Why B2B Marketers Need to Start Thinking Like Media Companies with Melissa Rosenthal

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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2:38It's convertive.com slash exit 5. That's convertive.com slash exit 5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

3:02Ladies and gentlemen, we're back. Another episode of the Exit 5 podcast. My guest on this episode is Melissa Rosenthal. She is the co-founder of Outlever, where she's building the world's largest enterprise media company. And that's what we talked about on this episode for you, lessons in how to build a media company for B2B. We talk about how, look, the fact AI right now is commoditizing content, right? All this AI stuff has made it nearly impossible to stand out on product alone. And so what do you do? Well, one idea, one path is to go and build a media company. She has done this. She worked at Buzzfeed.

3:37She helped launch Cheddar. She ran a bunch of the brand and marketing initiatives at ClickUp. And her whole thing is all about being a media company, but not in the way that I say it, not in the way of just write a blog post a week. I'm talking about, she told me she's sleeping four hours a night because she's just news jacking and figuring out what's relevant and happening right now in all of these different industries. And if you need a little boost in your content strategy, your marketing strategy, because you're tired of all the AI slop in your feed, I want you to listen to this conversation with Melissa and think about how you can apply some of these lessons to rethink content for 2026, 2027.

4:14You can't just be pumping out listicles anymore. So enjoy this conversation with Melissa. Go find her on LinkedIn. Follow her. You can see her whole content playbook play out in real time. This was a really good one. Get the notebook ready. You were telling me before that you moved to San Diego to work at ClickUp, and I have known you in my head as BuzzFeed gal and now you're doing your own thing. I didn't realize you were at a ClickUp. Can you give me like the two minute career story? Who are you? How'd you get here? What do you do now? Yeah, it's a little weird. So early days, BuzzFeed. I started at BuzzFeed when there were 10 people.

4:51So very early, the company kind of blew up, became a household name in media. And my team there was all of brand, all of creative. I grew it to, I think we were like 150 people globally. my team and the company was over a thousand by the time I left. And yeah, I mean, that was like my education into kind of everything that has gone into my career since it's the frameworks of like why people share content, what resonates, how do you think about things and bucketize them into why people would share them and why people would like engage with them to begin with. So I feel like that was my education in like just psychological frameworks of like things that work and why they work.

5:27So that just is like kind of the narrative that will guide this conversation because everything comes back to that. So after BuzzFeed, I went to go start a media company called Cheddar with my partner and former boss at BuzzFeed named John Steinberg. And we started Cheddar because we saw what was happening with distribution across live media. So people were cutting the cord with cable. That was a crazy thing. Everyone had a cable bundle. And you had YouTube TV and you had Fubo and you had Pluto and all these new streaming OTT on demand services start popping up. And we were like, oh, well, that's this huge shift that we need to capitalize on.

6:02So we started Cheddar, which was a, which I guess it is, but it was a live media news network for millennials about finance and tech and AI. Well, not in the way that we know it, but very early, just like everything that we felt like wasn't being delivered on with traditional cable. And it was pretty successful. We were in every streaming service across the country. We had millions of viewers. We sold it to a cable company called Altice back in 2019. Yeah, right before COVID. I was like, well, I can't work at a cable company. That's just not who I am. And it didn't really like jive. So I decided to just kind of think about like what I wanted to do next.

6:41And it's funny because at that time, media from BuzzFeed to Cheddar, Cheddar worked because we were focusing on different types of distribution. But at that time, BuzzFeed was already starting to struggle because distribution had changed quite drastically with like Facebook taking more control over ad dollars and kind of killing the feed. So yeah, it was just like, wow, media is not on this like upward trajectory. I should kind of look elsewhere. And I was always really interested in tech and like where that was headed. And yeah, I was serendipitously, I was a ClickUp user and ClickUp reached out and said, hey, we're looking for a CMO.

7:13And I said, I'm probably not your CMO, but I can probably do some really great work for you. And we met and it worked like it was a great kind of partnership. And I worked there for four years under Zeb, leading brand and creative and all the things that kind of go into marketing outside of performance. And yeah, it was awesome. And then I left ClickUp and I was a CMO of this health and wellness app that I will not name for six months. And I was like, this is not for me. And then I launched my own company that sort of ties in, I think, the convergence of where I think things are headed and my experience at ClickUp and go to market and forward looking into what media should become.

