into chat GPT because I'm on a pro version. I'm not a pro version of Claude, which means sometimes in Claude, my PDFs are just too big, but otherwise I'll put them in chat GPT, summarize them there. And then after that, I take that output, Claude. And I put it into easy gen. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I was on a very early, like very early version of easy jazz, like super early adopter. And because I wrote so many text posts in the beginning, I started to learn about and understand structure. So, you know, like all the elements that everybody talks about endlessly on LinkedIn, which is like your hook, your re you know, your rehab, everything. So I learned that structure. I understood how important it was because I was seeing my posts that were written well. With short sentences, good structure, very readable, very digestible. I saw those do better. And when I first started using EasyGen, what I saw was it was writing posts in that format. It understood to write a hook. It understood to write a re hook. It understood to write a good power ending and a CTA at the bottom. And ChatGBT was not doing that. It was too wordy. There were emojis in the post. There's like all these issues with it. So. EasyGen is a hyper personalized tool for LinkedIn. So I'll take that output, I'll put it into EasyGen just to refine it. And then the last step is putting that into, you know, adding that in Notion or editing that in LinkedIn. And what I'm doing there is I'm adding my experience, personal insights or anything else. Yeah, so if I'm talking about something that I've done, that's where I, I can explain the results or I could explain some sort of transformation that happened, right? I used to My post used to not do well and now they're doing well. And here's the things that I did where you add that little signpost or you add that little social proof in there, which shows you that you've gone through the process. You know, that demonstrates your expertise. That's where you, it doesn't even have to be so, so much of the post. It could be a few sentences where you describe something personal or your experience or how you feel about it. And that is, that is Good enough, because people will see that and understand that a human did that. You did that. It shows your personality. So, so that's what I do. Finally, I, I, I edit it and that's where all of that personalization happens. And that step is critically important. So, you know, you see some creators that are, that are skipping that. And when you skip that, that's where the outputs start to seem very robotic. Right. but for me, it's. It's all about saving time during drafting, like that copy drafting is you eventually get there, but it's just a big time sink for a creator. So you get the drafts out of the way with AI, and then then you make them your own. And I think that's the winning formula. Like I've seen that happen. You know, I've seen that go from literally like zero likes, like two likes on every post I was doing about this time last year in February last year, I got 57 new followers for the entire month. so that was just 12 months ago. so I've kind of seen that, seen that happen. I've seen that those structures work, but yeah, that's, that's my process that I use to create content. And that's the process that I'm, you know, I've shared with my team at Miva and they're, you know, they're starting to use that to create their own content as well.

Audrey: 17:46

It's great that you say it's a combination of human and AI, right? Cause you're always adding your human take, whether it's your own personal stories, you know. A specific case study or like just your own experience. I think that makes the entire post Very different from what you would typically get from an AI tool that's just giving you generic content One interesting thing that I found is ChatGPT's memory feature is amazing So when I have been using ChatGPT to refine the copy Basically remembered my style of writing and tone of voice on LinkedIn. So all I had to do is prompt it and say, please write it in Audrey's style of writing and tap into your memory base and it can recraft an entire piece of content in my voice. I was not expecting it to be so powerful but it has evolved so much over the past two years.

MJ: 18:36

That's really cool. And how do you do that? Are you putting like a PDF into ChatGPT or are you feeding it links of where you've written content?

Audrey: 18:43

So the crazy thing was initially when I built my own GPTs, I would feed the examples, right? But I think ChatGPT natively is already, pulling your transcripts. And even without realising it, it was already learning my style of writing. So my hypothesis was since it's already remembering what I talked to it about, why don't I put it to the test? So that is something you might want to try. It's super. Yeah.

MJ: 19:08

I do, yeah, I was thinking about taking my post and putting them into a big PDF and feeding that PDF into a project so it had that, but maybe I don't even need to do that.

Audrey: 19:17

Yes. Yeah. With the evolution of AI, I think chat GPT is pretty much there. That's crazy. It's so

MJ: 19:24

cool.

Audrey: 19:24

And what about, what about videos, MJ, like, do you believe in videos? Have you started working on videos? Is there a format you, you think we should be investing in?

