Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Waking Up Your Professional Network About this episode Most executives struggle to maintain consistent LinkedIn presence. Adam Rich, CEO of Known For and founder of Thrillist, explains how AI-powered editorial systems can transform professional expertise into authentic executive content. The discussion covers expert-in-the-loop AI workflows that eliminate content creation homework, strategic approaches to LinkedIn post promotion versus organic reach, and how B2B marketing authority is shifting from corporate brands to individual thought leaders.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:16 Speaker 04 12x. The combined network of your employees are about 12x larger than your own company following, according to LinkedIn. That's a distribution engine sitting inside your company that's mostly unused. Personal profiles generate five times more reach than company pages. But the people with the most credibility in your organization, your executives, aren't publishing. So how do you activate the people who actually have authority without turning executive content into a distraction? I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and today I'm joined by Adam Rich, the CEO of Known For, which turns professional expertise into consistent executive content using an expert-in-the-loop editorial system.
1:57 Speaker 04 Adam was also the founder of Thrillist, which he scaled to 300 million monthly users before its acquisition by Vox Media. And today, Adam is going to explain why LinkedIn authority in B2B marketing is shifting from brands more to people. Adam, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:14 Speaker 05 Hey, how's it going?
2:16 Speaker 04 Excited to have you here. First off, longtime fan of your work at Thrillist. Good to have you as my new friend and buddy. You went from running a B2C media property that guys like me know and love to B2B marketing. What went wrong?
2:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, living the dream. You know, really, the death of the media industry at large kind of slowed my role in terms of pursuing that exact channel. But you know, the common thread between both Thrillist and Known For is these were things that I needed just as a person in my life. I led a much more fun life when I was 24 that led the Thrillist, and I needed help knowing how to spend my time and how to have fun. And then after my exit, I was like so many of my clients, unable to string together consistent professional publishing despite knowing a lot of stuff. And realized that I had the insight and you know, the tools
3:16 Speaker 05 to create something that really solved the problem for me.
3:20 Speaker 04 Sadly, the party ends for all of us, but it looks like you're doing great right now. And I want to talk about LinkedIn and some of the content strategies that are working there specifically today. It always seems like the person that you sit down and have a beer with is insightful and knowledgeable about their area of expertise. And then you go on LinkedIn and it's just everybody else shouting from the rooftops, the same all sorts of stuff. Why does that happen? And why can't you get real thought leadership into LinkedIn?
3:51 Speaker 05 You know, the thing that I should have understood sooner because it affected me as well, is the discomfort going from knowing your stuff to raising your hand and saying that you know your stuff. I think that a lot of people, you know, imposter syndrome may be overstating it, but I think that being performatively smart about something feels really awkward to a lot of people. And indeed, one of the things that Known For helps our clients with is just the...
4:22 Speaker 05 Interview modality being something where, you know, having another person be curious about what you have to say and draw you out, kind of like helps you sidestep a little bit of that discomfort with talking about yourself and what you know. And, you know, and I think what you're alluding to is exactly right. You see so much chatter in professional spaces, and it's not the people who know the most, it's the people who chatter the most. That's simply it.
4:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, the word that you said that I really anchored on was performative. And, you know, I've done this. I've posted some really cringe-worthy content over the years. And hey, I'm not afraid to admit it. I am a recovering content marketer. And it seems like the people that are posting the most frequently and honestly get the most shine from LinkedIn often are the ones who are performing. And also, it's the doom and gloom. And here's what you're missing. And here's what you're doing wrong, as opposed to real facts, real business, and real insight. How do we start to change that? Is it a LinkedIn platform problem? Is it a content problem? What's the way to get real, actual substance?