7:49So that's the, I think like three minute TLDR of it all. It's not only will you not name, it's been scrubbed from your LinkedIn. So it doesn't never happen. It doesn't exist. Exactly. If you haven't had one of those, then you're not trying hard enough. It's my opinion. Fair. I've had that. It's okay. So I think the reason that I wanted to have you on our podcast is obviously you have incredible background and I've seen a bunch of your content. I think you're super well-spoken. And quite frankly, you just get it, I think, from a content standpoint. And so the people that listen to this podcast are mostly B2B marketing professionals, execs, VPs, CMOs, individual contributors.

8:29And the thing I wanna talk about with you is content, right? And so there's so many things here. And I wrote down this word from the beginning, which I love, you said bucketize, which is great. We're gonna get back to bucketizing content. But I wanna hear so much of what your background is at an actual media company. People like me for years have been parroting this thing that some people agree with or not, which is like every B2B company should be a media company. Really kind of what that means is just like you have to be good at producing content. You had a stint at ClickUp. So many people are doing content, but they're not actually getting business results from it.

9:03And then if you try to get business results from content, you like squeeze too tight and you try to like measure every article and video. I think you have an interesting point of view here. How can we try to unpack that? It's not even a question, but can we that's the thing I want to riff on with you having you here. Yeah, we can do that. I come at things from like a very logical perspective. And maybe it's like because I've been in media and I've been on like the B2C side and I like understand how people think. And then you go to B2B and it's like, let's convolute everything and then measure things that shouldn't be measured and measure them in silos and not measure the holistic thing of like what we're putting in.

9:38And it's like put in five percent of the effort that it actually takes. and then we want 150x the outcome. That's what I see with B2B. What would an example of that be? Like what's an example of something that we like spend 10 minutes on, but then expect it to drive 10 million in pipeline? I think it's just the breaking down of what a strategy is into one asset. That's what it is. The companies that are doing LinkedIn, if they don't see results in like two posts, well, this isn't working. That's the attitude of B2B. Like I'll summarize it in like that. And not everyone. There's definitely companies, I think that are forward looking and like understand what it takes and are staffed with the people that have that perspective on things.

10:17But I think B2B boils it down to like looking at two things under a microscope and say, well, these didn't work. So a strategy doesn't work rather than like, we're really going to invest in doing this for like three to six months. Let's measure and along the way, like iterate, but we're going to look at it as a holistic program and not like break it down into like a post. I just think that is crazy. It's mostly a strategy. It's a strategy thing. It's like not having a strong point of view about what we're going to go do and why we're going to do it. And we're not just going to do it for two months.

10:48I haven't been in B2B for more than ClickUp, right? So it could be just a sign of the times of like marketers are really afraid. I don't know. The company that I run right now, Exit5, is a media company in B2B. And I want to shout about this more because it's actually in consumer, like you have to have so much volume and so much reach and you have to reach hundreds of thousands of people to make the funnel math work on what the conversions are going to be on that. But in B2B, it's like if you're selling, oftentimes these companies are selling six or seven figure products. And so it's like, I don't actually need a million people to download my podcast.

11:28I need like a hundred of the right people. And you can actually live by that if you're willing to like lean into that as a strategy. It doesn't have to be this huge viral sensation. Yeah, a hundred percent. I just think that marketers don't think like that, period. They're not like media folks. So like when you're thinking about a strategy, they're thinking about it in terms of like, I don't know, white paper assets or like LinkedIn posts. And it's not this holistic thing. This is what we're building. This is our North Star of what we're building. I think if more people thought that way and then, okay, this is the North Star and then sort of like start to say, all right, these are the pieces of it.

12:02This is how we're going to execute there. It might just be easier to swallow. So we have a bunch of examples from you of people who do a good job of this. I just want to list them out and maybe you can kind of narrate them. But I think these are perfect examples of what it takes to stand out today and to build something meaningful in content versus just writing listicles, right? But you have Polymarket built its own media entity on LinkedIn is now heavily investing in becoming a media company. Ramp, I love this example when companies invest in the subject matter expert to do the content stuff, but Ramp keeps an economist on staff that makes data-driven content to stand on its own as journalism.