MJ: 19:31

Yeah, I literally just started and I just started because video is scary. I mean This is the thing with video. It's there's so much to video, you know, it's it's body language It's your tone of voice. These are the things that make videos good. I think in my opinion It's not just what you're saying. So it adds a completely different element to Which is something that you need to learn and master. I think anybody could get good at video, but it's a brand new skillset. And so I spent most of last year just trying to get better at writing and content creation and visuals and like design. And that's a lot. There's a lot of nuance in that topic. Right. And so I didn't want to jump into video right away, but I am now. And it's, you know, I think when you see what's happening on LinkedIn, You know, it's important. They've added a video tab. Sometimes when I open my app, a video is the first thing that I see. And so you can understand that they're pushing it. There is this tick tockification that's happening there. And I think you have to adjust to that. You have to adapt to that. So, so this year I am, You know, I'm investing time in myself, just understanding how to do it better. How do you do a direct to camera video? I just made a post on because it's something I just learned like a few weeks ago. so, I think it's super important. I'm investing in it. My goal is to do just four videos a month now, but I will probably ramp up over time. And, and kind of see what happens, you know, I've, I've had one good video that I posted that did well, but most of them, I see, they're getting less engagement, which is interesting. So I think that when you're creating content on LinkedIn, obviously the algorithm is changing and you have to adapt to that change, but you have to have. Multiple pieces of content in your repertoire, because what I find is a carousel post or an infographic post. Those are really audience drivers. You know, they're, they're saveable. They're shareable. You're getting more reposts and you truly see like a lot of audience growth from that post. At least I do. And then more on the video post. These are ways for people to understand your personality, get to know you a little bit better. And this is what video posts are for and so I'm going to start treating it that way. They're, they're trust builders, but I think everybody needs to learn that skill set. It is intimidating. I think you have to start slow and like, you know, dip your toes into it and then start creating, content because, you really put yourself, you put yourself out there when you create content in general, but when you create video content, you're really putting yourself out there. You know, you've been doing it for a long time. What was your experience creating video content? I

Audrey: 22:02

didn't want to do video content initially. I

MJ: 22:05

was

Audrey: 22:05

like, oh, we have to, even though I post so much now, right? When I first, I was like, this is such, like what you said, it's a very intimate. Content creation process. You really are putting yourself out there and I I think my first video I took like 100 takes and then like maybe like five seconds of the 100 takes I think that is decent But the one thing I learned is like what you said, right just Just put in the reps put yourself out there. It doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to make progress one insight that I also found is video content may not always get you the most impressions or views I know there are a lot of big creators saying video is the only way to go But you'd have to bear in mind that they already have Huge following and a huge visibility. So again, the odds are different right like They may get like the better end of the stick and be able to push their video content up But if you're a smaller or growing creator, you may not see that kind of benefits. So what I found is For me, video content works best, when it is something where you are doing a demonstration or when you are showcasing a new tool. those are things that people are interested in. And one insight that I also gather is that The first three seconds of your video is as important as the hook in your post copy. So with, without, you know, that captivating hook in your video, you're going to lose the audience. And it's the same thing as when you're writing post copy, right? The first line is equally important in the process.

MJ: 23:33

Yeah, I completely agree. And I saw that. And that's, that's one thing I mentioned, because I wrote a post on creating one of my videos that did well. And my first piece of advice was like, don't start the video with, Hey, guys, or Hey, everyone, like, just jump right into what you're talking about, jump right into the problem as if it's a hook. And, I'm not exactly sure if that's why the video that I posted recently took off, but it's, I think that's the right format. At least when I watch videos, that's what I want to hear. As soon as I hear these, these triggers of like, this video is, is going to be boring. Then I'm, I'm out immediately. So I think you got to jump. Yeah, I watched you got to make them count. Yeah. I watched so many Mr. Beast videos when I was trying to figure this out, you know, like I'm not watching the full video, but I was watching the beginning. And it, every, and he has talked endlessly on how he is very precise on every little, the thumbnail is perfect and this, you know, and he experiments so much. And I noticed a pattern that his videos were starting a certain way. So it's like he always, always jumping right into exactly what he was going to talk about in the video. So he immediately let the audience know what they were in for in that video. And, I thought that was interesting. So if you watch his videos, just the first, like you said, three seconds, 10 seconds, you're going to see this pattern emerge. It's like, just take that and use it, you know, use that for your LinkedIn content.