5:30 Speaker 05 Well, look, I mean, I think the first step is to recognize that LinkedIn is an attention business. And their priority is LinkedIn, and you're spending more time there. And so, higher engagement content and more of it advances their business. And so, that's kind of them being them. I think where people run into problems is thinking that LinkedIn is something that it isn't, that it's there to help your career, that it's there to help you get a job. It's there to have you spend time on it. And so, as long as you understand that that's the imperative that flows through every decision they make, from their UX to their algorithm, then you can at least start to figure out how you want to show up there,
6:12 Speaker 05 and how to really kind of thread the needle between, you know, what you feel is your authentic brand, and what it is that they're going to reward and show to people. And, you know, the right strategy is the thing that is a livable compromise between those two things.
6:25 Speaker 04 I saw a great stat the other day. 60% of all bad executive decisions were made based on LinkedIn content. Can you verify or deny?
6:35 Speaker 05 Well, look, I mean, 80% of people know that there's a statistic for every outcome.
6:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, and 60% of the time, it works all the time.
6:43 Speaker 05 That's right. That's right.
6:46 Speaker 04 Let's talk a little bit about executives.
6:48 Speaker 05 Sex, Pentor, Correlate, yeah.
6:49 Speaker 04 Exactly, and I think some of that's actually working on LinkedIn is like, I tried this thing once, it must be true, I'm gonna shout it from the mountaintops. It seems like the people that actually have the knowledge and probably the statistics that we're joking about a little bit are the executives at most companies, and they are the people often that are the least likely to post consistently. Why is it so hard for executives to get their thoughts out there?
7:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, they're caught in a really understandable bind where they're time poor, but because of their reputation and the fact that they've done good work and built their careers into something they're proud of, they can't publish anything that is going to make them look bad or that isn't fully considered. And so they're trapped in a state of inaction where they just can't devote the time to publish anything that doesn't result in a downside of exposure. And so that's a little bit of the thing that I think a lot of the AI tooling and the writing technologies that are out right now are kind of promising to address.
7:58 Speaker 05 But what's been interesting to see is, you know, kind of following that like Gartner hype cycle a little bit, people being really excited about the idea of AI helping alleviate this time crunch and then looking at what comes out the other side and recognizing that this is all reputational harm waiting to happen. But it doesn't really change that there is this situation where the more impressive you are, the more you have to lose by showing up in the wrong way.
8:26 Speaker 04 I've been doing a ton of research on mid-market B2B CMOs for our production company, and one of the big problems is what they call the sea of sameness, where everybody's using the same models, so everyone sounds the same. And I feel like we're obviously seeing that in LinkedIn, and most of it is just the pattern matching of what LinkedIn content looks like it's driven or written by AI and what actually sounds like it's a real person. It's not just a time poor problem. It is a message crafting problem as well. How do you write content if you're going to use LinkedIn or use artificial intelligence to help you craft your message without just sounding like a robot?
9:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, you know, I've actually got a little bit of a conferrian opinion about this. It's born of my time in the media industry in general, but we learned this over and over again at Thrillist that your audience is always a distracted one and you imagine that they're paying more attention to what you're creating than they actually are. And so it's the biggest levers of content strategy that actually are the most important. And the single biggest thing that you can focus on is are you talking about the right stuff? It's my sort of truism about this is, you know, 90% of content success is topic selection. 9% is a fresh insight and 1% is reassuring people that you're credible enough for them to pay attention to
9:54 Speaker 05 and maybe even repeat. And that's really the way that I focus the work that I do with clients where, you know, yeah, you don't want to sound like AI, but the issue with sameness isn't about tone. It's about not having something, something to talk about or something fresh to add to the thing that everybody's talking about. You know, I think what, what you would find is that if somebody is dialed into the exact right issue and adds something really fresh and really arresting, they could have all the M dashes and the it's not X, it's Y's in it and people would still appreciate what they have to say because they're actually adding value. We're really, really focused on this packaging lever that is like one half of that remaining 1%.
10:40 Speaker 04 I want to add Ian that the now I have the full picture because that's my favorite AI. Like what it always says, maybe that's just a Claude thing, but now I have the full picture.
10:50 Speaker 05 It's very reassuring, yeah.