12:39Peter Walker, formerly of Carta, he's been creating data-based marketing insights for years. Another one, a guy that I follow is Kyle Boyer. These people aren't even trying to be content people. They're like, look at Lenny, what Lenny's done with Lenny's pockets. It's like, can you go super deep? Or I look at you, your content crushes on LinkedIn. And I honestly, I don't know how, not because it's not good, But it's like everyone tells you don't post images, don't post links. And like your funnel is like you post a screenshot of an article, a headline and a long thing, and you're just crushing it.

13:09So is that the thing is like we got to rethink. It's not this world of like hire a bunch of junior bloggers to like make content for you. There's something different happening here. Yeah. Well, let me I guess maybe I can explain what I'm actually doing and that might help. So you think, OK, you're like, all right, Melissa is just like writing these posts. They've got articles. There's this format. But the reality is we're also becoming a media company. So we have state of AI, state of brand, and we're launching 10 other state ofs in the next three weeks. So these are run by myself and right now two other full time people.

13:39We're becoming like an actual enterprise media organization. So the strategy there like ladders up to something, right? It's every day I'm going to do this. We know exactly who reads what article. We iterate on the types of content that those folks look at. There's a funnel that drives them to us as Outlever, which is my company. So there's a deeper strategy there. It's not like, let me just do this for fun. And I think a lot of people see it and they're like, well, Melissa's LinkedIn strategy is great. And it's like, yeah, but there's a lot kind of going on behind the scenes there, which I think is like what most people assume is a strategy, right?

14:12They're looking at the tip of the iceberg on something and they're like, well, this is what this person is doing. But they're not like going a layer deeper to be like, what is this person actually doing? Which is great for us because the people that actually find us to want to work with us already know what we're doing because they get it. they're landing on the articles and they're like, well, this is fucking smart. So they click on this and then they inbound us. So we already have this like very kind of qualified lead. But yeah, I think it's just like it's people look at this one thing and they think it's like the content performance is so much usually deeper than just like writing a post.

14:40The companies that I really admire, even Air does a fantastic job, I would say, for B2B because they understand their audience so deeply. They're like, oh, we need to reach creative people. And what do creative people like? They like good content. So we're going to come up with some good stuff and act like a media organization that has something to say. And I think that's not the other thing. I think companies have just like lost the like, what do we say? So they just say the same thing. And everyone is kind of the same company today. So that like makes it tough. I'm interested in the content thing that you mentioned before.

15:11So you have two publications that you have today, and you're going to launch a bunch more over the next couple of weeks. How do you be good at that at scale? I think with AI, you could use Claude and do a bunch of stuff and create a bunch of content. The volume is there. I've always struggled with hiring writers, training them. I'm like, it's never good enough. It's never good enough. You got to find these unique people like a Peter Walker, but they're never going to come work for you. How do you do it, Melissa? Yeah. I mean, we're not publishing original insights right now. The insights are basically on BuzzFeed-ifying enterprise, where I think about the frameworks.

15:42You're still turning something around. You're still saying something, or you don't have to produce an original insight. But if I read your stuff, I'm like, oh, this is good. But the perspective and the angle are the things that you have to train people on, which is the toughest thing to even be good at to start. Because if you don't have that perspective or that angle or understand like what the rallying cry is of that audience, then like you're kind of coming at it from like an empty perspective, which is not going to go anywhere. I now understand every piece of content and who it will resonate with and why and how the framing affects that.

16:11And that's what I try to train the people that work with me on these publications around. Is it hard? Yeah, it's not like easy, but that's the beauty of it. Nothing good is easy, which is why the ones that do it really well will stand out. And it's not for everyone. It's for companies that can have a perspective and can understand where they fit into that perspective. It is challenging to scale to 10 publications, which is our goal in the next three months. We're hiring a bunch of people, but they're going through a boot camp, which is my own boot camp of BuzzFeedification of enterprise, which I don't even know.