Audrey: 24:56

Yeah, I think one thing that also stood out to me during our conversation is you view content with a very interesting marketing lens where you're studying top performers, figuring out what is working and then testing it for yourself. Am I right to say that?

MJ: 25:09

Oh, I mean, constantly. Yeah. And if, yeah, if you, if you see So, you know, I see my posts, they're a lot about, you know, I post a lot about LinkedIn growth. I post a lot about my LinkedIn growth and things that I'm observing, like nuances. Those posts do very well because readers on LinkedIn want to learn how to grow on LinkedIn, but it kind of, Shows my process. I'm like trying to pick everyone apart. I mean, every day is a, is it with a new post as a way to learn something about what's working and what's not working. So, yeah, that, that's, I'm very much an experimenter when it comes to sales and marketing. I'm like, do as much as we can create as much content as we can and then, you know, see what's working, what's not, and then double down on that instead of being too academic about it. You know, yeah, so I

Audrey: 25:53

love that. I love that mindset. you also mentioned sales and marketing So let's dive a bit into the sales side of things On linkedin there is a huge thing that maybe not many people talk about they talk about content creation But the second part of things is of course social selling and the selling part of things, right? So how have you found the social selling process on linkedin? And do you have any tips for people who are not comfortable having conversations online?

MJ: 26:17

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I'm writing a lot about LinkedIn growth. I'm writing less about our company growth and so, or, or Miva in general. And so the, the process that I'm going through right now is learning how, learning what types of content work on LinkedIn very well, and then training and teaching my team to create content that is more company focused. And so that's what we've been doing. With, with content that is company focused, I see that we will get a lot of engagement on it, but I don't think that leads are just coming to folks that are creating social content. And so I believe that the right strategy is a mix of content creation to build trust, you know, show, ICP that you're an expert. And then where the real magic happens, I believe is in outreach and DMs. You know, really kind of more traditional style things, but, you know, reaching out and starting to have a conversation with somebody and then bringing them into the fold. Because I believe that if sales folks think that they're just going to create content and then leads are going to all come to them, that's probably not going to happen. You know, you're going to, so there's a purpose for both. Things content creation, the purpose is, you know, grow your audience, gain more exposure, gain reach. But then you also have to have that conversation. So, you know, you probably have to create a some sort of lead magnet or capture leads or some more traditional startup style of selling. Or you just need to DM, you know, you need to LinkedIn navigator. I mean, and that is the, that's the thing that we're doing internally, which is going into LinkedIn Navigator, creating lists of our ICP, and then really just doing personalized outreach, you know, kind of hand to hand outreach for, for those folks. And I think you're still going to need to do that on LinkedIn. I don't know what your experience has been, but I think that, in the SaaS world, I think that that's what needs to be done. Yeah. I think

Audrey: 28:10

anyone who tells you to just rely on inbound is. Probably not telling you everything

MJ: 28:15

Yeah

Audrey: 28:16

And the funny thing is I think this happens not just for like in the cesspool, right? But even beyond a lot of creators start out thinking that content creation is you know, the golden ticket but Honestly, I think it takes you about six months to see, you know, decent traction. And you might get a few prospects and inbound leads, and then you'd need to qualify them. You haven't even done the qualification yet. By the time you qualify them, they may not even be people you want to work with, may not be people who fits within your ICP. And then you're wondering why did my content not work? So like what you said, right? It's important to create content. For authority and trust, but it's also important to do that outreach so that you're actually, you know, starting those conversations and like hunting for your ICPs who land on your profile, who view your content, but are not taking action.

MJ: 29:04

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so that's what, you know, over the course of the next year, I want everybody in my company that's that's revenue generating and start thinking about it from that sort of mindset, you know, even going all the way up to our executive team, because when someone comes and sees our folks on https: otter. ai On social. I want them to see that there is expertise, there is knowledge. The co our company's been around for 25 years. There's deep, deep, deep product knowledge like lodged inside of our company. So I want them to be able to see all of those things. But then eventually we're still gonna have that one-to-one chat for now until like all the ai, all the AI agents take calls for us and, you know, do all the work for us. But I think for now, there's, It's still really important to have a, a person in the mix and have those conversations and do the outreach. Yeah. So we'll see how that changes. This is gonna be an interesting year.