10:52 Speaker 04 Um, I, I, yeah, it's hard to digest that you're saying, well, hey, look, your tone doesn't really matter. Uh, if you get the right topic, um, when it's clearly drafted by AI as opposed to you. Something about that doesn't, uh, doesn't sit right with me, right? When I read a post and somebody is clearly using, or I'm, I'm seeing the not X, but Y. Now I have the full picture, but wait, there's more.
11:17 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
11:17 Speaker 04 Um, I either think the person is trying to pretend to be like Steve Jobs. Um, hey, there's one more thing, uh, or they, they didn't actually write it themselves. And so there's an authenticity piece. Let's, let's, let's double click on that. How do you figure out authenticity?
11:32 Speaker 05 And look, I mean, I think that that is something where we, right now, I think i- i- in a previous era, you would exclude yourself, um, in what you had to say by seeming unprofessional, by typos, that kind of thing. And I think that we have a new version of that kind of lack of professionalism in professional publishing. And it's the naked AI, like, writing crutches. Um, and that's a little bit of a pass fail. You know, if your stuff looks fishy, people will just tune it out. And so, you know, I, I think maybe I'm overstating it that it's half of 1%. But I think you basically need to clear a threshold of being credible. And part of that is not reading like AI.
12:15 Speaker 05 Part of that is not reading like, you know, it was something you scrawled in Crayon and then you can't spell. And part of that is also being able to validate your opinion. You know, that 9%, that fresh kind of contribution to a busy issue. That's the sort of, you know, the story that backs it up or the color on the, on the position that you're sharing. All three of those things essentially reassure your audience that you can be taken seriously, that they should continue to read what you have to say and that they can assimilate it into their understanding of an issue that they care about.
12:50 Speaker 04 Look, the headline here is the topic matters the most and then what your new, unique perspective is. And you're saying, as long as you have a minimum threshold for tone that doesn't, uh, trigger the, this is obviously AI generated. You can use AI to write your content. It's okay. Walk me through your process. Let's go from the what to the how. Uh, you're sitting down with executives and helping them create a really high quality content that they're publishing consistency. Walk me through your methodology.
13:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, it's like you explained, it's an expert in the loop system where, you know, it's essentially set up to let AI do what it does well and have a person do what it doesn't. It begins with a signal session, a conversation, not unlike this, where I talk to the executives about the things going on in their world. These are people with their finger on the pulse and they know what matters at that moment. And they share what they have to say. And my job, or you know, the other people that work for me, is to draw them out and ask them why they think that and who should care about this, or why is this not the way that people already think? And just to make sure that you get a whole lot of rich data and rich signal, because
14:05 Speaker 05 my system is all 100% the ideas of the subject. It doesn't come from me, it doesn't come from AI. And so the single biggest thing we can do is gather a lot of really rich signal. And then, you know, the steps from there have these points of editorial intervention where, you know, we make sure that it's organizing the content around a coherent assertion, something that's interesting, something that adds value, because these are always going to be busy topics. You know, the right content strategy isn't to talk about something that nobody's thought about yet and that you're going to blow them away. I mean, The New Yorker gets to do that sometimes, but even they don't always. And so that idea of the fresh assertion is something that, you know, has a lot of editorial
14:48 Speaker 05 rigor to it in the process that we built. And then, you know, taking it through the packaging, making sure it's platform native. And we do a lot of help for LinkedIn, but I run a bunch of newsletters for clients that, you know, don't want to have to worry about feeding the beast, but know that a weekly newsletter is a really direct connection with your audience in a way to really kind of claim a lot of voice in their consideration. So, you know, that's sort of one of the later steps in the thing. And ultimately, everything gets like a human pass, just to catch the, you know, I get the full pictures of it all.
15:24 Speaker 04 You know, you have an unfair advantage because you've been working in media and you've seen sort of the up and downsize and ebbs and flows of the industry. And now you're sitting down with executives and you're interviewing them and asking them for...