16:41I just made that up. Tell me what's in that. That's interesting. What's in the boot camp? Well, first of all, we've built like a bunch of tools internally to make things easier. So we will have people basically like a lot of our product that we do for customers is interviewing executives. So like a GLG kind of type of a model is in a way. And we have them go through this interview process where they'll use our tool to interview. And the tool helps guide them based on my brain, basically of what the questions are, where the interview will be stronger. but then they come out of it and then it's basically there's like a Melissa on the side of their screen and it's like hey here are the frameworks and the angles of what where this could head what do you think and they have to pick kind of it's like pick your own adventure of where this piece ends up and then we just do that over and over and over into repetition eventually they get it they start to get it because these people are like coming from traditional journalism backgrounds but then you can have like b2b expertise and that's I think what we found has a really good meet in the middle kind of okay we get I get where you're headed But yeah, it's a lot of repetition, obviously, doing these articles and over time understanding the angles and who will this reach and why will it reach them and why would they care and why would they comment on it and why would they share it?

17:47These are the questions that they have to answer for every article before they're set off and set free kind of on their own to do it. Is this something that you all built internally, this tool? Yeah, it's called Oliver. But yeah, it's Oliver's. It's everything. It's a CRM. It's an inbox. It's a brain. It's an interviewing tool. It's a sales intelligence tool. It's like a lot of things that B2B companies do. But we use that to enable us. We don't sell that. So we sell the end of what that result is. But that's for us specifically to allow us to do this, which I don't think anyone else will ever be able to build because it's just like my brain.

18:23Well, it's a good example of what it takes to be good. It's like a lot of proprietary knowledge. Yeah. All the stories we're covering are public stories. we're not just covering news though we're then inflecting in a perspective and an angle in that of like this is why this audience should care about this thing and the beauty of that though is that no other media company is really i would say niche creators kind of are for sure and then peter walker and like the the ramp folks and like people that are coming up with original data and forming perspectives on that are but traditional media can't do that today because they're just focused on breaking news to get clicks.

19:03So then you have, that's why obviously the media creator economy has flourished because traditional media companies can't afford to exist anymore. I mean, BuzzFeed just went bankrupt and got sold for 20 million. Oh my God, it doesn't work. So this alt model of where the actual perspective comes from when you're not chasing eyeballs and you're trying to really build an audience comes from like these unique perspectives. But I don't think everyone has that. So I think it's kind of like a finite resource, but you can train and with technology, you can sort of start to build around it. I mean, it's definitely not perfect, but it at least has like, there's a starting point.

19:34Do you have an opinion on where that content should be today? Should it be on your website? Should it be a podcast? Should it be LinkedIn? You know, we've always been taught about owned media and you want to remember the days of like Medium and be like, well, Medium's cool because it helps with distribution, but that's actually not going to rank. And it's just so much is changing right now. How would you guide the VP of marketing and B2B thinking about their content strategy with this answer? Yeah, I mean, great question. My like, if you can do it all, my answer is like kind of do it all. Owned Media is like doing all of these things well and creating kind of like this little empire of successful franchises within your company under the same, I think, masthead actually, but successful franchises.

20:14for a lot of our customers, we build third-party trade sites. So like we run, trying to think of one, like cxcurrent.com for a customer. We run thedatawire.com for a customer. So we're building out trade publications. And then there's a lot of other properties that are happening. Yeah. Okay. So for my company, as an example, we sell to B2B marketers. Some guy is trying to extort me via email and wants me to buy b2bmarketing.com. We could own that, have a publication there, be the number one source on B2B marketing. It happens to be brought to you by exit five. Yeah, I mean, that's what we sell.

20:46And then we sell other companies want to do it and build a hub on their own site, which we have a different strategy for. But that going back to your larger question, that is a part of it for sure. Having like an adjacent arm allows you to do really, really cool things. Like a lot of our customers are like doing dinners with open AI and doing awards and conferences, but through their through their media outlet now, and the ones that like get it really get it. They're super leaned in on it. This is lightning in a bottle because we can capture an audience and actually earn an audience that is coming to us for information and not for product.

21:16Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an exit five live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases and McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2 ,000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes.

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22:22Check them out at Optimizely.com slash exit five. That's Optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep. Before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search.

22:59and they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you and this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. But then there's having that newsletter attached to that, building a podcast off of it, doing conferences and award.