Audrey: 29:56

Yeah. I think there will be a lot of hyper-personalization at scale with ai. There will be a lot more content being put out there and I think that human touch is still equally important, in the sales process. Right. So maybe one other question that I have is, how do you think teams. Can get the buy in or how do you think, you know, if you, let's say you're an individual in a company, how would you convince the different stakeholders to start putting content out there? Because honestly, it is hard and it is also a responsibility that isn't something that most people are comfortable with.

MJ: 30:28

I agree. I think so. You need to start with, you need to start with employees in an organization that are already, that already want to build a brand. I think everybody at some level wants to build a brand. They want to build a personal brand. They want if you were to ask someone, would you rather have zero followers or 50, 000 followers? I think most people there's I'm sure exceptions, but most people would say I'd rather have a large audience. Now what's preventing them from doing that is just you have to put yourself out there. So there's rejection, there's all of the things that we worry about when we put ourselves out there. So I think first is you need to start with folks in the organization who are okay putting themselves out there first. And so that's what we did internally. So, you know, I have a guy, Dan, on my team, Dan Stevens, he's awesome. And he, you know, he saw that I was creating content and he's like, that looks cool, I want to start creating content. So he just starts creating it because he was comfortable with it. And now more folks are coming along for that ride because they saw him doing it. So, so that happened organically. you asked about convincing leadership. I think that's probably trickier if you. If you have a leader, it's going to be difficult if you have a leadership team who's not bought in on the idea of social content and that being able to drive results. If you find yourself in that situation, I think it's really important to go out there and find examples of two things. One, how the world has changed, right? And like I mentioned before, SEO is getting harder, paid ads are more expensive. So if you just start there, then it becomes what is the next What's the next evolution of marketing. So you have to prove that message. And then after that, it's, you know, find some examples, some case studies of where it worked well, show those to the leadership team, and then help them understand the time commitment it's going to take you, because I think the other, the other apprehension at the leadership level of a company is going to be, Now, everybody, my team is going to be sitting in front of it, like creating content all day. They're not going to be, everyone's going to be a content creator. And so you have to show them that, with AI, you're able to create posts quickly. Like my whole team uses EG gen. Now they can create a post fast. They all know how to create. If we were just doing text only posts, they could create a post in a minute. Like it literally is that easy if you know the right tools. So, then showing your leadership, like with AI. I could spend 30 minutes a day and here's how I'm going to break that 30 minutes up. I'm going to comment for a little bit. I'm going to engage. I'm going to create one post. I'm going to post it. And then through that process, I'm dedicating 30 minutes of my day to this. But over time, I think it will look like this, this case study more kind of. So I think you have to do that. I think it's going to be difficult if you're in an organization that's very traditional in the way that they market is very protected around employees posting on social media. I think it's going to be very difficult. but I, but if you have an executive team who is into it, like we have at Miva, like you should dive into it. I think that's, That is something that is really exciting. You know, if, if your exec team supports it, your leadership team and your manager supports it, like dive in, do it, try it. but I, but if they don't, I think you have to make a really compelling case study of the time spent and what the results could look like.

Audrey: 33:33

Yeah, and I guess people don't see the instant impact of LinkedIn because if it's like a paid ad, right, you put money in and you get a conversion and you know, it's like very clear ROI, but for LinkedIn, it's a long game. and I think it takes time to like nurture the client. For them to see your content. I have prospects reaching out to me after one year of seeing my content. but they are high quality prospects and when they're ready to buy, they're ready to buy because you don't even need to sell to them anymore. Right. Right. And that content just pays for itself. So, I think that's something that businesses and leaders should bear in mind that this is a long term game, but one that maybe has more compounding rewards.

MJ: 34:09

Exactly. That's really important. Yeah.

Audrey: 34:12

Maybe one last thing that MJ you could share with us is what is one tip that you have for people who are trying to start on their LinkedIn journey but don't know how?