15:38 Speaker 04 Perspectives and opinions. And so you inherently can pull out what a good topic is or what seems like it's interesting using intuition. Most of us that haven't worked in media for a long time don't have that skill. So how could we recognize what a good topic would be? Like what you're doing?
15:56 Speaker 05 Well, you know, I have years in the media business, but I wouldn't say that, you know, it was never anything I studied. Intuition was something I developed as I went, but part of that was by being my own audience at Thrillist. You know, I was a young guy in a city looking to have fun. And, you know, I think the more that you can empathize with the person you're creating the content for, the more that you're going to unlock an editorial capacity to know when you're talking about something good. You know, would you read it? That's the biggest question that you can ask yourself. And if you find that you're tuning out, preparing your own content, you're in trouble.
16:35 Speaker 04 I feel like we're always too close to the source, right? Would I read the topic that's interesting to me? Yes, because it's something that I have vested interest in because I'm working on it. How do you separate, understand what's interesting to you might be interesting to other people, but separate out and create some distance from, you know, the self-promotion aspect and what's actually useful to the audience?
16:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I think that the, I think that there's, there's sort of two answers to that. The first is simply that you're not always going to know. And part of the content game is creating a lot of content, but whether that's B to B, B to C, you're going to need to take a lot of shots and you're going to learn. But the other part is to really be, to try to be as honest as possible about whether this is something that's going to add value to that person's time. You know, early on at Thrillist, we made a strategic decision that we would only ever publish recommendations. It was always going to be something that, you know, came to you and told you something that was worth remembering and trying. And that idea of always showing up with some value to confer was something that, I think, anyway,
17:44 Speaker 05 helped us really earn the devotion of the audience that we built. And I think that that's something that we can all take into the professional publishing we do.
17:54 Speaker 04 Tell me a little bit more about what you learned from Thrillist and specifically, what can you take that goes from that B to C media publishing lens that is applicable into B to B?
18:04 Speaker 05 I think broadly speaking,
18:07 Speaker 05 B2B is a very misunderstood designation because it actually doesn't describe a different kind of audience or consumer. I think what it does is allow you to go narrower and nichier in terms of the what, the things you talk about. But at the end of the day, there's no difference between a B and a C. It's just a person sitting there, probably reading it on a phone. Maybe they're sitting at a desk if it's a B. But like, this is also a person who's thinking about what time they're gonna try and hit the bridge to miss traffic. And they're also worried about whatever they didn't do in the morning. And they have 10 other things that are competing for their time. That reality of distraction doesn't abate when you put on your work hat.
18:51 Speaker 05 And so that idea of being consumer good with your B2B content is really something I encourage all of the people I work with to take to heart. Because, you know, B2B lets you go and talk about like server architecture where I wouldn't wanna go and like publish something for the general public about that. But, you know, you still need to grab somebody and appeal to them emotionally and speak to the needs that they came in with and add some value for them.
19:18 Speaker 04 I feel like there's this line with B2B as opposed to B2C. B2C, you can be a little bit more fun. You could be a little bit more engaging, a little bit more dangerous in your tone and copy. And the feeling is with B2B, you have to be very serious and credible and robotic. And honestly, that's how we get into this like corporate website, like just don't understand what the company does, like doesn't use plain English, but it sounds serious and fancy. How do you start to engage and move past that like traditional corporate description into actually making relationships with your prospects and customers?
19:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I think the first step there, look, it's a great question, but I think the first step is really knowing your prospect and understanding that person. And, you know, there's a way where the kind of formality of B2B is a part of the value delivery. Because if you are too off the cuff and casual, are you credible? You know, like, is what you're saying actually going to add value? Or are they going to say, like, this person is doing bits and joking around? And I'm trying to talk about zero day vulnerabilities in my code base. Like, I can't listen to what this person has to say. So that's an example of, you know, too casual a tone undermining value.