23:35The ones that see it working then extrapolate that out and build it into their own media empire, I would say. Okay. God, this is sick. This is so sick. This is so sick. Thank you. Thanks, thanks. Well, because you're not just making a blog for someone and you're saying like, no, we only want to, I only want to work with people who like believe this and the, cause I was gonna, I'm writing down a bunch of nonsense, but I'm thinking of all the objections people have. well, you know, we want to own that on our website. And it's like, well, it's the same reason why like the community gets ruined or this thing happens.

24:03It's like there's a gangster move from the beginning by the way you said like, nope, it's a company that's building their media outlet and it has a different name and a different place. And that's kind of like the 80 % of why it's going to work, right? Yes, yes. But there is. So we do also build for many of them now, like a complimentary hub on their own site to where they can comment from the company perspective on their own news so that there's an interlinking. It gets a little complex because our media companies also play a role in this in which we're kind of building out this immense network of backlinking and taboola style B2B content where some of that stuff is featured.

24:37So it's become like a very complex web. But yes, it starts with having this third party adjacent perspective on things. We built one the other day for a company that we're working with called talentsignalnews.com. And I'm super excited about that one because it's everything that has to do with the culture of hiring and what's happening within talent when resumes become commoditized by AI tools. So like there's two things that make me really excited about that one. It's one, like it's such a hot topic. Everyone's talking about it. B, the rallying cry for people that are really great to try to get attention and then for companies to try to figure out how to hire.

25:10It's kind of the convergence of like three things that I think make a media property really valuable. So when there's that and there's a clear perspective and a clear path, that's when I I think it does the best. So yeah, I'm excited about that one. We actually launched it last week. All right, this is awesome. This is what people are going to want. So let's talk about the mechanics of building your own media outlet. Who should do it? Maybe we could talk why too, because how do I measure this? How do I turn the results into pipeline? Who should do it? Let's just riff on some of that. I'm into this topic, this.

25:39Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's the logical question of why would you do this? And then there's, hey, how do we evaluate this and measure it short-term versus long-term? First of all, when you're building a media company, it's not just your own perspective, it's the perspective of others. So you're interviewing people within your ICP set. So you become like a GLG. And what happens with that when you're interviewing people editorially is like they're saying all kinds of really amazing things about what's happening in their companies, which effectively is sales intelligence, which allows you to kind of understand where they are in market, what a good BDR should actually be doing, which is intelligence on people and understanding where companies sit.

26:13So we just do that through an editorial lens, which was sort of like part of the sell into companies. It's like there's a short tail. Hey, we're actually talking to ICPs. And then there's the long tail, which is showing up in LLMs, actually drinking in search, getting shared on LinkedIn because the content you're speaking on behalf of that company, getting syndicated on like Hacker News. We've had a couple of our customers get syndicated there for some of the hot topics they've published. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of benefits, right? So like they start seeing, all right, there's leading and lagging indicators.

26:42You start to see some of the leading indicators and you're like, oh, I see where this is. All of a sudden, they've built a community of people, too, that they can just get to a conference. They can do an award. You have power that you don't have when you're a company publishing a blog. No one cares about your blog. I have a question on this. Would you consider this a similar vein to like, I have a friend who's a CMO. He was a CMO at a cybersecurity company. It was called Recorded Future. Oh, yeah. You know them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom Wentworth was the CMO and he was like, you won't believe this.

27:13This is working. And I'm like, well, why is it working? He's like, well, they went and hired, spent a bunch of money and hired a former NPR level journalist and they started a podcast and it was completely agnostic from the marketing team. And it was like, well, that's why it worked. you didn't hire some, no disrespect, not being ageist, but you didn't hire some 22 year old to write content that's going to appeal to CISOs, Fortune 500 CISOs. And I, back in the day, did an interview with this guy, Gonto. He ran marketing at Auth0 and he was an engineer and our content needs to appeal to engineers.

27:47So you know what I did in marketing? I just hired four former engineers to like write our blogs. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. All of those are parts of it. Recorded future is a good example because they did it really well. Can you have a CMO or a leader that has a perspective on having like, hey, adjacency makes sense? You can also do this well, like on your own site, if you create a hub that actually like feels like it. It doesn't need to be offsite. It's just offsite usually is an easier, there's an easier understanding and delineation between church and state for people where they are okay with the offsite content in certain instances.