MJ: 34:23

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I didn't know how. So I can kind of share literally last 12 months ago, I was, I was floundering, with a, you know, Just creating text posts only, and gaining no traction really. Like I, last February I gained almost zero traction. And so I've kind of been down that path. If you're just starting out, you know, my two main, so two things that I think are super important because there's a lot of LinkedIn advice out there. So the way that you structure posts. You know, like we were talking about earlier, Audrey, like the hook there, you have like, that's all out there. You should know that. So you should understand what works well on LinkedIn. but I think what's really important once you have those basics down are two things. Really. The first is finding folks who you respect, you know, content creators that you really love and start engaging with their content. You know, that changed a lot for me because I was posting and ghosting really in the beginning and I thought that content was the only thing that mattered, which is a big mistake. So that held me back for a few months when I was first starting, but it is really important to go out there and I think engaging, start engaging with our content and getting in the process of what it feels like to engage with their content. And so the pushback that I'll typically get there is, I don't know what to say, like I don't know what to comment, I don't, I can't just comment, I don't have an opinion on everyone's post every day, how am I going to comment every day as part of setting up this process, and my easiest advice is just like, Give someone a, give someone a compliment on their post. It doesn't have to be super deep. It doesn't have to be a unique POV. If you have that, that's nice. But otherwise you could just share that you like the post, or you like the certain element about the post, or you really like the visual, or whatever it is. I think spreading that positivity helps content creators. Anybody that is a content creator knows that, when you put out content and it bombs, it doesn't feel good. Like even today, even the biggest creators that I talked to, they still say the same thing. Like when they put out a post that they thought was going to do well, it didn't do well. It, it doesn't feel nice. Right. So just spreading positivity is a way to, to, to start that process. Even if you don't know what to say in the beginning. So getting into a habit of doing that just five, 10 minutes a day, we'll start to, those content creators will start to notice who you are, which is very important on LinkedIn. The second piece is to this is once you start creating content, just know that your content is not going to do well in the beginning, like it's going to take time, as you mentioned, six months to gain traction, probably at least right? And, but once you start doing it. It's not okay to just do it. So you have to start improving your content over time. This is super important because I see a lot of other creators get stuck in a plateau where they're basically posting the same level of content over and over again for long periods of time, like six months, they're just still doing the same post. It's like the wordy carousel with like all this text on it. It's like the content's not improving. And I think when that happens, All of that work that you're doing to comment on other creators posts, you're not getting the reciprocity people aren't like those creators aren't coming back and and repaying the favor with a comment on your post because the content's not improving, you know, it, it gets boring to like comment on someone's content if it's if it's not if it's just boring content. So I think you have to really take that seriously. And And look at what's working, you know, study what's working and constantly think about how do I make my message more clear? How do I make it more precise? Is this valuable to someone? Is this actionable? Can they actually do it? So you're not just posting the high level like, you know, people don't quit their job, they quit a bad boss or whatever, you know? Like, everyone's seen that before and it's too high level and it's not actionable, doesn't help. You know, it may help somebody one day who's having a bad day, but it's not helping people constantly. And so I would say those two things are the most important, which is your content is going to suck. Just keep doing it. Trying to get a little bit better every time you post something and you'll be okay. And then the second is just, yeah, go out and find 20 to 50 people that you respect and make a habit of just commenting on their posts every day. You will find some that start to come back and comment on your post. And that is really important for reach. Like that reciprocity effect on LinkedIn is super, super important for reach. Like once, I had larger creators coming back and starting to engage with my content. That's really where my content started to take off. So I would think those two things, you know, don't, don't skip those. Cause if you skip one or the other, you're going to struggle to, to see like a really accelerated growth path. Yeah,

Audrey: 38:52

thank you so much for those insights. MJ, I think what you say is so spot on. What people don't realize is LinkedIn is still a social media platform. At the end of the day, you still need the engagement. They reward community, they reward reciprocity. So that's something that you really want to double down on, especially in the beginning phases when you are just starting out. And with that, MJ, where can our listeners find you?

MJ: 39:15

I'm super similar. Just go find me on LinkedIn, MJ Jandel. You'll, you'll see me out there. I'm really, I'm really focusing on LinkedIn versus other platforms. When I start posting on them, on other platforms, I'll mention on LinkedIn and you'll see it. So if you, you can find me there. Yeah,

Audrey: 39:29

thank you so much again for your time, NJ, and thank you for joining us. It was a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you guys too for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to the AI Market Display Book and hit the bell for more actionable marketing insights. We'll see you next week.