20:36 Speaker 05 But, you know, when a more casual tone or a more conspiratorial kind of message allows this person to feel that you're empathizing with them, that you relate to them, that you share their position. There's a lot of value to be gained by, you know, kind of loosening the tie a little bit. I think, you know, you can't know the right answer to that, though, until you understand who it is that needs to care about what you're saying and what it is they need to to feel in that tone in order to come away the better for engaging with you.
21:08 Speaker 04 Maybe it's just my opinion, but if you can't make fun of the potential collapse of, you know, the banking system or security or basically culture as we know it, what are we doing here? You can't have any fun.
21:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, look, you can laugh about it or cry about it.
21:23 Speaker 04 It seems like we're going one way or the other. I happen to be very optimistic about some of the changes. But let's talk practically about the publishing mechanism. And specifically, you're working and doing a lot of work on LinkedIn. Tell me how you think about the funnel on LinkedIn and really where does the executive content that you're producing actually have the most impact?
21:45 Speaker 05 The unavoidable reality of it is that who you are makes the biggest difference when it comes to LinkedIn. If you are a super intelligent, you know, upstart who just started his career or her career, and you've got great things to say. It is a very, very slow grind to get to where people are paying attention to you, that the algorithm is really favoring you. It's not, it's not like TikTok where, you know, the right content can really explode. I much, much more frequently with my clients see the opposite, where I'm working with somebody who is later on in their career. They've accumulated thousands and thousands of LinkedIn.
22:26 Speaker 05 Followers because thousands and thousands of people have met them through their career and been impressed with them and connected. And maybe this is a person who almost never publishes and they have this kind of standing hunger for their thoughts. That starting to publish and starting to kind of unlock their ideas with my system really goes and. Addresses and sort of activates this this dormant audience.
22:54 Speaker 04 It's interesting. Your your nobody till somebody loves you is what's going through my head and and in LinkedIn. Maybe that's, you know, a little too true where you could write the best post in the world. But if you're just some guy on the street, it doesn't really matter and you could write something that's just garbage. But if you're a CEO of a prominent company, you're going to have an unfair and a distinct advantage. I think that's one of the things that we're seeing is not just who is publishing, but also where in the organization. Right? And often we're seeing the difference between brands and people. Tell me about the bifurcations between company pages and people pages and why are we leaning more towards people?
23:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, look, there's sort of two considerations and one is. The kind of gamesmanship of the of the the platform where, you know, LinkedIn is is sort of trying to get people to connect. That's what it is using to engage us. And so company pages just have really low algorithmic reach compared to people. But on the other hand, people represent people to us, just for a lack of a better way to say it. And we are wired to want to connect with people and the the sort of, you know.
24:09 Speaker 05 Like hominid in us is here to connect to other people and that is in our wiring. It's in our gray matter and that thing of a message with a person behind it carries a lot more weight than a message. From a brand and I don't know what that brand means or what it's done or what it represents. Almost no brand has enough consistency and equity at this point for the fact that it's saying it. To confer any kind of inherent credibility to it. There's, you know, a handful of those, whereas a person, we very quickly can assign them attributes and qualities that we see in ourselves and that we see in others.
24:51 Speaker 05 And there's just like that sort of humanity boost is something that, you know, has been the case kind of forever, but is all the more interesting right now when everybody's kind of also out with their pitchforks and torches for things that are written by the robots.
25:09 Speaker 04 People want to buy from people. There's no getting around that. And maybe with the exception of Claude, which seems to be, you know, an anthropic, which everybody seems to, you know, love and, and, and think very fondly of as if it were a person. The, the brand is this entity that's meant to house people. And I feel like we often get away from that idea, which is like, people are supposed to live inside the brand. It should be the opposite. Just practically speaking, when you're working on publishing for your clients, how much content, how frequently, what format, just give us the lay of the land for what's working on LinkedIn today.