28:20So just kind of depends. I think it can be done really well across the board. The thing that it needs is perspective and buy-in and a little bit of patience. I think people are just, they're frantic these days for wins immediately. So we try to do that, but it's tough. I think patience is still underrated in what you're doing. And whenever I try to tell people about this, listen, in five months, we've built two media publications that have multi-million organic monthly uniques that drive all of our business. And it all just comes from that. And if we build on that, we are going to be incredibly successful.

28:53And the longer we build and the longer we do this, the better it's going to be. If you can take even a fraction of that approach and think about it, I don't know, do 10 % of what we're doing, it'll work. It'll really work. So we try to be the best in class example of what this looks like at scale and what this looks like to actually do it well. Two things on that. Number one is I think a big part of the, whenever I talk to someone about like the value of writing on LinkedIn or social, it is one of those things where you just have to start doing it because you don't know what's going to come in.

29:22And everyone has an example of you post something and the post gets really low engagement, but some founder DMs you and was like, oh, I saw your post. That was awesome. Where does that show up in the analytics? It doesn't. And so you have to just start doing that. That's number one. Number two, you slid in this casual, oh, we're doing multi-million organic views a month on your content. How? I understand you're creating good Is there a distribution piece here or is you just hitting on these trends? You're like newsjacking. What the heck is going on? It's that. I'm newsjacking. And I didn't know what was going to happen when we started this.

29:59When five months ago, I was just, all right, I'm going to create this new format. I haven't seen it on LinkedIn before. It's going to be our own content. So people are going to think, what is she doing? She's pasting like Wall Street Journal articles or like copying whatever. And then it's going to become really annoying. And then they're going to realize, oh, wait, they're actually building like all of these publications or things that they actually own. So that's like where we started. And yeah, it was like, all right, let me just start posting three to four or five times a day. I'm going to ignore all these people that think they know the rules of LinkedIn and see what happens.

30:27And it really works. When we have something go viral, I'll get 25 ,000 direct referrals directly from LinkedIn, from the link that I'm putting under the post. That's crazy. People say, don't put the links in. Here's Melissa saying I drove 25. There's thousands of views coming from that. And then what happens is one of those people has a great newsletter or is on Hacker News and will post it on Hacker News. And then all of a sudden, oh, my God, this thing is going viral. So LinkedIn is like has become the hook to the virality. But now, honestly, like sometimes I'll like I'll post something on LinkedIn and it won't get traction and then I'll see it go viral in Japan.

31:00And I'm like, oh, this is really interesting. So I like have to trace it down and figure out what's happening here. But I mean, now we have so much traffic, I won't even promote stuff and like people are picking it up. So maybe they're coming to us to just see what's happening, which is awesome. That's the goal. I think we're just constantly iterating and figuring out what works. I think there's also just such a lack of good media across different verticals. We're going to take over all of those. I think that you're a perfect example of like, you have to just do it all the time. If I, I'm just was trying, while you were talking, I'm trying to scroll through your posts and figure out where the hits were.

31:32And it's like, okay, 41 likes, five comments, 34. Okay. 41 likes sometimes is 10 ,000 views and 50 ,000 impressions. Oh, so the metrics here can be met. I noticed if I promote a webinar, right, it gets no clicks, but 200 people will sign up or something like that. And the people that are hitting on it are the people that I want for that post and that article. So I've like started to just like, I'm like, well, I don't care. I'm just going to post five times a day. And I'm going to, I know exactly which ones are going to target which people. and then I get the data back and I learn and I move on.

32:05Like I had one, if you go a few days back, go to Friday, go down, down, post so much. That one. So that one took off. That one generated about 200 ,000 page visits across the web. So it got picked up across all this other stuff. This is why you don't listen to anybody. People that are listening to this podcast, people in Exit 5 are telling me, don't tag people, don't use images, don't use the links, don't tag more than one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. She tagged seven companies, include and a link and an image. And this thing went nuts. I love it. I love that you shut me up too. You're like 31.