25:44 Speaker 05 The big myth that I find myself busting with clients is that there's any sort of preset frequency that you need to hit. You know, there may or may not be some kind of algorithmic value assigned to the person that shows up X number of times a week. But I actually think what's far more important is what does the frequency or the format, how does that align with your brand, you know, like if you are a late in your career, like, you know, I don't know, global management consultant, like killer, you're not supposed to be posting on LinkedIn three, four, five times a week because you're busy. You're out there flying to Singapore for something and that is your brand.
26:25 Speaker 05 And, um, you know, that's like, I would think it was weird if like this management consultant had, you know, a slideshow, you know, like that may be the format that people that are, you know, LinkedIn brand experts are using and seeing a lot of algorithmic lift from. Certainly those like little carousels are something that, you know, you read reports about the algorithm really favoring, but it doesn't really make sense to exploit that for additional reach if it's sending a message that runs counter to who you want to be seen as.
26:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, I've seen different arguments that the more you publish on LinkedIn, the more engagement you get with people that are in your audience. And then, once they engage with the content, the more widely it gets distributed. And so, you know, I feel like there's this balance of frequency and depth. And hey, maybe if you're the management consultant and you're flying around the world all the time, and that's sort of your brand, being a little mysterious is a good thing for the brand and not being so visible. I do think that in general, the more content you publish within reason, the more likely you are to have your content circulated on the platform.
27:38 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, it's surface area, right? It's, I think, you know, that's the thing that, that really, that's the reason why consistency is so important and regularity is, you know, it is about providing like discovery and awareness, surface area.
27:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, I hear you. And I do think that there's something to be said for when you engage with somebody on the platform, then they're more likely to see your post. So it's not just about how often you're posting, it's also how engaged you are, how many, when somebody's comments, they're going to see your next post most, more likely. So the algorithm is not as simplistic as you gotta post five times a week. It's, it's a little more complicated than that.
28:14 Speaker 05 When you think about it for your own purposes, or when you're talking to people about this, like, is there a frequency that you tend to settle on?
28:22 Speaker 04 I try to publish three times a week, one being a publish, you know, basically promoting the Martech podcast interview that I do, and whenever we're publishing, that's every week or every two weeks, depending on how many sponsors we have. I want to do something thoughtful, that is talking about what we're doing with I Hear Everything, my production business. And then I want one observation around what's happening in the market. And in reality, I'm publishing like once a week because, you know, life gets in the way. And I wish I could be more thoughtful, but that's, that's in theory, my strategy. All right. I want to move on to our lightning round, where I'm going to ask you a couple of Martech related questions about activating your professional network and some of your previous experience. Are you ready?
29:03 Speaker 05 Let's go.
29:04 Speaker 04 All right. First question, we're going to start off with a little bit of LinkedIn. Should you boost your best performing LinkedIn post with paid, or let organic do the work entirely?
29:14 Speaker 05 I think that that is another brand question. I think it's not a great look to have your post coming out with like a little promoted thing there. But I think that it's sort of expected for certain kinds of professionals, depending on what they're doing. And, you know, I think also take it with a grain of salt because again, people are very distracted. And I would bet you that most people miss the little promoted tag, especially if they're on mobile. But, um, you know, I think that if you at all feel like you have your brand to protect, boosting is a little bit of a sleazy look.
29:49 Speaker 04 You know, it's funny, I think of it a little differently on LinkedIn as opposed to other platforms like YouTube. YouTube, you give them a dollar, they take away all your organic. It seems like with LinkedIn, when you start promoting your content, they actually give it more visibility. And maybe it's, I boosted this, somebody engaged and that engagement then goes and drives more organic traffic. I don't have a problem seeing promoted posts. What I do have a problem with is seeing the promoted post 27 times. I think there is a time duration or a frequency that really matters. So you can take a post and you could push it and make sure it gets out there. But I don't want to see your same post for three weeks in a row.
30:32 Speaker 04 Now you're just cluttering my feed and then I start to be more aware of the posting. And that's my personal opinion.
30:38 Speaker 05 Well, and I think that there's also a little bit of an intent thing where, you know, if, if we're talking about the CEO of some company with a thought on an important issue. I mean, that's sort of an organic message. If I saw that boosted, that would feel kind of weird. And I would wonder what his handlers are trying to do with his, with his profile. Whereas if it's somebody basically talking about like, hey, we're going to help you with your, with financing your small business, that's a message where I see that that's promoted. And it's like, well, yeah, of course it is.
31:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't know. I, I promote a lot of my personal posts. Mostly because when I don't, I get 600 impressions and I'm promoting it to my first party audience, right? People I already have connections with. But if I give LinkedIn 50 bucks, then all of a sudden I get six times the amount of impressions to the audience that I want to reach. I don't care if it has the promoted tag, call me shameless. I told you, I do cringe worthy things on LinkedIn. I'm not proud. Let's move on to the next question. What's the biggest lesson you learned scaling Thrillist to 300 million monthly users?
31:44 Speaker 05 It was really just about consistency and quality. That was the name of the game. Thrillist for most of its sort of early days was a newsletter, barely a website. And that thing of showing up every day with something good, something we could recommend, was really, really hard. And it was a tremendous executional undertaking. And operationalizing a team around doing that in 21 different cities was the undertaking of my career. But it was what allowed us to grow and to earn the trust of as many people as we did. And it really was, you know, showing up every day, being consistent.
32:29 Speaker 05 You could count on us and we're going to show up with quality. And we are going to, you know, have some relevance and some timeliness so that when you get that email, there's a reason why I'm getting it today.
32:41 Speaker 04 When did you leave Thrillist? And I don't know if it actually closed, if the domain is still around, but in your mind, when did it wrap up?
32:49 Speaker 05 I left in 2018 and I assume it became bad right after that. But it's, no, it's still around and they got some good people working there. You know, it's, it really feels like it had kind of a heyday in the end of the aughts, early teens. And, you know, it really felt like it was aligned with the zeitgeist around then of kind of the explosion of craft and all kinds of, of cities really kind of exploring their like culinary traditions. And, you know, the craft beer thing happening and barbecue exploding and burger worship kind of peaking. And, you know, all of these things really kind of were tailwinds for us.
33:35 Speaker 04 It's funny that your answer was consistency. And when I assumed your response was going to be more about cracking into the zeitgeist and building the brand. And I think, you know, the most remarkable thing about Thrillist is you left in 2018. So obviously it was downhill from there. But it's still a brand that has that recall, right? When we were introduced and somebody said, oh, this is the founder of Thrillist. I'm like, Thrillist, know it, love it. It's still in my memory as a place to go find cool stuff to do. How did you do that?
34:07 Speaker 05 I mean, look, that was, that's consistency. I'm sorry to say, Benjamin, it's, you know, you can have your brand want to represent all kinds of things, but it's only if you reinforce it 100 times in a row with zero variation or confusion that your average kind of distracted, overwhelmed consumer starts to have an association with it, much less any kind of real trust or affinity. You know, the zeitgeist part was a huge, a huge strategic element of creating a breakout brand and, you know, really kind of a sine qua non for existing and succeeding. But that intention wouldn't have meant anything if we weren't able to show up every single day and earn
34:51 Speaker 05 that trust kind of brick by brick.
34:54 Speaker 04 All right, I'm bouncing around back and forth. We're gonna go back to LinkedIn.
34:57 Speaker 05 Go.
34:57 Speaker 04 True or false, putting links in your LinkedIn post kills your reach?
35:01 Speaker 05 True. I feel like every now and then you'll see something where someone at LinkedIn is like, no, no, no, that's not true anymore. But like, anecdotally, you can see that, you know, that is still kind of what's happening. And then from a commonsensical standpoint, why would they facilitate people leaving LinkedIn when this is an attention business?