32:40My point was, I was going to try to scroll to get to the big one. But the hits aren't the hits. That's the thing. Well, this is why all of the judging someone's marketing by what you see them do, you actually have no idea. You have no idea what's happening until you see the performance. But my point was going to be though. Okay. So yes, that's awesome. Even this is like, show this to the CEO. Even this post that has only 41 likes and five comments drove tens of thousands of views. But my point was going to be like, if you kind of look, it's like basically one out of every five, you kind of get like a mega, you get a super bonus or something.

33:11And that's, that just shows you that you have to just be in the game every day. Do, do, do. And then you're going to, this one popped off or there was another one after this. This was a longer time ago, but I think you wrote about like the ClickUp hiring a CMO for a million dollars. Dave, we're like 50 posts back at that point. Okay. Every day. I know it was like 10 days ago. This was the other one, the Reddit. Yeah. Yeah, the Reddit one. Yeah. Interesting. Why should I not go hire a person to just write about marketing trends every single day and hope we hit on one and that drives traffic back to my company?

33:40Like, why would I not do that? Is that a rhetorical question? I like, there's not really an answer. No, I'm like, it's so obvious. Like seeing this, it's like, oh my God, it's so obvious. But this is not what we do. We hire, we hire a blogger, especially inside of a B2B company, you hire a blogger and you're like, write an article a week and they can't keep up and you burn them out and you stress them out. How do you get the mentality? I guess I've built media companies, right? It's so funny though, when I started this company, it's me and my husband actually, we're co-founders. And when I started this company, I was like, okay, I don't wanna be a media company and I don't wanna be a services company.

34:13And we're just a media company and a services company, but it's the best thing because I'm really good at both of those things and it works. Oh my gosh, that's the takeaway. I don't care. I don't care what else happens in this podcast. Whatever your industry is, And I know so many people that listen to this. It's cybersecurity. It's fintech. It's professional services. It's marketing. It's sales. It's whatever. There's something about just sitting there and being like, what are we going to write about today? That's the true media company mindset. That's not the like B2B company should be a media company, right?

34:42For sure. I think there is like an element of rigor here that like may not be across other companies. So right now I'm getting like four hours of sleep. I realized this is a sprint in my life and like I will scale this and we're going to figure this out. But right now I'm not. sleeping because I have to half run a company and we have a lot of customers and then half run a media company. So with my mind, you're doing the writing. Are you not sleeping because you're newsjacking? You're doing the newsjacking. I'm doing a lot of the writing. And when I'm not doing the writing, I'm coming up with the angles and I'm feeding those to my team.

35:10And it's just like I'm an editor in chief now of two publications that soon need to be 10. So, yeah, it's a lot, right? So I think the one thing preventing like other people from doing this is you're not going to see my results if you do this once a week. That's why I'm posting five times a day, five articles a day. It's going to soon to be 25 articles a day, which I don't know how we're going to do it. But media companies act like media companies, right? That's the thing. That is what they do. They're not a B2B company that decides to write one piece of content. So I think the mentality would need to change for this, the frameworks to work.

35:39But if they do work, they do work. They just need... When I went to work at ClickUp with Zev, I was like, okay, so I'm going to build brand. I built brand B2C companies and I'm going to approach it like that. We're going to hire my BuzzFeed video team and we're going to create a media agency within the company. And that's how we're going to create all of our performance creative. And we're going to do versioning of it. And we're going to build branded stuff. And eventually we'll do a Super Bowl commercial. And he was like, yeah, for sure. Luckily, he was actually he meant that because that could have backfired like really poorly.

36:07But yeah, he allowed me effectively to build like a media agency within the company and act more like a B2C company just because like our town was effectively more B2C because it was teams of two to teams, thousands across every vertical. So it made sense. But it took like if he wasn't on board with that, like it wouldn't have worked. It's the same thing here. The way that I operate this company, I don't know. We do this for other customers and it works because we're at the helm of it. I don't know if I joined a company as a CMO that I would be allowed to do this. I don't know. Maybe it's the right.

36:39Like I wouldn't be as successful as I am doing this outside of myself because I have this rigor and this angle and this understanding of things. So I think it just depends. I do think certain companies can get there. I mean, RAMP's the perfect example. Like they're really smart. They're gonna do this. I mean, they're already doing this. They also have money to play around with. They are taking huge bets. They're worth$40 billion. There's gambles that they can take that others are like, we're PE backed and like our investors don't understand thought leadership and we're gonna go higher, like a BDR.