35:21 Speaker 04 Somebody on LinkedIn can say, no, links don't affect your posts on LinkedIn, but they're definitely not putting a link in that post because no one would see it if they did.
35:29 Speaker 05 That's right. That's right.
35:30 Speaker 04 Let's move on to the next question. What's one LinkedIn best practice that is actually a waste of time?
35:36 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, this is gonna kind of get back to the consistency conversation we were just having, but I think that feeling like you've got to publish at some schedule that is misaligned with your brand or your pace of insights is a really quick way to waste a lot of time and, you know, probably turn people off of you and your message. You know, it's, you'd love to have something great to say every day, but, you know, if that's just not the frequency with which you're finding you've got stuff that's really must-read, you're better off publishing less and having it be better.
36:14 Speaker 04 I think there's a big difference between what I'll call the consumer social networks and the professional social networks. And often, at least I have this desire.
36:24 Speaker 04 I can like be inspired by something. Mostly on Instagram, the only thing I ever post anymore is pictures of the grapevines that I grow in my backyard. Cause we make a whopping five bottles of wine a year.
36:36 Speaker 05 That's pretty good.
36:37 Speaker 04 Thank you. Just getting through the process is the fun part. The volume doesn't matter. But, you know, I will take a picture and write a quick thumbnail and be like, all right, this is a inspirational. Like the moment has hit me, I'm just gonna post some content. And it's a snapshot. And I want LinkedIn to be like that. I am inspired by this beautiful thing I'm working on. Let me just quickly throw it out there on the web and people will shine the light on it and see my brilliance. It doesn't effing work that way.
37:09 Speaker 05 Are you concerned that you're maybe not doing enough beautiful stuff?
37:13 Speaker 04 Uh, no, I got plenty of stuff going on. That's not the problem. It takes work, it takes effort to craft the message and to write something that is considerate and thoughtful and useful for the audience. As opposed to here's a screenshot of this new deck standard that I have right here, everything. I might love it, no one else cares.
37:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, look, I mean, that's a little bit, some of that is the, is the medium, right? Like the, the taking a photograph of something that's gonna mean something in a moment to the people that follow you on Instagram is a much more natural way of conveying your thoughts and sharing.
37:48 Speaker 04 All right, last question for you, Adam. Tell me a little bit about the way that you're using artificial intelligence to manufacture content at scale.
37:57 Speaker 05 The beauty of the moment with AI is in just how much it can amplify intent. I think that that's something that is, the, the conversation is starting to coalesce around is this idea of intent. And that being the thing that at least for now, we're responsible for. And so, you know, this idea of, you know, having all of the, all of the, I, I like the Claude sweep, but having all those tools to basically take the ideas of, you know, a solopreneur like myself and turn those into whole systems, whole processes, you know, whether those are living in code or they're things that are, you know,
38:39 Speaker 05 I, I build a lot of my system in Notion just cause it's a really handy way to basically create editorial systems that are, you know, plain English, but work as, you know, real. Enforced code, you know, that's, that's sort of a remarkable way to translate what I did for years at Thrillist where, you know, you had documentation and you had rules and you had people and you would talk to them about how you did this. And that same kind of editorial discipline is something that having AI be this language system really just is like, it's, it's like a one-to-one comparison.
39:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's, it's funny. I think that's one of the reasons why we see eye to eye. We're both sort of in the same boat in the sense of being solopreneurs or, or people that are managing relatively small teams, but trying to do really big things. And I think that using Claude Code or any of the other coding agents allows organizations to be smaller, but also take on a big challenge. So, you know, we'll have to keep doing it and let's, let's keep exchanging some notes there.
39:48 Speaker 05 That sounds great. Well, thanks for, uh, thanks for having me on.
39:51 Speaker 04 All right, Adam. Great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for coming on and being my guest. And that wraps up this episode of the MarTech Podcast. Thanks to Adam Rich, the CEO of Known For for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Adam, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com. You can always visit his website, which is getknownfor.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right. That's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
40:54 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the MarTech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.
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