37:07I don't know. Obviously that's not really what we wanna play in, but I think it's mentality too of how you think about things. But this will outlast like every other company if you do it well, like you'll win for sure. With all of the advancements in AI, could I build an agent that is doing media monitoring, is listening? How much of the secret sauce is you? I think you kind of answered this before because you have this system. Someone's going to listen to me like, oh, cool. We're just going to automate this. We'll write these daily recaps about what's going on in the news. Yeah, you can. You can get it to a pretty good place.

37:39It's so hard though. The media listening portion is also the hardest thing because I have to understand what to talk about across like a thousand different verticals. So we've been building media listening now for two and a half years and like we're getting there. It's like really getting there. It's like so close to being like almost perfect. Sorry, what does that mean? Media listening, understanding what trending topics are interesting. It's like what every single company is doing across at any given time slotted into different what's happening in AI orchestration, how companies are building their own companies, what's going viral on LinkedIn, what changes are being made on websites.

38:12It's literally like, how do we amass like any sort of a signal that can become a news story? Because it's not just news. Because if you start only looking at trending topics, then you're not able to like, we're kind of able to almost like break news because you're just listening so widely, which other companies and other media companies aren't really doing because they're not focused on that. They're just focused on scoops. Because everything's a signal for us. When I write about how Uber is changing their company structure to align around AI. It goes viral. All right, well, I need more of that because everyone cares about that.

38:41And here's an example, like the CFO of ClickUp, Dan. She's so, so smart and really now AI builds just insane. And she writes about how they're changing the company and all this stuff. And I'll pick it up because I'm like, this is really interesting and everyone else will want to read this, but no publication is really picking it up, but I pick it up. So, and then other people pick it up and then it gets shared. So it's just kind of like there is a sense of what can we find that others aren't finding that allows us to do this. And then we pass that down to our customers too. Like that's the media listening supports us and it supports everyone else that we service.

39:13But yes, you can do it. You can do it. You can totally do it. I'm not saying this is prohibiting. You can definitely set it up. It takes a little massaging and thought. I totally get it now. It's picking it, go deep on an industry, the companies in the industry, you're understanding what they're all saying. And gosh, especially with you and the AI, what's your AI publication called? It's called the state of AI. State of AI. Which is really crazy because for some reason, well, first of all, I'm buying domains. I'm not buying a house. I'm buying fucking domains every day. I spent so much domains.

39:44The really cool thing about it is we found a masthead that actually is also everyone else's state of report. Every company calls their thing the state of X. State of. We have a sponsor in our newsletter this week, the state of B2B marketing, right? But we're now the state of because we own every single state of domain. So it's just kind of funny. All of a sudden - I'm the captain now. Yeah, kind of that. But yeah, it's the state of AI, the state of brand. Those are the two. And then we're launching seven in the next couple of weeks. Okay. This is what a psycho does during these interviews, but this is great.

40:15Look, I wanted to have him listen on because I think this perspective, I think we have this in our little intro in our prep, and I'll just like kind of close with this. But I do think that this, I don't know if you said this or Marissa wrote it or AI wrote it. So I'm just going to say it, but AI and content commoditization have made it nearly impossible to stand out on product alone. Companies are realizing they need to control their own narrative rather than rent it from algorithms or ad channels. And like, this is the stuff I love about marketing. And I love that. Yep. All the AI is commoditizing demand gen and SEO and this, how can we, this concept of even if you don't go all the way in like Melissa and you're doing all this writing four hours a night, even if you just take a little step in that direction and start writing about industry news and becoming an authority on the topic your customers care about, I think this is the most impactful marketing strategy that you could be investing in right now.

41:07I hope this was helpful. That's why I wanted to have Melissa on. Go follow her. You can see this approach firsthand. We'll link to all of her stuff and it's fun to watch. It's like a little game now. I follow you and I see which one I'll have to follow you and see which one is super viral. But as you corrected me properly, you never actually know what's happening behind the scenes. Thanks, Steve.

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